Sunday, 19 March 2017
There's a New .Health Domain and It Could Save You From Fake Medicine
Looking for health information online usually feels like casting your line in a swamp of "alternative" treatments and snake oil. But the folks behind a new domain—.health—want to help people identify legitimate sources of medical information.
The domain head honcho—the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) —gave the responsibility for new .health websites to a Miami-based company, dotHealth, which will oversee who gets to purchase the shiny new suffix. This week, dotHealth CEO Jose Rasco announced that they will begin selling registrations to trademarked health companies in May, and open it to the public in December.
The goal is to have .health addresses become an identifier for qualified medical companies and websites providing important, reliable information. "With more information online, it has become more difficult to distinguish the credible information, particularly when it comes to health," Rasco said in an email interview. "The .health TLD will provide a home for health information online that is focused, credible and meaningful."
According to Rasco, the company will take specific steps to ensure that those who get .health addresses will be dependable. An advisory board will review all applicants, and fake pharmacies, for example, will not be allowed to purchase the new domain. A security protocol administered by Neustar, the largest provider of core registry and digital naming services, will also help deter misuse.
Some experts worry that the .health approval process won't be stringent enough to prevent internet users from being sold fake cures. Consumers have come to recognize that certain domain extensions, like .gov or .edu, lead to bona fide websites, but there's no clear indication that .health websites will be audited the same way.
"I don't think this will improve the quality of health information online. And I don't think it will be a service to consumers unless additional safeguards are put in place," said Timothy Mackey, director of the Global Health Policy Institute at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.
"If you're relying on doctor Google to diagnose your disease — which a lot of people do — or if you're relying on it to self-determine what your treatment options are, or if you're just worried about your kid and it's 5 a.m. and their leg is hurting or something like that — which I'm guilty of myself — then you really should be looking at reputable websites that are associated with evidence-based information, sites like Mayo Clinic, or PubMed."
Mackey argued that dotHealth's evaluation process isn't transparent and that the company hasn't responded to public health officials' concerns. "When you talk about .health sites, ideally they would have evidence-based information that is non-biased, that is objective and has been vetted and verified by a third party or perhaps by people that have a public health background," he said. Otherwise, websites could provide inaccurate information about vaccines, for example. Or anyone with the highest bid could easily get a coveted address like diet.health.
Moreover, if ICANN decides to release a slew of other health-related domains — like .med, .doctor, or .clinic — as it suggested in 2011, people may have the same difficulty in differentiating among all the options that they face now.
Some groups of domain owners have started collaborating in an effort to set standards for verifying which websites are allowed to register for which addresses. But according to Mackey, if internet users really want good health information, they need to look to academic institutions and be more critical of commercial websites for now.
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Thirty years in, South by Southwest still keeps it weird and wonderful
Nathan Mattise
AUSTIN, Texas—We at Ars have woken from a taco-and-barbecued induced haze and managed to survive our largest outing to date at the annual South by Southwest conference. The event wraps this weekend after 10 packed days (loosely) defined by tech, policy, film, gaming, and entertainment. If you haven't attended recently, it's a radically different event even from a few years ago.
On the conference's 30th anniversary, in fact, SXSW CPO Hugh Forrest kicked everything off by showing the event's original program from 1987. Want a microcosm of the festival's evolution? Forrest planned (and designed that pamphlet) all on his Mac+. Today, he says it now takes nine months of planning/prep so the conference can both function and add new wrinkles, like its app chatbot, Abby.
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Saturday, 18 March 2017
Bitcoin Exchanges Have Accepted the Inevitability of a Fork
Bitcoin just can't catch a break. Last Friday, the virtual currency community's hopes were dashed when the Securities and Exchange Commission denied an application to approve a bitcoin investment fund. Bitcoin quickly recovered its value, but just a week later, it looks like another potential disaster is on the horizon.
After two years of debate and acrimony, bitcoin might finally be about to implement a code change that would split the currency in two, with meaningful investments on both sides. This possibility has been a nightmare for many who support the status quo, and on Friday a group of major bitcoin exchanges—which in many ways make up the foundation of bitcoin's economy, since that's where coins are bought and sold—released their contingency plan.
An open letter signed by 18 bitcoin exchanges including some large players lays it out: If bitcoin is split into two, these exchanges will trade both versions as separate currencies. But there's a catch. The exchanges state that they'll only support the newer version if it can safely avoid issues that have plagued splits in other virtual currencies.
"While a contentious forking event may be inevitable, and may ultimately provide a path forward for on-chain capacity increases, we have an obligation to our customers to provide a clear and consistent plan to minimize potential confusion surrounding such an event," the open letter states.
Read More: Bitcoin's Very Important Day Has Turned Into a Shitshow
The issue at hand is increasing the capacity, and size, of the "blocks" of bitcoin transactions that get uploaded to the blockchain. Right now, these blocks are almost uniformly full of transaction information, limiting the number of transactions that can go through the bitcoin network in a reasonable amount of time. For people who want bigger blocks, the argument is that if bitcoin is ever going to be used by people around the world instead of just a niche community of enthusiasts, it needs to be fast.
Enter Bitcoin Unlimited, a version of the standard Bitcoin Core client that allows miners—the people who create the blocks—to signal to other miners if they're willing to accept bigger blocks. If enough miners agree that they will process larger blocks for long enough, then Bitcoin Unlimited forks off from the main bitcoin chain, effectively becoming its own currency with its own rules. Interest in Bitcoin Unlimited has skyrocketed in recent weeks, leading the exchanges to plan for what will happen next.
One large risk of a split like this is what's known as a "replay" bug. When bitcoin alternative Ethereum split into two versions through a software fork, this bug wreaked havoc by duplicating transactions from one chain onto the other. To offer Bitcoin Unlimited on their platforms, the exchanges wrote, its developers need to protect against this.
"Failure to do so will impede our ability to preserve [Unlimited] for customers and will either delay or outright preclude the listing of [Unlimited]," the open letter states.
It's unclear what, exactly, will transpire in the coming days and weeks. But at this pivotal time in bitcoin's history, nobody wants to take any chances.
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