Interesting Links for 14-08-2014

[andrewducker]

• What's behind the battle over breast-cancer drugs between NICE and Roche?
  (tags: breasts cancer drugs nhs uk )
• The UK government is looking forward to turning off the copper telecoms networks
  (tags: uk telecoms broadband networking )
• Robin Williams' daughter leaves social media after receiving abuse
  (tags: abuse death OhForFucksSake )
• An American

Comments

Centralised messaging

[fanf]

There is a point between p2p and centralized, which is a trapezoidal model: a mesh of p2p servers each of which has clients radiating in a star topology. Like email or jabber or perhaps IRC (tho it's server topology is spanning tree rather than p2p mesh).

The problems with mesh-of-stars seem to be: harder to deal with spam, harder to add new features, harder to do client-to-client feature negotiation. And platitudes about openness and competition are not enough to justify the costs of open protocol development.

It's a shame.

Re: Centralised messaging

[andrewducker]

It is a shame, because I'd love it to work well

Re: Centralised messaging

[fanf]

One option for revocation is to periodically roll the keys and re-encrypt the posts (which is analogous to the way DNSSEC does it).

It is worth keeping in mind that you can easily go overboard with the crypto stunts, since a reader can always cache their own copy of the article. So you can have a fixed symmetric key per article which gets periodically re-encrypted for each reader, using that reader's short-term revokable key. Re-encrypting the per-article keys is easier than re-encrypting whole articles.

I think that's enough for now because I am supposed to be having fun at worldcon, not crypto narging in your comments :-)

Re: Centralised messaging

[andrewducker]

I can't go to Loncon - I demand that you entertain me instead!

Seriously though, I agree both that it would be far too easy to go overboard, and that you should be off having fun :->

[a_pawson]

And she certainly thinks NICE has got it wrong. She said: "It's disgraceful. These 'suits' sit behind desks and make these decisions without getting out there and asking patients and seeing the difference it makes. "Could they really sit and say to my family, sorry we cannot afford this treatment for me."

Yes they could. And this is the problem - people don't seem to understand what NICE does. They look at the evidence about the effectiveness and effect of various drugs, and make a decision which to fund based on a calculation which also takes into account the cost. They do not take into account the opinions of patients who have no clue what they are talking about and nor should they.

The press is constantly full of stories about NICE banning some new cancer drug. Throw in the fact it is a QUANGO and it's perfect tabloid horror story fodder. It would be wonderful if we could buy every single drug, no matter the cost, but our country doesn't work like that.

[andrewducker]

Yup. We have X amount of money and an effectively infinite amount of medical uses to spend it on. NICE's job is to work out how we can get the best value for money out of that.

It's not a _nice_ job, and I'm sure it's not easy, but someone's got to do it until the robots take over and start making us stuff for free.

[gwendally]

This is a weird thing to type, but I'm a blind person. I have all sorts of coping strategies and they mostly work to make me functional in a seeing world and, in fact, you could probably assert that my blindness has been cured by three invasive eye surgeries and two less invasive procedures (so far: apparently I have to keep doing one of them every few years.) I've been cured of cataracts, detached retina, severe myopia, and now I use a variety of prescription glasses to manage the new affliction of presbyopia

[andrewducker]

Oh ye, but you're not completely blind from birth. You have very, very bad eyesight (for which, my sympathy, I have a horror of losing my eyesight), but you're not entirely blind.

I believe that being completely blind from birth is really unusual though.

[gwendally]

I went back and looked at the article again. It didn't say anything about "blind since birth

[andrewducker]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's worth pointing that out, because so much of life nowadays assumes good eyesight.

I remember watching one of the developers where I work, who has _appalling_ eyesight, and has screen magnification turned up, with his eyes about three inches from the screen. Incredibly bright though, and it clearly doesn't hold him back much, as he's done very well.

[theweaselking]

He didn't ask Siri where to hide a body.

[andrewducker]

Darnit, a perfectly good story, derailed by the truth!

Thanks.