10-01 Contents: Y2K+10, Hospital Data Protection, SoftTest events, ICS membership, XLTest upgrade
ISSN 1649-2374 This issue online at http://www.sysmod.com/praxis/prax1001.htm [Previous] [Index] [Next]
| Systems Modelling Ltd.: Managing reality in Information Systems - strategies for success | |
IN THIS ISSUE |
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| 1) Risk Y2K+10 Irish Hospital Data Protection problems |
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| 2) Quality SoftTest Ireland events February 16-18 Irish Computer Society - 6 months free membership |
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| 3) Spreadsheets XLTest enhanced with VBA export to folders for Diff |
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| 4) Off
Topic |
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| About this newsletter and Archives Disclaimer Subscribe and Unsubscribe information |
Given this week's terrible news of the earthquake in Haiti, start with:
http://www.redcross.org/
or http://www.redcross.ie
or http://www.redcross.org.uk
etc
Patrick O'Beirne
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Cisco, Symantec, Apache and others have to tackle Y2K10 Glitches.
Risks Digest and others are reporting more New Decade bugs.
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.89.html
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.90.html
Y2K+10 problem 1. German contactless bank cards (report by Dr.
Debora Weber-Wulff, HTW Berlin)
"Tagesschau
reports online that people who were using newer cash machine cards that
had new-fangled golden chips in them were told at the machine that
their cards had an error because of a "software error". Not only ATM
machines were affected, supermarkets and such that check cards online
refused to accept the cards.
The culprit has been named: The
company that produces the cards, Gemalto. Seems that the software
thinks that it is the year 2016 and not 2010, so all of the cards are
no longer valid. The problem is a program stored on the chip.
The
banks don't want to have to exchange all of the cards (a really
expensive solution), so they are looking for a workaround.
30 million cards are affected, and changing them would entail the owners all having to learn a new code for their cards.
But it turns out, if the chip is
found to be malfunctioning or not there, the card readers resort to
reading
the magnetic stripe. Spiegel and others report that all it takes is a
little Scotch tape over the contacts of the card, and the readers will
switch to fail-safe mode. Retailers now dispense tape at the cash
registers.
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/0,1518,670433,00.html
On
a side note, customers of smartphones using Windows Mobile operating
system have been noticing that incoming SMS messages also have the date
2016.
http://archive.midrange.com/bpcs-l/201001/msg00012.html
BPCS
Version 8.1 Release 00 TLE Version 3.2 Rel: 01 Starting from
this
year all our outbound transactions (Version 4010) have
been sent with an incorrect date in the GS segment, the date is
19100104.
The hospital that kept over a million blood samples without the parents' consent has also suffered a theft of servers in 2007.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article6982446.eceMark Tighe reports: "A Dublin hospital has built a database containing the DNA of almost every person born in the country since 1984 without their knowledge in an apparent breach of data protection laws."
That implies a computer database - in fact it is only a collection of samples, the DNA information was not extracted AFAIK.
The
hospital in Temple Street is under investigation by the DPC
since
The Sunday Times discovered that unknown to the DPC, the hospital has
amassed 1,548,300 blood samples from “heel prick tests” on newborns
which are sent to it for screening. The majority of hospitals act on
implied or verbal consent and do not inform parents what happens to
their child’s sample.
http://www.phiprivacy.net/?p=1800
UK: Records stolen from hospital that held secret DNA
database January 11, 2010 7:05 am
Mark
Tighe reports: "Two computer servers containing the records of almost
1m patients were stolen from the Children’s University hospital in
Temple Street in 2007 and have never been recovered. The data were far
more than that lost on stolen bank laptops in recent years. The theft
was investigated by the data protection commissioner (DPC) and the
gardai after being reported by the Dublin hospital in February 2007.
The organisations had decided that there was no need to inform the
public, believing there was little chance of the thief being able to
access the data. Patients’ details, including names, date of birth and
reason for admission are thought to have been included."
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=63941837
The
issue is also discussed on boards.ie with one post describing the story
as "Stupid sensationalist media". However, legal eagles disagree:
http://www.tjmcintyre.com/2010/01/childrens-hospital-lost-data-on-1m.html
T.J.
McIntyre,Lecturer in the School of Law, University College
Dublin, comments on the story on his blog on IT Law in
Ireland: "…. In
light of these controversies elsewhere, the lack of informed consent
and the fact that there is no legal basis for the heel prick tests (a
point confirmed in North Western Health Board v. HW and CW) it’s hard
to see how Temple Street could have believed that it was entitled to
hold onto these samples indefinitely – and it is remarkable that this
point appears to have been missed by the ethics committee on four
separate occasions."
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One of the simplest questions that's hard to answer - because it is a tedious task - is "What changed between these two versions of a spreadsheet?"
XLTest can be used to compare the structures of two spreadsheets or all the sheets in two workbooks. I have now added a facility in 1.10 to export all the code to folders and send them to a diff utility - I recommend WinMerge - for ease of comparison and merging the versions.
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Simply send your comments to FEEDBACK (at) SYSMOD (dot) COM
Thank you! Patrick O'Beirne, Editor
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What do we call the decade after the noughties? The Tens / Tennies / Tenners ?
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