You don’t have to read it, but you just might learn something.
Leading Thought
Prime
How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them
You probably know that stores and companies offer rebates on things rather than simply putting them on sale because a large portion of buyers will either not take the time to send in the rebate, or if they do, will have made some error that allows the rebate to not be paid out. From a business perspective, this might make sense, even if it can irritate customers, because the money not rebated goes right to the bottom line. But what about health – or any other – insurance?
Enter PXDX, the system “Cigna said its review system was created to ‘accelerate payment of claims for certain routine screenings…‘” This might be a true statement, put powerful tools can often just as easily be turned to purposes that they weren’t intended for (or maybe were, but is misrepresented to prevent push back). Following the rebate model, PXDX allows Cigna to deny thousands of claims without review, though this may not be quite legal, because they know that, while the experience for it’s members will be poor, very few will try to argue the claim. The health insurance rebate corollary.
There are a lot of problems in this story. For one, the mere fact that health insurers are for-profit entities is an aberration. But to then use technology to cause harm to those who are most likely in a position to take time to fight a denial, or pay the fees out of pocket is unforgivable. As technologists we need to be cognizant of the ways tools we build can be used to harm people, whether it’s AI with biased training data, surveillance systems that help oppress people, or social media helping to spread misinformation and destabilize countries. As a country we need to put an end to for-profit versions of things that should be a right or are incentivized to do harm: health care, the criminal justice system (especially private prisons), among others.
We thought it might fall into a legal gray zone,” said the former Cigna official, who helped conceive the program. “We sent the idea to legal, and they sent it back saying it was OK.
Helping women escape violence
This is a really short piece from the Toronto Star, but is a powerful example of how something like unaffordable housing impacts people in ways you may not think about if you are lucky enough never to have experienced them. Affordable housing is defined around one-third of income; in the US, if you take simple minimum wage of $11.25/hour for someone lucky enough to be employed full-time, this would mean monthly rent of around $650. I don’t know where you find rent like that.
Now, imagine you are not the primary breadwinner in your relationship, and are dependent on your partner for at least part of your living expenses. If you are in an abusive relationship, your choice becomes one between staying and living with the abuse, hoping not to get killed some day, or becoming homeless and accepting the risks that come with that. This situation is not uncommon and exacerbated by investment properties driving up rent.
As is often the case, it’s the things that you haven’t had to deal with in life that can really shift your thinking, similar to the Section 8 article shared in the last issue of Self. Documenting. Especially in the US, where we have the resources to do more to help people, we can and must do better to protect the most vulnerable.
In Canada, a woman is killed approximately every six days by her intimate partner.
Man battling Google wins $500K for search result links calling him a pedophile
Imagine that someone posted incorrect information about you to The Internet and that information shows up in search results for your name. What do you do? The unfortunate reality is that there may be nothing you can do.
In this case the victim, a Canadian citizen, didn’t learn about the defamation until after the statute of limitations had run out so there wasn’t much he could do about the source of the false information. Attempts to get Google to remove links to the information so that it was at least less discoverable went back and forth, with Google trying different theories of why they couldn’t do so, including citing NAFTA and Section 230 of US law. The outcome – after years of fighting – is evident from the title.
Here’s Why Juicero’s Press is So Expensive
I ran across this tear-down article about a product I vaguely remember: Juicero. If you don’t really remember it either, Juicero was a $799 juice press that squeezed bags of pulp. But it was more than that. It had wi-fi, barcode scanners, a subscription service, and a press that could exert thousands of pounds of force (I feel like Stefon writing the description, “It’s got everything…”).
What didn’t it have? Constraints. Constraints on development. Constraints on component cost. It was what you get when money is no object and you don’t you don’t iterate on customer feedback. It was a beautiful machine to squeeze bags of pulp meant just for it all at once. Unfortunately, the bags could also be squeezed by hand making the beautifully machined parts, injection molded carbon fiber plastics, and elegant engineering unnecessary.
It’s the beautiful data management app you built because you know it’s what your customer needs and wants, when they can get the same thing from Excel. Definitely worth a read if you work in hardware or software engineering, or any other aspect of product development.
Coming Soon
Juneteenth Conference
(June 15th and 16th | Chicago, IL and Virtual)
The conference to celebrate Black Excellence in technology, promote Black technology professionals, and to encourage future Black technologists to explore careers in the field is back! For $300 (in-person) or $100 (virtual), this is steal. Definitely give it a look.
Test Automation & Digital QA Summit
(MAY 31, 2023 | DETROIT, MI)
Test Automation & Digital QA Summit is a testing conference that focuses on software testing, test automation, and digital quality assurance. The Summit will encompass Strategies, Tools, and trending Technology in the Software Quality Assurance and Test Automation area where Quality Assurance Leadership, Management, and Strategy converge.
Humble Bundles
Mastering Azure, .NET, and SQL Server
New offering from Humble Bundle benefitting Cool Effect – and, if you don’t know it’s there, there is an Adjust Donation button that will let you give more of the take to charity! For a minimum donation of $18 you get 20 titles, including:
- Pro Azure Administration and Automation
- SQL Server 2022 Revealed
- C# Programming for Absolute Beginners
- Pro C# 10 with .NET 6
- Microsoft Azure for Java Developers
- The Art of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) with Azure
- And more!
DE&I
Twitter quietly edited its hateful conduct policy to drop transgender protections
In a free society, it’s hard to argue that free speech isn’t a corner stone, but companies are not prohibited from censorship. The first amendment is often conflated with free speech in general, but only guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. That said, what duty does a platform such as Twitter have to protect people from hate speech and other harassment?
While many companies take this responsibility seriously, it seems that Twitter (under Elon Musk) no longer sees a problem with letting people spread hate under the guise of not boosting it and also labeling it. While abuse is up across the board on Twitter since Elon took over, especially targeted is the Trans community, which is up exponentially. One reason for the removal of protections from the Twitter Terms of Service (TOS)? Elon seems to believe that he himself will suffer under the TOS based on past Tweets and statements.
Social media has proven itself to be a force for both good and evil intent. The shifts in Twitters policies exposes some of the most vulnerable populations to harm and is, thankfully, being held accountable by advertisers who don’t want to be associated with hate speech. The unfortunate part is that Elon has taken a position of not backing down that will lead to the deaths of an unknown number of people – whether through self-harm or at the hands of someone influenced by rhetoric – one of which could be his own daughter. Hopefully there comes a point where it will make more sense for Elon to sell to a more responsible owner but, if not, then Twitter deserves to disappear from the social media landscape.
According to GLAAD, misgendering and deadnaming transgender people raises privacy concerns and “can put them at risk for discrimination,” violence, and “increased levels of psychological stress and depression.” Simply respecting pronouns of transgender youths—according to a 2021 survey from a nonprofit organization focused on suicide prevention, The Trevor Project—can halve the rate of attempted suicides.
Scholastic, and a Faustian Bargain
Such a tough position to be in, to be an author with an opportunity to be published by Scholastic, to share the story of your grandparents who happened to meet in Minidoka, a Japanese incarceration camp in Idaho during Word War 2, and to have to turn it down. Why? Because the publisher decided it would be too hard to let the author’s note stand with the words racism, or with a description of how racism still persists.
It’s unfortunate that the same group of people scream FREE SPEECH! when it comes to what people can say on social media, are OK with attempts to suppress the truth about the country’s history with racism, or the continued persecution of minority groups. Suppress (or try to) the understanding of people with other religions, sexual orientations, and lifestyles, going to the extremes of defunding libraries (though this was reversed under pressure from the public), or removing books based on a parent’s objection (which backfired in Utah, where a parent petitioned to have The Bible removed).
Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, our history as a country is intimately tied to white supremacy. If we allow a small group of loud voices to terrify companies into suppressing this truth, we are doomed to be bound to it for all time. Only by shining light into the dark places can we hope to move forward in the light. We were once the greatest country on the planet; we can never be again as long as we embrace the practices we criticize everyone else for.
They wanted to take this book and repackage it so that it was just a simple love story. Nothing more. Not anything that might offend those book banners in what they called this “politically sensitive” moment. The irony of curating a collection tentatively titled Rising Voices: Amplifying AANHPI Narratives with one hand while demanding that I strangle my own voice with the other was, to me, the perfect encapsulation of what publishing, our dubious white ally, does so often to marginalized creators. They want the credibility of our identities, want to market our biographies. They want to sell our suffering, smoothed down and made palatable to the white readers they prioritize. To assuage white guilt with stories that promise to make them better people, while never threatening them, not even with discomfort. They have no investment in our voices. Always, our voices are the first sacrifice at the altar of marketability.
Engineering
9 essential tips to become a better coder
This is a pretty solid list of tips that are good reminders if you’ve been coding awhile, or great advice if you are starting out. There really isn’t much I can add here other than if you’re a developer, give this a read.
Novice software developers (and too many experienced ones) look at their code to admire its wonderfulness. They write tests to prove that their code works instead of trying to make it fail. Truly great programmers actively look for where they’re wrong—because they know that eventually, users will find the defects they missed.
Infosec
Attack Techniques: Spoofing via UserInfo
How much do you know about valid url structure? Are you aware the initial spec allows for user info to be embedded? Similar to the spec defining a valid email address, there’s probably more to a url than you think.
The placement of user info at the beginning of a url can make it appear to the untrained eye that a link provided in a text or email is valid; however, it only appears so because the user name portion carries a domain the recipient may recognize. While some browsers have taken action to warn users that they may have clicked a phishing link, not all do. And, while this has now been removed from the specification, many browsers still honor the credentials because they are being used for legitimate – if not potentially insecure – uses.
Short but important read to help you stay protected online.
Last summer, RFC9110 made it official, suggesting:
“Before making use of an “http” or “https” URI reference received from an untrusted source, a recipient SHOULD parse for userinfo and treat its presence as an error; it is likely being used to obscure the authority for the sake of phishing attacks.”