April 2015

In 2014, Americans lost an estimated $119 billion gambling. Is there a way to use that betting obsession to make people...healthier? Georgetown University Hospital anesthesiologists Kerry DeGroot and Jason Hoefling are developing an app that’s designed to do just that. Called Bushytail Health, it will use gambling’s natural appeal to help diabetics -- and possibly other chronic-disease patients– -- manage their health issues. "We thought about how to motivate [patients] and at the same time, hopefully, gain data," says DeGroot. "And money is the only thing clinically found to motivate people to live healthier."

Users can sign up for free via the Bushytail’s website or iPhone app, which is set for a beta release in April. The first step: establish the user’s A1C level -- which gives a snapshot of a diabetic’s blood-sugar level. Next an algorithm -- created by DeGroot and Hoefling -- calculates a customized target A1C level per user. The user then receives a confirmation email with his personal goal level and a link to his "game." That’s where the gambling comes in. To play, users need to make a bet by putting up money as a buy-in. The dollar amount is up to them, but the money is real. That bet goes into a pot with wagers from other diabetics, all of whom try to hit target A1C levels within their game’s six-month course. Miss the mark and you lose your money. But if you make your goal, you get your bet back -- plus a cut of any cash lost by other players."We have no cap on the amount someone can bet," says Hoefling. "For some people it only takes $1 to motivate them. For some it could take $1,000."

Rob Graham, CEO of Errata Security, has traced the origin of malicious code that pummeled GitHub pages to China Unicom, the same telecommunications company that has been caught before aiding the massive censorship apparatus known as the Great Firewall of China. The white-hat hacker tracked down the source using a modified version of the traceroute network diagnostics tool. The customized traceroute used HTTP packets to trace their path along the Internet, rather than UDP or ICMP packets used in normal traceroutes. That allowed Graham to figure out the location of the node that was sending the malicious code.

The evidence implicating China's government in the GitHub DDoS attacks came the same week that Google and Mozilla said their browsers will no longer trust digital certificates issued by the China Internet Network Information Center. CNNIC, in turn is administered by the Chinese government's Ministry of Information Industry. The evidence also comes as President Barack Obama signed an executive order imposing economic sanctions on overseas hackers who perpetrate attacks on critical US infrastructure.

[Commentary] In the late 20th century, many viewed the world as a zero-sum game. Any US loss of competitive advantage was our adversary’s gain, and our security, the argument went, was correspondingly weakened as well. Then, a key technology battleground was a measure of raw computing power known as “MTOPS” -- or millions of theoretical operations per second. Successive administrations tried to protect this assumed US security advantage by blocking exports of computers above a certain MTOPS limit to any but our closest allies.

The National Security Agency was always an important player in this discussion. After all, in the business of making and breaking codes, advantages in computing power were often decisive. The export barrier was seen as the NSA’s friend. US intelligence was given a black eye, unfairly for the most part, by l’Affaire Snowden. It has conducted its business honorably, with restraint and oversight -- perhaps more than any other country. But that has been little noted. Today’s issues give the United States a chance to demonstrate to the world that its tough and powerful intelligence services understand what is at stake and intend to join the public discussion on how to balance the truly important privacy and security questions before us and, more important, take meaningful steps to make us stronger.

[Michael Hayden is a principal at the Chertoff Group, and was director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009]

Wireless associations PCIA (infrastructure) and CTIA (carriers) have joined to ask a federal court to let them file a separate brief from the Federal Communications Commission in a fight over tower siting. While the associations are on the same side as the FCC, they say there are enough differences that they want to weigh in separately in a challenge to the FCC's rules by Montgomery County (MD), which was joined by the City of Bellevue (WA). Those include that the FCC did not give the wireless associations all the relief they had sought, and that the government’s interests are not the same as the association's, and their reasoning behind supporting the FCC decision will likely diverge, and the associations may even offer legal theories or opinions adverse to those of the FCC. Then there are the logistical hurdles of coordinating government and private briefs, the former which several levels of review by the FCC and DOJ, they point out. "The FCC has evaluated the record and formed considered policy judgments on the material presented, but it does not deal with local governments in the same way that the Associations’ members do, and so cannot inform this Court authoritatively about the consequences of localities’ policies and interpretive disputes," they said.