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Karen Jackson Appointed Virginia Deputy Secretary of Technology

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine today announced the appointment of Karen Jackson as the commonwealth's deputy secretary of technology. Jackson is currently the director of the Office of Telework Promotion and Broadband Assistance for the commonwealth. She has previously served as the vice-president for broadband programs and as a regional director for Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology and worked as an associate information design specialist for Computer Sciences Corporation in Hampton Roads.

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first published week of:   05/04/2009

The war for mobile developers is on: Do you have to pick sides?

Microsoft has offered up more details on its mobile developer strategy, matched Apple’s App Store revenue split and offered a more transparent process for app approval. With the details of Microsoft’s plans revealed developers are hit with a conundrum: What mobile platform do you bet on? After all, Apple, Microsoft, Research in Motion, Palm, Nokia and Google’s Android all have application markets launched or planned.

But here’s the problem: There are only so many developers and there is only so much time. At some point developers will have to choose sides–or at least eliminate a few platforms as options. In the end, this selection process is likely to come down to a few obvious items:

• Money;
• Reach of the platform;
• Developer relations.

In the grand scheme of things all three of those items are probably equal. Meanwhile, all of these application markets offer similar revenue splits–developers get at least 70 percent of the revenue.

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first published week of:   03/23/2009

UAB computer forensics finds virus disguised as Social Security download

Experts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) say they have discovered a new spam campaign that is made to look like messages from the Social Security Administration. This new campaign was discovered by the team at the UAB Spam Data Mine. An expert on the team says the messages tell users that there are errors with their Social Security statement and links them to false pages that appear to be the Social Security Administration Web site. The fake Web site prompts users to enter their Social Security number before downloading a fake statement. The expert says the download is actually a virus that steals personal information. After falling prey to the scam, victims will have given up not only their Social Security number, but also their account numbers and bank passwords. The expert reminds that savvy computer users should never trust an email to update an account

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first published week of:   12/07/2009

Up to nine percent of machines in an enterprise are bot-infected

In a three-month study of more than 600 different botnets found having infiltrated enterprise networks, researchers from Damballa discovered nearly 60 percent are botnets that contain only a handful to a few hundred bots built to target a particular organization. Only 5 percent of the bot infections were from bigname botnets, such as Zeus/ZDbot and Koobface. And Damballa has seen bot infections grow in enterprises as well, from 5 to 7 percent of an enterprise’s IP address space and hosts last year, to 7 to 9 percent of them bot-infected this year. “It’s more the smaller, customized and targeted types of botnets [that infect the enterprise],” says the vice president of research for Damballa. “Corporations have become very good at dealing with the larger threats that get publicized - they tend not to get affected widely by Conficker, for instance,” he said.

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first published week of:   09/28/2009

Utah.gov Uses Geo IP to Customize User Experience

Utah’s portal offers a user experience tailored to each citizen’s local surroundings, thanks to the state’s deployment of Geo Internet protocol (IP) technology. The feature recently helped Utah.gov win the top state honor at the Center for Digital Government’s Best of the Web awards ceremony in Hollywood, CA.

Using Geo IP, the portal reads a user’s IP address and utilizes GIS to match it with links relevant to the physical surroundings of that address. “We wanted to localize the services and information so they would mean more to the citizens,” said Dave Fletcher, chief technology officer of Utah. “The Geo IP enabled us to determine what public meetings and services would apply to citizens using the site.” Some of those customized links include data for local, parks, libraries and schools.

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first published week of:   10/26/2009

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