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There was an entertaining tale about this in Henry Marsh's Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery (he's a very significant figure in brain surgery

There was an entertaining tale about this in Henry Marsh's Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery (he's a very significant figure in brain surgery in the UK). There's a lot to it, but it came down to running around the hospital getting mad with the new digital system for looking at X-ray pictures rather than having them in physical format. Given one of the admin's passwords to try (it was something quite rude like "fuckoff"), he still couldn't make it work, and was advised that they were forced to change passwords every 30 days and to try "fuckoff2". It turned out the actual password was something like "fuckoff4" due to the time that had passed since the password had been shared around the department. Edit: Found another recollection of the tale here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/30/do-no-harm-stories-brain-surgery-review-henry-marsh* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/30/do-no-harm-sto...

octorian 7y ago
Somehow this reminds me of a problem my father (who is a doctor) has often complained about. Basically IT shitheads enforcing their policies on ALL computers in the hospital, including those used in operating rooms. So that means things like a screen (displaying important information) locking from X minutes of inactivity, on a computer that the surgical team is physically unable to "bump" periodically or type a password on, due to them being scrubbed and sterile. It reaches a point where you basically have to tell these people "Someone could DIE if you don't change the fucking policy for our use case" to get things to change.
- jiggawatts 7y ago
  Conversely, computers outside the surgery are all on one big network in a public space with random unsupervised people walking around at all hours. It's very easy for someone to utilise this in a way that violates the privacy of a patient in the worst possible way. Think nosy reporter looking for HIV status of a celebrity, or abusive parents looking for their kids to stop them having an abortion, that kind of thing. I've been involved in the design of hospital computer networks, and I tell you: meeting all the requirements at once is hard! The system we designed used contactless smart cards and Citrix. The idea was that as the attending doctors moved from bed to bed and ward to ward, their desktop session would move with them. The instant they logged on somewhere else, the previous terminal would lock and the session would transfer to the new terminal without a full Windows logon cycle. It was basically equivalent to disconnecting a monitor and connecting a different one. No passwords were needed, they just had to tap their id card once. My challenge was that this has to occur in under a second, including the smart card cryptographic authentication step, which was limited by the throughput of the NFC chip on the card. From memory, it was woefully slow, and we had to use the smallest compatible elliptic curve cipher available to make it acceptable. Similarly, it was difficult finding a thin terminal device that was both fast enough to do this, and fanless so that it could be sealed against dust. This was needed to prevent their warm insides becoming the perfect breeding ground for antibiotic resistant superbugs.
  - octorian 7y ago
    This sounds like EXACTLY what Sun's SunRay thin clients used to do, back when the rest of the *nix world seemed completely oblivious to this whole "hot-desking" concept.

octorian 7y ago

Somehow this reminds me of a problem my father (who is a doctor) has often complained about. Basically IT shitheads enforcing their policies on ALL computers in the hospital, including those used in operating rooms. So that means things like a screen (displaying important information) locking from X minutes of inactivity, on a computer that the surgical team is physically unable to "bump" periodically or type a password on, due to them being scrubbed and sterile. It reaches a point where you basically have to tell these people "Someone could DIE if you don't change the fucking policy for our use case" to get things to change.

jiggawatts 7y ago
Conversely, computers outside the surgery are all on one big network in a public space with random unsupervised people walking around at all hours. It's very easy for someone to utilise this in a way that violates the privacy of a patient in the worst possible way. Think nosy reporter looking for HIV status of a celebrity, or abusive parents looking for their kids to stop them having an abortion, that kind of thing. I've been involved in the design of hospital computer networks, and I tell you: meeting all the requirements at once is hard! The system we designed used contactless smart cards and Citrix. The idea was that as the attending doctors moved from bed to bed and ward to ward, their desktop session would move with them. The instant they logged on somewhere else, the previous terminal would lock and the session would transfer to the new terminal without a full Windows logon cycle. It was basically equivalent to disconnecting a monitor and connecting a different one. No passwords were needed, they just had to tap their id card once. My challenge was that this has to occur in under a second, including the smart card cryptographic authentication step, which was limited by the throughput of the NFC chip on the card. From memory, it was woefully slow, and we had to use the smallest compatible elliptic curve cipher available to make it acceptable. Similarly, it was difficult finding a thin terminal device that was both fast enough to do this, and fanless so that it could be sealed against dust. This was needed to prevent their warm insides becoming the perfect breeding ground for antibiotic resistant superbugs.
- octorian 7y ago
  This sounds like EXACTLY what Sun's SunRay thin clients used to do, back when the rest of the *nix world seemed completely oblivious to this whole "hot-desking" concept.