I am mortified at this story. Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users has been receiving very graphic death threats on her blog and other blogs. She doesn’t know if she is going to post anymore (I am sure she will come back from this), and she has cancelled all her speaking engagements.
I have to say that there are some really screwed up people out there. And when it comes to driving someone away from their passion and their life, then I just feel like throwing up. I was happy to see this post and this exchange of comments as well, but I am still just completely disgusted at some of my fellow human beings.
Vet
Here’s a comment I made on a post over at Riskanalysis.Is. The post was about how best practices should not be followed on blind faith, and it turned into a small (bit good) debate about the reasons behind compliance. Alex didn;t know about the history of HIPAA, so I decided to turn to my alter-ego, “The Enlightener”, to help out.
Many people think HIPAA is just about securing health information, hence the common misspelling – HIPPA – which people thinks stands for Health Information Protection and Privacy Act or something like that. If that was all HIPAA was about, then I would agree it is essentially useless. But in reality HIPAA stands for “Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act” (nothing about “information” in there), and it was an attempt to standardize health records to reduce cost and fraud for Medicare and to protect American workers from the “pre-existing condition” issue in health insurance. The infosec piece came to be because of the realization that all this health information floating around could be misused (and that is NOT only information in electronic format – the privacy side of HIPAA deals with paper and the like).
It was actually fairly visionary for the government to think about the dangers of what they were doing. That’s not saying the regulation is worth a crap. But it proves that HIPAA was truly born from risk analysis / tolerance.
A good source of HIPAA history: http://www.hipaadvisory.com/regs/hipaahistorybyzon.htm
I have known so many people in the healthcare industry that didn’t know this little bit of history. And I am not talking about the janitors and the cooks who didn’t really need to know (though I would argue that to some degree). I am talking about executive level and director level individuals running a healthcare organization.
Vet
The blog is fixed. For those of you familair with Wordpress, you can change the format of your permalinks to reflect dates or numbers or whatever. I have mine set to dates (click on the title of a post and then look at the URL to see what I mean). For some reason Wordpress got confused, and those links weren’t working. I looked at my personal blog to see if it was ok, and it was fine. But I noticed that the permalink format was set to default, which is pretty much just nonsense (to humans anyway), so I changed it to the date format I love so much. Then I got the bright idea to just change the format on this blog, then change it back to the date format to see if it would get kicked into gear.
Well, sure enough, it worked. Not sure what happened, but I think I will change my passwords just in case. I probably need to anyway. Now if I can find my post-it notes so I can “document” my new password. 
Vet
Thanks to Kurt for letting me know there are some problems with the permalinks on my blog.  For now, if you click on the link to a spcific post, you will get a 404. Looks like links to comments are also screwed.
I think this has to do with my theme being old and I am now on WP 2.12. The author of this theme has a beta out, but I don’t want to screw with that. So you might be seeing a new theme here soon. I am uber-busy with a proposal and some afternoon meetings coming up, so I will look into this evening.
Vet
