Ecuador hospital runs on Linux Mint
Just a small note to celebrate a Linux experience I've had today.
Recently moved to Ecuador and visited this morning the Centro de Salud in Catamayo, Province of Loja. It's a large gov't hospital/medical center.
As I met with multiple doctors getting all sorts of paperwork done, I couldn't help noticing that the login screen looked kinda familiar.
As they logged in to their PCs, the familiar Mint interface popped. They were running some old app for new patient entry, I suspect it was written in PowerBuilder (from what I remember from my previous ancient life as a PB developer many years ago), as the old-school Win95-style interface and L&F seemed strangely familiar.
Since PowerBuilder does not run on Linux, I can only assume they must be running it on Wine.
So kudos to whoever is the smart kid who is saving the people of Ecuador some $$$ and not wasting it on Windows. The government here does not have a lot of money to waste, so it's nice to see someone smart here utilizing the right set of tools to get the job done at the right cost.
This is the type of Linux desktop deployments we all want to see more of. No drama, just regular users using Linux all day to get their job done.
Posted Apr 5, 2016, 1:21 AM UTC
Speak for yourself. I'd rather not see doctors and hospitals run Mint. I'd rather not trust my medical information to a distribution that doesn't even have a security team.
Moreover, I rather not have hospitals run software that does not meet any certification standards.
With all love for Linux and open source, installing an uncertified random Linux distribution in a medical environment is irresponsible!
Which certification would be relevant?
There are certifications for medical equipment that makes sure you don't get killed because of malfunctioning equipment.
It sounds ridiculous but those laws are there for a reason, similar to nuclear power plants and aircraft.
These are certifications for systems that actually run analysis and control life support systems. The computer where a doctor types in his thoughts, and even the anamnesis does not require certifications.
Source: Am working as a developer in precisely that area where functions are excluded because we don't want to be subject to certification.
It doesn't sound ridiculous to me; but it sounds like it might be specific to particular countries or jurisdictions.
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Qubes OS or bust!
I feel like "Mint security" is a new meme
I don't want them to run XP either, but you take what you can get. Not everyone is going to run OpenBSD.
It's not the operating system that matters. It's that the whole system has been approved to meet medical standards.
If staff at a hospital just randomly installed Linux on their computers, these computers would no longer be allowed to be used at a hospital.
For all you know those computers could be on an air-gapped network
Well since this is Ecuador I'm going to go out on a limb and say that acquiring 'properly licensed/approved' (read: expensive) medical software isn't that cut and dry.
PB saves data direct to a relational DB, not on the local PC, BTW.
How does that help me if they get a keylogger installed?
Outside of the highly publicized hack of their forums (which has nothing to do with the actual distro), is there some concrete example of default Mint insecurity?
Just curious. I am not saying you may not have a point, but it is based on the whole Ubuntu LTS core, so should be pretty solid in this area.
Not patching kernels, not having a security team, getting their distribution channel hacked.
Except they don't actually install things like kernel patches.
Yes, there is. Mint doesn't update system critical packages by default, including the Kernel, which means that out of the box the system is vulnerable. Mint also doesn't use AppArmor or SELinux.
Yes, there is: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2994
Mint is neat for a personal desktop or whatever, but it has absolutely no place in an enterprise environment where security is a concern. This thread on LWN has some pretty decent discussion on the security concerns of Mint: https://lwn.net/Articles/676664/
It has everything to do with the actual distro.
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Their upstream is Ubuntu, which handles security.
Except they don't bother to install many of the security patches, like kernel patches.
Also, just because your upstream source has a security team doesn't mean you have a security team. What about the changes your distribution makes from your upstream source?
Hospital computers that have medical information aren't usually connected to the internet.
I have some sad, sad news for you...
i don't think that's true, my doctor is running XP :P
And he's connected to the internet because of XP? It's common to use XP because of old medical programs, but not even a dentist's XP computer is allowed to be connected to the internet because of the personal information they hold.
That's not true at all, I have plenty of family members that get their medical information emailed directly from the local hospital and doctor's offices here in Virginia. There's a plenty of rooms in doctor's offices with computer hooked up to the internet and their local network as well.