August 2009 Archives
By Gautham Nagesh
08/31/09 05:10 pm ET
Last week I made a visit to the District of Columbia's federal courthouse to look up some documents for a story I've been working on. Since I don't have an account for the federal court records database known as PACER, heading down to the courthouse was the only way I could download and print the records I needed at a cost of eight cents per page. I sat down and dutifully printed out the first lengthy set of documents, only to find that somehow all of the text printed out backwards on the page.>>
By Aliya Sternstein
08/29/09 03:08 am ET
On the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the agency charged with weather forecasting recently found that more storms have been identified since the late 19th century because of advances in information technology, not because there are more storms.>>
By Gautham Nagesh
08/27/09 04:32 pm ET
The Department of Homeland Security today released three new directives aimed at clarifying the agency's policies on Customs searches of laptop computers at the U.S. border:
"Keeping Americans safe in an increasingly digital world depends on our ability to lawfully screen materials entering the United States," said Secretary Napolitano. "The new directives announced today strike the balance between respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers while ensuring DHS can take the lawful actions necessary to secure our borders.">>
By Melanie Bender
08/26/09 06:22 pm ET
This week the Sunlight Foundation announced the finalists in its Apps for America 2 contest, which challenged the public to come up with innovative applications using the data feeds from the recently launched Data.gov. Sunlight Labs received 47 entries since the contest launched in May and has narrowed the field down to three finalists:>>
By Aliya Sternstein
08/25/09 03:38 pm ET
After Ben Bernanke was appointed to his first term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, he gave a commencement speech on the connection between information technology and economic prosperity to the class of 2006 at his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The man that President Obama on Tuesday reappointed for another term as chairman observed three years ago that IT investments don't always translate into productivity gains immediately.>>
By Jill R. Aitoro
08/25/09 03:27 pm ET
Usually people equate the terms "open standards" and "cloud computing" with weak security -- whether legitimately or not. But McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt argued the exact opposite during a morning session at the GFirst Conference, hosted by the Homeland Security Department's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team.>>
By Aliya Sternstein
08/24/09 03:39 pm ET
The administration quickly should spread hand-cleaning and other public health messages through social media to prepare young people for the expected 2009-H1N1 epidemic, a presidential advisory group reported on Monday.>>
By Gautham Nagesh
08/21/09 02:35 pm ET
In response to a confusing report published this week, I would like to take a moment and pass on a clarification I just received from GSA regarding the deadline for agencies to transition to the Networx telecommunications contract.>>
By Aliya Sternstein
08/20/09 05:58 pm ET
A coalition of public interest groups has yet to hear from the national security adviser about its request that he allow public comment on a review of classification policy before delivering it to the president next week.>>
By Aliya Sternstein
08/19/09 05:21 pm ET
The administration on Wednesday announced safeguards intended to protect consumers from health information technology breaches, as the White House moves forward on its healthcare overhaul.>>
By Gautham Nagesh
08/18/09 11:32 am ET
GSA just confirmed that they will be naming David McClure will be named an associate administrator, heading up the Office of Citizen Services and Communications. OCS manages all of GSA's public outreach efforts, including the federal web portal USA.gov and the Federal Web Manager's Council.>>
By Jill R. Aitoro
08/17/09 02:52 pm ET
Software giant Microsoft will release the latest version of its Windows operating system in October, and the company can only hope that this go around is smoother than the last.>>
By Aliya Sternstein
08/14/09 09:53 am ET
Programmers may extract data from a White House-led online discussion about transparency to analyze the influence of participants who are out to prove that President Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen.>>
By Aliya Sternstein
08/13/09 04:31 pm ET
Stimulus money recipients can start on Monday the process of reporting their spending and job creation statistics to the public.>>
By Gautham Nagesh
08/12/09 12:16 pm ET
I'm hesitant to address this topic, since I don't really want to draw additional attention to an erroneous report. But this piece from PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak on his blog Dvorak Uncensored has been creating enough buzz this morning that I felt it necessary to clear up a few points Dvorak raises.>>
By Aliya Sternstein
08/11/09 04:28 pm ET
The Cato Institute's Jim Harper on Tuesday blogged that a recent White House proposal to reverse a long-standing ban on cookies is an acknowledgment that Americans can control their own cookie intake.
No, this was not a commentary on the administration's healthcare overhaul plan.>>
By Jill R. Aitoro
08/10/09 11:05 am ET
The same week that the acting White House cyber chief stepped down, the Homeland Security Department has lost one of their cybersecurity officials. The Washington Post reported that Mischel Kwon submitted her resignation after five years as the director of DHS' U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, which was established in 2003 to coordinate the government's response to cyberattacks.>>
By Jill R. Aitoro
08/07/09 02:12 pm ET
The latest reports about Thursday's denial-of-service attack that brought down Twitter and slowed Facebook point to a Georgian blogger as the hacker's primary target. Allegedly, the attack was intended to silence his pro-Georgia commentary posted on multiple social media sites.>>
By Allan Holmes
08/06/09 05:50 pm ET
Federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra was in Silicon Valley this week, where he spoke to the Churchill Club, the valley's premier business and technology forum. They liked what he had to say, according to some news reports.>>
By Gautham Nagesh
08/06/09 07:44 am ET
A special notice posted by the General Services Administration on FedBizOps contains the first set of requirements for vendors interested in offering cloud computing services through GSA's online cloud storefront.>>
By Allan Holmes
08/05/09 04:50 pm ET
The market for electronic health records is heating up, according to the Wall Street Journal blog Digits. Salesforce.com has bought a stake in a small EHR company. The company joins Google, Microsoft and even Wal Mart -- which this year "said it had partnered with Dell and . . . eClinicalWorks to sell an EMR from its Sam's Club stores," Digits reported -- in the market, which has been fueled by President Obama's stimulus package.>>
By Aliya Sternstein
08/05/09 12:39 pm ET
The government's IT shop on Wednesday announced it has updated a recently-launched White House Web site with reviews of all major federal IT investments.>>
By Allan Holmes
08/04/09 04:44 pm ET
To learn just how the nearly $800 billion in stimulus spending is affecting agencies, consider this graph below. This is one slide from a presentation that Christine Shafik, director of the Office of Internal Review at the Energy Department, gave back in June at a conference for top federal executives. It shows just how much the budgets for certain offices within the Energy Department grew this year due to the stimulus bill -- money that federal employees must give out in grants and contracts.>>
By Gautham Nagesh
08/03/09 05:01 pm ET
The Wall Street Journal reported this afternoon that acting cybersecurity czar Melissa Hathaway has resigned from her post for personal reasons.>>
By Allan Holmes
08/03/09 02:42 pm ET
One of the most complicated networks to assemble has to be a Medicaid claims processing system. Numerous states -- Maine, North Carolina, Indiana and many others -- have reported during the past several years that the development of modern Medicaid claims processing systems are over budget, behind schedule and simply don't work.>>
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