What's in the News

Gov't Moves to Separate Hospitals from Medicine Sales to Lower Costs

Public has long complained drugs are too expensive, and government says reform will start in 34 cities across nation

(Beijing) – The government has published a notice saying it will try separating medical services and drug sales in pilot cities across the country, a move interpreted as an attempt to lower the high cost of medicines.

The Ministry of Commerce published the notice on its website on September 9. It said it is working on the reform with several other government bodies, including the National Health and Family Planning Commission.

The former Ministry of Health, which was folded into the commission last year, had pursued a separate reform.

The commerce ministry's notice said large qualified drugstores should take the place of hospital pharmacies, and says that doctors should be responsible for making diagnoses and writing prescriptions that patients get filled at the private drugstores.

The goal of the reform is to lower the costs of medicines by encouraging more competition among drugstores, a source at the commission said....


I always had the vague idea getting a prescription in China was some kind of difficult, untrustworthy operation. Turns out "prescription" has had, in effect, a different definition here. Who knew!

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29282407

For all the talk of not support ting blah blah and not allowing blah blah to blah the world, seems The US has no problem feeding money to such a company. Of course No doubt many US companies are guilty and are getting away with god knows what.

Drugs aren't expensive here from what I have seen.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29282407

For all the talk of not support ting blah blah and not allowing blah blah to blah the world, seems The US has no problem feeding money to such a company. Of course No doubt many US companies are guilty and are getting away with god knows what.

If Jack Ma gets any wealthier and more powerful, he's going to start getting a swelled head.


Oop, too late.

I'm sure it happened as soon as iOS 8 for the iPhone was in beta and it was found that Baidu or Bing could be replaced as the default search engine with DuckDuckGo on the iPhone.

For best effect, skip the text and go straight to the clip: 

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/fox-host-asks-whether-female-pilot-bombing-isis-means-we-have-boobs-on-the-ground/

Chinese government launches man-in-middle attack against iCloud

Targeting new iPhone users to capture user credentials, monitors find.

GreatFire.org, a group that monitors censorship by the Chinese government’s national firewall system (often referred to as the “Great Firewall”), reports that China is using the system as part of a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on users of Apple’s iCloud service within the country. The attacks come as Apple begins the official rollout of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus on the Chinese mainland.

The attack, which uses a fake certificate and Domain Name Service address for the iCloud service, is affecting users nationwide in China. The GreatFire.org team speculates that the attack is an effort to help the government circumvent the improved security features of the new phones by compromising their iCloud credentials and allowing the government to gain access to cloud-stored content such as phone backups.

Chinese iCloud users attempting to log in with Firefox and Chrome browsers would have been alerted to the fraudulent certificate. However, those using Mac OS X’s built-in iCloud login or another browser may not have been aware of the rerouting, and their iCloud credentials would have been immediately compromised. Using two-step verification would prevent the hijacking of compromised accounts.

This is hardly the first time that the Chinese government has used its control of the nation’s Internet infrastructure to attack the security of cloud and Web services. In August and early September, there was an apparent MITM attack on the Chinese messaging platform Weibo and on Google Plus. Earlier this month, there was a similar attack on Yahoo.com, apparently targeted at monitoring what citizens read online and allowing for content filtering of any news about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. There is also an ongoing MITM attack against Microsoft’s Outlook.com Web mail platform.


Also: Chinese government hijacking iCloud, Microsoft logins, reports say

news from Canada 

The hysteria over terrorism has been getting out of hand lately, but when people really start doing some of these things, I have to wonder what's gotten into the water. First, some clown in Quebec decides to attack a couple of off-duty soldiers and then runs them down, then another just shoots a soldier standing on guard duty at the war memorial in Ottawa then tries to attack Parliament Hill single handed. Thankfully he was stopped cold before he could do any more damage, but you have to wonder wtf is going through these people's heads.

anyone remember those CIA drug experiments from the dark ages, when they would feed LSD to unsuspecting subjects then manipulate their behaviour? I wonder if something of the kind is at the root of the "homegrown terror" behavior we're seeing now. How else to explain it?

I'd say: a couple of nut jobs. I'm glad the latter guy didn't have access to an assault rifle.

I'm less bothered by the tragic incidents themselves (2 murders in a country of 34 million is a smaller deal than is being made of it) than my government's reaction to it.  To wit:

Here's our next prime minister Justin Trudeau's wonderful address on the subject: http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Politics/ID/2568016031/
The gist: We grieve our loss, but talk of losing our innocence is inaccurate: we have never been innocent to the threats and dangers of the world. These attacks were designed to intimidate us, but they will fail: they only serve to remind us of what we stand for.

Here's our current prime minister Shithead Harper's version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy8acMKab1A
Terrorist terrorism, terroristically terrorizing us, will not intimidate us.  I am introducing sweeping 'security' measures and redoubling our 'efforts' abroad.