Darci is a former health attorney that is now assisting in the healthcare extraction of rules and regulations to the electronic age.

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Show Notes:

• Versionone
• Darci on LinkedIn
• Darci’s Blog

Full transcription of previous episodes can be found below or also at heywtr.tumblr.com

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Womens’ Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: So, Angela, today we’re interviewing Darci Freedman and she works at the same company as me. She’s actually my bosses’ boss, so it’s pretty fun to get her on and talk about the awesome ways the company was founded , and how we’ve involved women right from the get go and all the kind of cool things we do as a company.
ANGELA: Yes indeed. It is a good interview. But, before we get into it, I just want to mention that you can support this network and this show by going to Patreon.com/today. I think our lowest subscription, and you might be able to go lower, but our lowest subscription is $3.00 a month, and that supports all the shows on the network. It keeps us up and going. We have a lot of technology podcast, other ones, that you can check out in addition to Women’s Tech Radio, and just show your support for the show there.
PAIGE: And we got started with the interview today by asking Darci what her role is at the company.
DARCI: I manage a team of about a dozen people who handle the acquisition of content for a proprietary platform that is targeted towards non-legal regulatory professionals in the compliance arena. So, a lot of big data.
ANGELA: Wow, that is a title. That’s great.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: That says a lot and nothing at the same time.
DARCI: I know.
PAIGE: And it’s so beautifully jargonized.
ANGELA: It is, yes. That’s exactly.
PAIGE: So, for full disclosure for everybody on the show, Darci is actually one of my bosses, and so we work for the same company. And I am one of those people that she managers in her awesome way to help acquire this content — although, you make it sound like we’re pirates. I know of like it. We’re going to acquire content.
ANGELA: Arrg.
PAIGE: Which we’re not.
ANGELA: I know.
P; We use open government data to do this awesome work.
DARCI: Yes.
PAIGE: So, I know Darci, that you have kind of an interesting non-traditional story. You are actually not a technical person by background. What is your actual background?
DARCI: All right, here it is. It’s interesting. I’m an attorney. I am a former litigator. Actually, the way I say it is I’m a reformed litigator. Which, if you were a legal audience you’d be laughing hysterically at. But, I was a health lawyer, and basically I had the corporate job where the hours were enormous and the time commitment was just huge, and it just took a huge chunk out of me personally to do that. And I was, you know, I really enjoyed it, but after I had my first child I just really didn’t see how it was going to jive practicing and that level of commitment, and kind of the drain on me personally and in my personal life with how I wanted to raise my child. So, I actually stopped working for eight months after I had my first child. And I didn’t do anything. And that wa really weird.
PAIGE: Except be a parent, which is a full-time job.
ANGELA: Which is enough.
DARCI: Well, right. Yes. I didn’t do anything for air quotes “work”. Of course, I was doing a ton at home with my son and I had a kind of extreme situation with his birth, but when I started thinking I would like to get back to my intellectual pursuits and start something professionally, I had a relationship with somebody and he had a startup company. It was in the health arena. He said, why don’t you come work for us and start doing some writing. You know, you’re a subject matter expert in this area, come on and do some writing. And so, that’s how i started. I actually worked with a couple of other attorneys at this startup and anybody in startup experience knows, it’s kind of all hands on deck. You go in, you’re not in a defined role. You throw in any help you can render in any way that is needed at the given moment. And so, I started learning about the platform. How we acquired content for it. And things just kind of snowballed from there.
PAIGE: So this was a tech startup that you got involved with?
DARCI: Yes, and then it was later — I think it was 2007 we were acquired by a large Dutch based publishing company and, you know, I’ve been at the company for almost a dozen years now, and it’s been really interesting time to watch publishing and traditional print-based communications and tools, and the transformation of that into electronic products and workflow tools. So, we kind of — we were this startup that was acquired by this big publishing company, and we really pushed the envelope, because we didn’t have this huge project plan with dates planned out for ten years. That’s just not how we operated. And we really kind of were — we were known in the beginning as a bit of rabble rousers, because we didn’t conform to this kind of corporate ideal, and the normal way that a publishing company did things.
PAIGE: It’s almost like you got to come on — you know, we talk about technical debt, and it’s almost like the other company had publishing debt.
DARCI: They did, and they still do. I think most publishing companies are still working to move towards electronic, but to me print was something that I had only done in my legal background and it was not something that I did at this startup. We were all electronic. Indeed, the person who founded the company had another company — another startup at a different point in time, and he was the first person to put the federal register, which is this huge daily document that the federal government puts out that says here are the laws, and rules, and regulations from all of these agencies for the day. And that used to be only in print. I mean, just huge rainforest that were killed publishing that. And he put that federal register online in electronic form, and so he was very innovative. And he had this fabulous model, which was exactly in tune with what I wanted. He thought, there are all these really, really talented technical and non-technical women that want to raise families, and want to have a great work life balance, and he hired them. And he hired them into all of these different kind of scenarios. You could work from home, you could be in the office, you could work at night, you could work during the day when your children were sleeping if you were at home watching them. And he really capitalized on a lot of talent that otherwise really didn’t have an outlet or a place to go.
PAIGE: I didn’t know that actually. That’s really fantastic. So, do you think that made a huge difference with the way the company was kind of founded and got started, like to have that flexibility, but also to have that female talent onboarded so easily?
DARCI: It absolutely did. And I benefited from that model, and it is exactly how I operate today. In fact, I think when I came on board, other the actual founder of the company, I don’t think that there was — there was only one other man. Everybody else was a woman, and they were all over the country. At that time I think it was Denver Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire. Texas, and that is still the way I operate today. I just want people that are really talented. And there are a lot of really talented women out there, but here are these kind of barriers that we bump into.
ANGELA: Right, Paige briefly kind of talked to me about what you guys do, and it definitely applies to me, or applied to me, I guess. I worked in the medical industry for a while and I got to learn the retail side of it. What we would do is we would go onto like the DSHS website and print out these massive fee schedules, like you said, a forest, you know?
DARCI: Yes.
ANGELA: And everybody would have one at their desk. We had these desktop things where you could hole punch and then slide sections in, and it would be about 12 inches long full of all these different things. And we’d have to tab the pages, and of course, they release a new one almost every quarter. How does what you guys do change that?
DARCI: Well, in the beginning, because your example is right on. Fee schedules, code boos, that’s right up our alley. We have a whole line of coding and reimbursement products. I actually have to fight against that type of historical perspective on a daily basis. This just happened to me yesterday. I will literally have people that scan and PDF pages of the hard copy code book and send it to me and say, it doesn’t look like this. We need to make it look like this. These are people that I work with in the products that we’re developing. And I have to say, no we’re not trying to make — the online electronic experience in looking at a book, you have to move away from the antiquated notion that all you’ve done is take the book and put it up online. I mean, that’s a PDF.
ANGELA: Right.
DARCI: That’s very different from a workflow tool. A book that is in electronic format that you can actually use. So, that’s something we’re constantly struggling with. And the way that we kind of get — I push the envelope. We ask those questions. Why? Why would I reproduce exactly what’s in the book?
ANGELA: Right.
DARCI: I mean, unfortunately I have to buy — I buy those books so that I can say, but yeah look, this is — it doesn’t work the way they’ve set it up. Let’s restructure or modify some of the meta tagging so that we get search results in a certain way, and kind of get people away from the notion of, oh the book is electronic, it’s online, but it should be exactly the same as the hard copy.
ANGELA: Right, well to support that, what we’d have to do, specifically if we were shipping diapers. There’s a lot of age restrictions and quantity restrictions on that on a monthly basis. But also ,certain ICD-9 codes have to be used with it, and then that determines — and then also HCPCS codes. So, you have to use the fee schedule, the ICD-9 book and the — you know, so having an online resource — none of them say — the ICD-9 code doesn’t say, you also need to choose this HCPCS code with it, or this quantity limitation. What I did, which is like sudo what you guys do, is I modified our proprietary software so that it had identifier codes that would automatically tell the customer service rep, hey it has to be this diagnosis, or hey it’s this quantity. You know, you can’t have more than 150 or whatever. So, I tried and I made a cheat sheet that combined all three of those resources that really helped streamline then. But, I am super excited. I really want to check out your product now, because I think it could really help. I still have a relationship with that former employer.
PAIGE: That’s hilarious. You just named three of the things that make my head hurt, because I go in and I’m the person that does all the interlinking between ICD-9 codes and HCPCS and our current regulations.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh, yeah.
DARCI: It’s a lot. We do have a set of tools and a set of reimbursement calculators that we’ve developed that work, as Paige just indicated, in conjunction with the more explanatory material you might read out of the code book.
ANGELA: Right.
DARCI: ANd so, we put in different elements in the UI that flag things for folks.
ANGELA: Exactly. Right.
DARCI: So, you know, a little red flag, literally. If you want to code this, you have to think about this. It’s extremely complicated. I will tell you, I had — this is something that I fight against a lot. It’s really interesting. I have really, really talented developer types that we work with and we’re doing a revamp of some of those tools and calculators. We have a database fellow that, I mean, he knows the ins and outs of Medicare and Medicaid and all of — you know, ICD-9, ICD-10, HCPCS, CPT. I mean, he just knows it. He has a subject matter expertise, and then he’s a database guy. We hired him specifically because of that expertise. He was getting in pulled in all of these other directions and I kept hitting a wall. I kept saying to these folks, you know, we need this fellow back to work on these products. He was hired for this. Oh, we have other database folks. They’re used to working with really complicated data. They can dig into it. And we exposed it to them and they were like, wow the health care Medicare, Medicaid, medical coding, reimbursement payment is extremely complicated, and they backed right off and said wow you really do need to oftentimes have some underlying subject matter expertise in order to handle this type of data.
ANGELA: Yep. And I know, I worked on a federal grant in King County for a little while, here in Washington, called New Freedom. I was actually the pioneering purchasing agent for that. I would meet with the people going on to the program and try to figure out what they should their government dollars to make them more independent. That was the new freedom part. It was really hard, because I had come from mainly the retail side of things. Not necessarily services. And now I could offer a wide range of, you know, they could hydrotherapy or massage, different things. And it was so hard to find the fee schedules and know that I had the right one and figure out what they could get covered and not have to use their dollars for.
PAIGE: We’ve kind of talked about two different angles of your job. You work with a publishing company and you work in the medical field. Which of the two do you think it’s been harder to drag into technology?
DARCI: I would say publishing, without a doubt. And the reason for that is simply financial. For Medicare and Medicaid, the government has — generally, when they make a change and they want a program or a payment system to go electronic and be more modern in that sense, they do incentive programs. So, we will pay you more if you move in this direction. And then, they have a period of time that’s kind of — then the incentive payment goes away and if you aren’t where you need to be from an electronic perspective, you will get a penalty. So, that’s how they do it. So, they’ve been — providers and folks in health care industry payers/payees, they’ve been motivated by dollars. Publishing, I think it took them a long time to wake up to the fact that they weren’t going to be able to sale books on paper forever. I mean, really.
PAIGE: Yeah, I have to say, being in some of the meetings I’ve been in, it was really surprising to me that meetings this year people are still talking about growing the print publishing business.
ANGELA: Mm-hmm.
DARCI: Mm-hmm. I know that our company has made it a decisive part of their BDP to move from print to electronic. The dollars show that that’s where you need to be. And not just electronic, right? So, we need to move beyond, you know, I tend — we all fall prey to using these terms, but not just electronic, to workflow tools. Things that you can — that just integrate into your job and make it easier. So, that’s where we hope to be headed. There are a lot of barriers there, but there are some really good things that have been going on too. We — Paige, not on the team you’re on directly, but on some of the other teams that I manage, we have started with agile scrum and that’s helped a lot. That’s helped a lot and brought us a lot forward with development activities, but you still run into some walls with management who want a nice waterfall timeline.
ANGELA: Speaking of, what is Paige’s work ethic. No, I’m just kidding. I thought I’d slide that in there somewhere.
PAIGE: That was very subtle.
ANGELA: Yeah, I know, right?
DARCI: Well, you know, so here, I will kind of indirectly respond to that. We are a thin and trim team of people, and we handle a huge volume of data compared to some of our counterparts in other parts of the company. We may have been rabble rousers initially, but when you look at our bottom line in terms of the number of people that we have on the team and the actual content that they process, the volume of data is just huge compared to some of the other parts of the company that really get bogged down in process. So, to that end, we are a highly producing team and it’s because of the people. I really think it’s because they have a lot of flexibility. I always say when I’m hiring somebody, you need to have some core business hours that you’re available for meetings and whatever else, but I’m flexible. You can work when you want. You can work the hours that you want. We have some of those mad programer types who are working at 2:00 a.m. and that’s when they’re beautiful stuff is outputted. And then we have others who keep to a more traditional schedule, but I think that in part it’s that flexibility. That recognition of creativity. Which, I think people don’t often think goes along with a tech role or a tech background. I think they think of some person in front of a keyboard and all these white numbers running up on the screen, but there’s a lot of creatively in tech and I think you just kind of have to let that happen and out of it these amazing things come. That’s what I think of my team and everybody who’s on it.
PAIGE: Yeah, the flexibility at the company is what keeps me creative, keeps me going, so I totally agree. I think being a modern facing company and having a remote workforce and managing it so well has been an amazing experience for me to be part of. I wasn’t sold on remote work before, but now it’s part of my life.
DARCI: I think ten years ago, I mean I was working remotely ten years ago. I think that now — ten years ago people used to say, working you have to manage that and not everybody can work remotely. Everybody can work remotely. You just have to have management and a team that are in communication and that’s all you really need. There’s a lot of to-do that’s often made about remote teams. A lot of that is logistics, and I don’t really think that people need to be in an office, as long as you’ve got the open lines of communication going. I think then you’re good.
ANGELA: What tool do you use most to keep in communication with your team?
DARCI: For development purposes we use VersionOne for all of our tracking of our backlog items. It has a conversation tool and we use that, I would say primarily.
PAIGE: And VersionOne, for people who don’t know, is an agile software development process management tool.
ANGELA: Is it the number 1 or spelled out? Do you know? Number 1?
DARCI: Oh, it is spelled out.
PAIGE: It is spelled out, yeah.
ANGELA: You had a 50/50 chance there Paige.
DARCI: I think it’s all –
PAIGE: It’s bookmarked on my browser.
DARCI: I think it’s all one word too with the –
PAIGE: Yeah, VersionOne.
DARCI: And then, of course, we use some of the other chat type of tools. But I would say in VersionOne there’s a lot of conversation that happens in that tool. There’s a dedicated kind of team meeting room that you can design and we use that quite actively.
PAIGE: My team uses Skype a lot.
DARCI: Yeah.
PAIGE: So, Darci, we’ve talked some about being the small lean machine team inside the bigger company, and being kind of originally founded as a women’s centric company. Have you found transitioning into the bigger company with kind of it’s more traditional setup with gender norms difficult or have you had any pushback there?
DARCI: It’s a yes and no answer. The head of our company is a woman. The head of the business unit that I’m in is a woman, but those aren’t per se the tech parts of the organization. So, from that perspective that’s really heartening that I work for a company where the CEO is a woman, and the lead in my business unit is also a woman. And there are several other women in key roles. Not as much in the technical part of the company. And that’s been a little bit disheartening. We had kind of a restructuring in the last few years, and I remember my first exposure to the more kind of technical unit that kind of came out of that. And going into a meeting and being very exciting and having the head of that put up a slide deck so that we could see who all of his people were. And I just remember thinking, wow that’s pretty white, and that’s pretty male, and middle aged. It was really a little off-putting. So, we’re working to change that. I have a lot of really talented people on my team that I can see moving up through the ranks that I try to get a lot of exposure to. I think that’s one of the things that I really try — I try to do it for my entire team, is really get them exposure to the other parts of the company and other technical groups and organizations in the company, so that they can hopefully rise up through the ranks. But I think there are unfortunately some barriers there. I’ve experienced them myself. Sometimes they’re really subtle. Sometimes they’re more overt, like an org chart that reveals that it’s just all men.
PAIGE: What would an example of a subtle one look like?
DARCI: Actually, it just happened fairly recently. Basically we had — there was a technical issue with a resource and he was being kind of cross-utilized and we needed him on something, and he was supposed to be a dedicated resource to our project. Myself and my business counterpart, who happens to be a woman, reached out to our appropriate chain of command and flagged the issue. Ended up in a telephone call with a bunch of other senior level managers and myself and the other person who had raised the issue. And I got on the phone and it was just one of these conversations where it started — you know, it’s a very subtle thing. It’s actually been in the news a lot lately, this notion of subtle prejudice or subtle sexism. The Google conference that they had where their CEO kept interrupting their CTO, and he did that much more than he interrupted anybody else on the panel. It was kind of one of the things like that. They weren’t aware of the nomenclature and the tone with which they were handling the conversation. And it was — instead of it actually being an issue, it was let’s get on the phone ladies and let’s talk about the facts. Let’s try to tone down the emotion. It was that kind of tone to the whole conversation.
PAIGE: Wow.
DARCI: And I just kept getting angrier and angrier as the conversation went on, because I thought, I don’t understand what’s going on here. I have a valid issue based in hard numbers that I can show to you. I”m not being emotional. You know, it was that kind of thing. And i called them out on it. I instilled a lot of panic in the few moments that I called them out on it, but I just said I need to raise your attention to an issue, and I don’t know if you’re aware of what you’re doing here. Here’s what you’re doing. You’re starting the conversation off saying that we need to talk in facts. Somehow suggesting that the two women on the phone and the issue that they have raised is not fact based, it’s more emotion based. And then you’re using language like that. I think we were described on the phone as acting like the walking wounded and needing to tone things down and rachet back the rhetoric. All of these kind of phrases and terms that you would — I just was like okay, it’s not 1920.
ANGELA: Right, meant to knock you down a peg.
DARCI: Right. Do you realize what you’re doing? And I had calls — of course they freaked out right, because I called them on it. I had a couple of good calls afterwards with the individuals that were on the phone. One, who was very thoughtful and said I didn’t realize what I was doing, but I have four daughters and they’re just starting their careers, and I want to understand where you’re coming from and what you’re thinking, explain it to me. And we had a really great conversation. The other person, I think, that i had a conversation with, he thinks of himself as a lot more involved than he actually is — tried to tell me that that’s how he always runs his calls.
ANGELA: Oh my goodness.
DARCI: And if I’m on a call with other folks, I will see that they are run indeed the same way.
PAIGE: Well, either way, regardless of if you’re a woman or not, that’s not a great way to handle a call.
ANGELA: No.
DARCI: I agree. I agree, but it definitely had that related to kind of patronizing and you guys are emotional and you can’t really handle this kind of thing. I was like, whoa what is going on here? So, even in a company that is trying to evolve, those kinds of things happen. To me, the most important way to handle those things is to call people out on it. I think we have developed in some way this culture that — where you get this negative backlash for saying anything, right? And I’m just not going to be a part of that. If I feel uncomfortable with the way something is going down, I’m going to let you know.
PAIGE: If you see something say something, right?
DARCI: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: No, I totally — it’s the biggest problem with privileges. You don’t understand that you have privilege if you have it.
DARCI: Right.
PAIGE: The only way to see it is to not have it.
ANGELA: Right. Or to be called on it.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s — exactly.
DARCI: Yeah.
ANGELA: Perspective shift.
PAIGE: It’s our responsibility too to participate in the conversation. We can’t just sit back and say we wish things were different.
ANGELA: Right.
DARCI: Absolutely. I think it’s really important — I have these two little — I ended up with two sons, and a male dog, and two male cats, and my husband.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh.
DARCI: So it’s like the alpha-male. I work really hard in trying to call their attention to these kinds of things. Even if it’s just really simple language things.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com and from there you can do the show dropdown and find all the Women’s Tech Radio shows. You can also use the contact form to contact us directly, or you can email us WTR@jupiterbroadcasting.com.
PAIGE: The Jupiter Broadcasting website also has our RSS feed or you can find us on iTunes. We’re also heywtr.tumblr.com for transcripts of the show, or you can follow us on Twitter @heywtr.

The post Reformed Litigator | WTR 24 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Sony’s new hot legal defense goes after journalist & has a anti-Linux background. Ars gets hacked & why the big trend is the cord cutters friend.

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Sony Demands Press Destroy Leaked Documents – Slashdot

In an effort that may run afoul of the first amendment, Sony, through their lawyer David Boies (of SCO infamy), has sent a letter to major news organizations demanding that they refrain from downloading any leaked documents, and destroy those already possessed. Sony threatens legal action to news organizations that do not comply, saying that “Sony Pictures Entertainment will have no choice but to hold you responsible for any damage or loss arising from such use or dissemination by you.”

Sony Planned to Flood Torrent Sites With “Promo” Torrents

Sony Pictures’ TV network AXN developed a guerrilla marketing campaign to convert users of The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and other torrent sites to paying customers. The company planned to flood torrent sites with promos for the premiere Hannibal disguised as pirated copies of the popular TV-show.

The revelations are part of the Sony Pictures leaks which contain a discussion on the plan, framing it as a “brilliant anti­piracy social campaign.” The AXN employee describes the idea as follows.

“The idea is simple. We made a promo dedicated to Hannibal which is convincing people in very creative and no­invasive way to watch Hannibal legally on AXN instead downloading it from torrents.

“[T]his promo is supposed to be downloaded on the torrents sites, imitating the first episode of Hannibal season 2 but in reality would be only a 60 sec promo. The torrents sites are exactly the place where people just after [the] US premier would be searching for the first episode of season 2. So the success of this project is more than 100% sure.”

Unfortunately for the AXN Central Europe team the advertising campaign wasn’t well received at Sony Pictures’ headquarters in Los Angeles.

Sony Pictures Executive Vice President, who emphasized that it was a no go.

“Forget about a site blocking strategy if we start putting legitimate PSAs or promos on sites we’ve flagged to governments as having no legitimate purpose other than theft… PSAs being for public good, etc…”*

And so it never happened…

Ars Technica is the latest site to fall victim to hack | The Verge

There has been a lot of hacking news in the past few weeks, and now noted technology news site Ars Technica has fallen victim to a hack. The site’s front page has gone black, with white text reading “Ars Security” alongside a couple of Twitter handles, presumably of those who have taken control of the site. There’s also some music playing to keep you occupied while waiting for the site to come back online.

The issue doesn’t appear to be completely widespread, as some Verge staffers located in different points around the globe aren’t currently having issues connecting to the site. Ars itself is also aware of the hack; the site’s Twitter account indicates they should be back online soon.

NBC to Live Stream Network Shows – WSJ

NBC is launching a live stream of its broadcast network, part of a broader effort at parent NBCUniversal to make more of its content available online via computers and mobile devices.

Instead, to access NBC’s live stream as well as additional content the company plans to offer via an on-demand platform, consumers will have to provide proof that they already have a pay-TV subscription.

NBC’s live stream will debut Tuesday online, and mobile platforms will be available early next year. Walt Disney Co.’s ABC launched a live stream of its network last year.

Separately, NBCUniversal is also going to start making content from its Bravo and Telemundo networks available through Microsoft Corp. ’s Xbox One game console. USA and Syfy already have deals with Xbox One.

OpenYourMouth

The post Sony's Facepalm Buffoonery | Tech Talk Today 106 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Google is requiring developers to submit their physical address, and the Apple community has outed the manager behind the botched iOS 8.0.1 update. Are we seeing a dangerous threat or just a frantic response?

Plus some great questions, when to lawyer up & much more!

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— Show Notes: —

Feedback / Follow Up:

• On the Viability of Crowd Funding

• Wrist pain

• PHP at a client

• Google wants to post my home address

• Law and Coding

Dev Hoopla:

Person responsible for iOS 8.0.1 debacle also linked to iOS 6 Maps

A quality assurance manager responsible for this week’s botched iOS 8.0.1 release was also in charge of QA for iOS 6 Maps, sources tell Bloomberg. The man is identified as Josh Williams, who is said to have been removed from the Maps team after the app gave people bad directions and/or mislabeled important scenery. He has however been with Apple since 2000, and has been handling quality issues for iOS since the early days of the iPhone.

It’s reported that Williams has a team of over 100 people around the world, and that the company relies more on human discovery of bugs than automated testing. Partly because of these factors, it’s indicated that no single person can be held responsible for major software trouble. The company in fact has a committee called the Bug Review Board overseen by Kim Vorrath, VP of product management for iOS and OS X. She in turn reports to Craig Federighi, the senior VP for software engineering. To help with testing, the company relies heavily on feedback from third-party developers.

It’s at BRB meetings that Vorrath, Williams, and other people determine which bugs need to be solved immediately and which can be dealt with later. Bugs are labeled P1, P2, or P3; P1 can halt production of a device, while P2 or P3 items can be rolled into development of later updates even before the initial firmware is out.

The post Doxing Developers | CR 121 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

The FCC wants to carve out a fast lane for those who can afford it, is this the end of Net Neutrality, or are we all over reacting? We’ll analyze the situation.

Pro-Russian militants overtake more Ukraine Government buildings, and the new government is calling uncle.

Plus Colorado re-thinks their edible Cannabis rules, but something smells fishy, our follow up, and much much more!

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— Show Notes —

NSA is Crazy

Snowden hired an Espionage Act defense lawyer to work on a U.S. plea deal

Whistleblower Edward Snowden reportedly hired a lawyer in an attempt to cut a plea deal with the U.S. government.

Plato Cacheris, regarded as an expert in the Espionage Act—violation of which is the main charge brought against Snowden—has been working for Snowden since he leaked a host of National Security Agency documents last summer, according to the New York Times.

The End of Net Neutrality

F.C.C., in a Shift, Backs Fast Lanes for Web Traffic

The Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday that it would propose new rules that allow companies like Disney, Google or Netflix to pay Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon for special, faster lanes to send video and other content to their customers.

FCC’s new net neutrality proposal: What do we really know?

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal is scheduled to be released to the public on May 15, when the commission plans to vote on the first step in a long process to reinstate net neutrality rules shot down by an appeals court in January.

The first criticisms of Wheeler’s proposal came shortly after the Wall Street Journal broke a story Wednesday saying the FCC proposal would allow broadband providers to charge Web businesses for access to their fastest service.

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler.

The 1,300-word story was short on details, with only one or two paragraphs describing the proposal, and most of the rest of the story focused on reactions and on the history of the net neutrality fight.

• Franken says FCC Net neutrality proposal would “destroy” open Internet

Sen. Al Franken criticized as “misguided” a plan being considered by the FCC’s head to let companies pay for preferential access to ISPs, warning that it would “destroy” the concept of an open Internet.

In a letter sent to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on Tuesday, Franken said that the idea would constitute “an affront to Net neutrality and have no place in an online marketplace that values competition and openness.”

“Your proposal would grant Verizon, Comcast, and other ISPs the power to pick winners and losers on the Internet, which violates core Net neutrality principles that you have publicly supported in the past. Although you claim that this proposal is not a ”turnaround,“ it is difficult to understand how it does not flatly contradict your own Commission’s Open Internet Order.”

• FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Hits Back at ‘Net Neutrality’ Critics

In a strongly-worded and occasionally defensive blog post published Tuesday, Wheeler declared that he is a “strong believer in the importance of an Open Internet,” and said that his priority is to quickly craft new net neutrality rules that would withstand legal challenges.

What will happen at the FCC meeting on May 15?

The FCC is scheduled to vote on a notice of proposed rulemaking, or NPRM, addressing the new net neutrality plan. In an NPRM, the commission releases a set of proposals and asks for public comment on them. It’s the first step in a long process for the FCC to pass new regulations.

Because of the controversy over the proposal, the FCC has already begun taking email comments at openinternet@fcc.gov.

After Comcast, Netflix signs traffic deal with Verizon

Netflix just confirmed that it will pay Verizon for direct access through the carrier’s network, allowing for improved streaming video for customers. According to a brief statement, “We have reached an interconnect arrangement with Verizon that we hope will improve performance for our joint customers over the coming months.” The announcement mirrors a similar peering deal inked earlier this year made by Netflix and Comcast, and likely won’t be the last of its kind.

• Netflix US & Canada Blog: The Case Against ISP Tolls

For a content company such as Netflix, paying an ISP like Comcast for interconnection is not the same as paying for Internet transit. Transit networks like Level3, XO, Cogent and Tata perform two important services: (1) they carry traffic over long distances and (2) they provide access to every network on the global Internet. When Netflix connects directly to the Comcast network, Comcast is not providing either of the services typically provided by transit networks.

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Ukraine

Ukrainian President Says Security Forces ‘Helpless’ Against Militias in East – NYTimes.com

As pro-Russian gunmen seized another city in eastern Ukraine on Wednesday, the country’s acting president said that the government’s police and security officials were “helpless” to control events in large swaths of the region, where at least a dozen cities are now in the hands of separatists.

With the admission by the country’s acting leader, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, that major chunks of the country had slipped from the government’s grasp, the long-simmering conflict in Ukraine seemed to enter a new and more dangerous phase.

Kerry: U.S. Taped Moscow’s Calls to Its Ukraine Spies

Recording “Obtained” by the Daily Beast

The United States has proof that the Russian government in Moscow is running a network of spies inside eastern Ukraine because the U.S. government has recordings of their conversations, Secretary of State John Kerry said in a closed-door meeting Friday.

“Intel is producing taped conversations of intelligence operatives taking their orders from Moscow and everybody can tell the difference in the accents, in the idioms, in the language. We know exactly who’s giving those orders, we know where they are coming from,” Kerry said at a private meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Washington. A recording of Kerry’s remarks was obtained by The Daily Beast.

• Republicans Launch New Push To Arm Ukraine

Senate Republicans are pressing the Obama administration to do more to help Ukraine and hurt Russia and are introducing a new bill that would provide for weapons, sanctions, and more aid.

• The Obama Administration pushing hard to have us belive Russia is hurting from sanctions

Russia’s foreign exchange reserves were drained of a record $63 billion in the first quarter of the year, Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said Wednesday in an address to the lower house of the parliament.
If that pace continues, losses this year would surpass the $120 billion Russia lost in 2008 at the height of the global recession.

• But Russia’s Economy was already slowing

Last year, Russia’s economy grew 1.3 percent, its weakest rate in the past 13 years with the exception of 2009, when the country suffered in the global downturn. The growth slowed further this year as investors pulled money out of the county amid concerns over Russia’s policy in Ukraine.

Supreme Court Considers Limits On Warrantless Cellphone Searches

At Tuesday’s Supreme Court argument, Riley’s lawyer, Jeffrey Fisher, told the justices that the Founding Fathers never intended to allow such wide-ranging searches without a warrant. The warrantless search at the time of arrest, he noted, was to protect the officer’s safety and to prevent the destruction of evidence.

• Initial impressions from the oral argument in the Supreme Court cell phone search cases

This morning, I attended the Supreme Court arguments in the cell phone search cases, United States v. Wurie and Riley v. California. Here are some initial impressions of the argument

Weed Wackers:

Colorado eyes regulating marijuana edibles serving size after two deaths

Two recent Colorado deaths have been associated with legal edible marijuana products, and state regulators may now step in to better regulate portion sizes.

A 19-year-old student visiting the state on spring break jumped to his death off of a hotel balcony in March after eating 65mg of THC in a pot cookie. In April, a 47-year-old man fatally shot his wife in the head while high from candy marijuana edibles.

• Marijuana-infused-food rules in Colorado examined after deaths

Ten milligrams of THC is considered a serving size of the drug, but Colorado has no requirement that edibles be packaged in single servings, at least for now.

• State group debating THC levels in retail marijuana products, ‘edibles,’

10mg of THC is considered roughly equivalent to the amount in a medium-sized joint.

In Washington state, where retail sales don’t begin until July, edible pot products will have the same 10mg serving size, with a maximum of 10 servings per package, said Brian Smith of the Washington State Liquor Control Board, which is regulating recreational pot sales.

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The post Net Neutrality Doomed | Unfilter 95 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.