Another Swede here. I have never heard any of this before. Who told you this? I mean.. health insurance? You mean if you have supplemental private insurance? Mortgage? I have a mortgage and they have no access to any kind of health information and I would be very surprised if any bank would request it from me.

The information I got was from a company called Modigo but it was already discussed with my private psychologist; So Modigo just clarified what I had been told and had understood in writing.

Regarding the mortgage thing, I had the same feeling as you, but how it works is that mortgages are cheaper if you buy them with private insurance (income protection, life insurance).

For example: Nordea (a bank) and “If” (an insurance company) have a close partnership offering discounts for each others services when buying an apartment or house. Based on the information If gives backs to Nordea there can be greater discounts on mortgages; this worked in my favour previously and I got a 1.34% mortgage when the list price for 3y fixed was 2.1%.

It could be expanded further to say that if “If” considers me too high risk from various factors regarding my health that they would not even offer me health insurance at all, then the bank could use as justification itself that I am high risk and not extend a loan offer.

This sounds like it should be illegal imo. I’m not Swedish but your country strikes me as one where there are lots of protections for all kinds of people. Your (mental) health status really shouldn’t have an impact on whether or not you can get a mortgage, you cannot change anything about that. To me it sounds just as bad as profiling based on race or gender.

It's common for gender to be a factor in insurance. It's starting to become illegal, but it's a fairly recent thing. Most states allow it, California banned it in 2019.

Interesting, thanks for clarifying.

Why? Many banks are already making lots of money, regardless if you know how they make their money or not. I definitely do not agree that "its about time" to pay for having an account.

I really enjoy stories like this. Thanks for sharing. Must have been really satisfying to get it working!

Another one then :)

A few months ago I tried to run CSGO under Wayland. I recompiled libSDL.so b/c the one delivered with CSGO doesn't support Wayland, and ran with it LD_PRELOAD'ed. The game crashed upon start. After another debugging session with gdb/strace, I figured out that the CSGO binary is calling

  strstr()

with one of its arguments passed as a negative value from some other function, and it happens under Wayland only for some reason. Now, when preloading two libraries, and setting one environment flag I was able to play CSGO under Wayland.

  cat apps/strstr.c 
  #define _GNU_SOURCE
  #include <string.h>
  #include <dlfcn.h>
  #include <stdint.h>
  #include <inttypes.h>
  
  char *strstr(const char *haystack, const char *needle) {
   if ((uintptr_t)haystack > (uintptr_t)0xFFFFFFFF00000000) {
    return NULL;
   }
  
   char* (*p)(const char *haystack, const char *needle) = dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "strstr");
   return p(haystack, needle);
  }
  
  $ SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland LD_PRELOAD=/home/<user>/apps/strstr.so:/home/<user>/Downloads/SDL-master/build/.libs/libSDL2-2.0.so.0.12.1 steam

But after playing with all those strace's/gdb's/LD_PRELOAD's my trust factor in CSGO (the score which says how likely I am to cheat in the near future), went down from Green (good player) to Red (Significantly Bad - will start cheating any moment:) within a week. And that's for 2012 account, with Prime enabled since 2016, and a couple of hundred matchmaking games played, and many more casual/FFA games. So YMMV :)

I wrote to CSGOTeamFeedback@valvesoftware.com asking if they could verify if my account really deserves this rating, because every second CSGO match is again blatant cheaters now, but since nothing changed since a week (when I wrote it), this probably means that LD_PRELOAD'ing your steam is not a good idea :).

>but since nothing changed since a week (when I wrote it), this probably means that LD_PRELOAD'ing your steam is not a good idea :).

Welcome to the "knows too much to be trustworthy" category of perceived-troublemaker.

And this story gives an extra argument in favor of dynamic libraries as they make it easier to fix some bugs in compiled applications (except for games which check if someone messed with LD_PRELOAD).

So what are you saying? That we should sacrifice security (as explained in sibling comments) in order to allow grandmas to create their own web pages?

It all sounds ageist and misogynystic to me. I work with a few grandmas who are right there on top of the newest technologies going. One is a scientist working on a hell of a cool cloud product. Old ladies aren't the model of stupidity, as this thread might lead someone to believe.

Yes, exactly. Grandma should be able to easily publish. Now grandma doesn't say anything because the unnecessary complication pushed by google (https and now http3 which might be enforced a few years later. These has little to do with security and performance; mostly the google ad business has any revenue from all these complications)

*Sweden

Working as a software developer in the medical industry, I'm not at all surprised. Fax machines are everywhere in hospitals. In some sense I see it almost as a failure every time a fax is being sent.. but from a more objective view, the fax is really a very reliable form of communication. Of course, it doesn't scale very well, as the article describes.

(Note that I'm not in the US, but in Sweden.)

> but from a more objective view, the fax is really a very reliable form of communication

I agree with you, but.

When healthcare professionals use fax machines they normally have a protocol that they work to. This lets them know that their telephone line is working, that the fax machine dialled the other number, that the other number picked up, and that the fax was sent. Some of them for urgent stuff include a final "make a call and make sure they got, and read, the fax".

The problem is that these protocols were created when fax machines were on POTS lines. Now many machines are using weird fax-to-email and back again gateways, so we get all the disadvantages of fax combined with the flakiness of email.

Fax is everywhere in healthcare, and someone designing a better safer communication tool that addresses the reasons fax is used could make a lot of money.

It's easy to jump to conclusions on why you'd post this quote here.. Instead, maybe you could expand on what this quote means to you (in this context)?

Does (s)he have to have a point? It's an interesting anecdote related (even if only tangentially) to the discussion at hand.

I had to look it up. That's a very useful sentence... ;-)

I'm sorry, but I'm having a hard time relating to this. In Sweden, we have had chip cards for a very long time (it feels like), and I've never heard anyone complain that it takes so much longer than swiping. I guess you're in a country where it is relatively new?

Could it be that your card readers are somehow worse compared to the ones we have here, which makes it more painful to use? Could it be that here we always use a PIN code as well, so that takes a bit of time anyway, and you do not?

GP is probably in the US, like me, where chip and PIN is pretty new. I can confirm that it tends to take a lot longer than swiping; I still do a lot of both swiping and chipping, so it's easy to compare.

I'm Swedish, and there are definitely people that are away for long periods of time (usually paternity leave), but was it really that many people that you never met? :-) How long did you work there?

Not trying to be snarky, I just want to point out that it's not like you can take vacation year round (even if you're in Sweden..), even though we certainly have quite a bit of vacation (25 days is the norm) and no problem taking half a year of per parent per child.