Economy Forces County IT Departments to Embrace Practicality

While the development of citizen-facing applications like podcasts and RSS feeds sometimes get lots of attention, the 2010 Digital Counties Survey announced in July found that more practical projects really are the ones dominating county IT departments’ efforts.

The survey - conducted annually by Government Technology’s Digital Communities program - measures trends in county IT deployments, priorities and challenges. This year’s survey found large increases in what have long been considered government IT best practices: joint service deliveries, data center consolidations and mergers of redundant agencies.

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first published week of:   08/30/2010

ESRI Developer Summit Focuses on Opportunities to Integrate Geospatial Technology

Software developers from around the world will participate in the 2010 ESRI Developer Summit (DevSummit), to be held March 22–25, 2010, at the Palm Springs Convention Center in California. The DevSummit is a forum for not only mapping and spatial application developers to connect with ESRI but also for any developer interested in integrating spatial components into applications.

The highlight of the summit will be the Keynote Session featuring consultant and author David Chappell. Chappell will deliver the Keynote Address on cloud platforms and discuss how this fast-evolving technology impacts developers and their work. Chappell helps people worldwide understand and make better decisions about new technology. He has been the keynote speaker at conferences, events, and universities around the globe, including last year’s DevSummit.

This year’s DevSummit will have twice as many presentations as last year. Topics will include best practices, implementing security for applications, and mobile and Web Mapping API application development. Presentations will also be more in sync with the technical sessions, allowing attendance at both.

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first published week of:   03/22/2010

Europe warns Google, Microsoft, others about search-data retention

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are retaining detailed search engine data for too long and not making it sufficiently anonymous later, in violation of European law, the European Union’s data-protection advisory body has warned. The three companies received letters May 26 from the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which oversees data-protection issues in the E.U. Since 2008 the working party has pressured search companies to retain highly detailed search records for no longer than six months. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all agreed to modify how long they store the detailed data, which varied up to 18 months. The data collected by search engines can include a host of details, including the search terms, the date and time of the search, the searcher’s IP (Internet Protocol) address and the brand of browser, operating system and language used. Google keeps the full data for nine months and then obscures the last octet of the IP address. The working party wrote to Google stating that that policy does not protect the “identifiability of data subjects.” Also, Google retains cookies - data files used to track how a person moves around a Web site - for 18 months, which would also allow for the correlation of search queries, the working party said. In a news release, the working party singled out Google, saying that that company’s 95 percent market share in some European countries means it “has a significant role in European citizens’ daily lives.”

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first published week of:   05/31/2010

Executive Compensation: The 10 Highest-Paid Tech Chiefs of 2008

To identify the top 10 highest-paid executives in charge of IT, CIO.com combed through the proxy statements filed by Fortune 55 companies with the SEC. Proxy statements, which are distributed yearly to shareholders when their votes are needed to elect new board members or to authorize raises for top executives, list the pay packages for the company’s three to five highest-paid executives. Since most chief information officers aren’t listed on their company’s proxy statements because they aren’t among the top brass, we had to list in several cases executives who aren’t CIO by title but who oversee corporate IT as part of their broader responsibilities.

With the exception of Dell and Dow Chemical, the proxy statements these companies submitted in 2009 reflect executives’ compensation levels during 2008. Dell’s 2009 proxy statement shows compensation for its fiscal year 2009. Since Dow CIO David Kepler wasn’t listed on his company’s 2009 proxy statement, we took his earnings from the 2008 proxy statement.

Without further ado, here is CIO.com’s list of the 10 highest-paid Fortune 55 executives in charge of IT.

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first published week of:   03/01/2010

Facebook and Twitter flunk security report card

Digital Society, a self-professed security think tank, has given failing security grades to both Twitter and Facebook. Both sites are vulnerable to attacks that can give someone partial or full control over one’s account, the group claimed. According to Digital Society, the main problem with Facebook and Twitter is that neither site allows full Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protection. Both sites create unencrypted sessions for the user by default. Although the actual logins are encrypted, they’re not authenticated - which means one cannot pull up security information in one’s browser to verify the sites’ identities. Even if a user forces a secure session by going to the main sites for Twitter and Facebook, the sites still have links to non-secure parts of the site and JavaScript code that transmit authentication cookies without SSL, Digital Society found. These are not new concerns, but the news fits hand-in-hand with the release of FireSheep, a FireFox add-on that lets people with limited technical knowledge hijack other people’s Web accounts over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. Digital Society’s report card essentially spells out what an attacker using FireSheep or another packetsniffing program could accomplish. In Facebook, for instance, an attacker can gain access to every part of an account except username and password, allowing the attacker to send status updates and read private messages.

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first published week of:   11/08/2010

FCC adopts net neutrality (lite)

After years of debating, infighting, wrangling in court, and mostly just waiting, the Federal Communications Commission has approved an Order that will adopt “basic rules of the road to preserve the open Internet as a platform for innovation, investment, competition, and free expression.” Net neutrality has finally arrived—but it’s not what backers of the idea thought they’d be getting.

“Today for the first time the FCC is adopting rules to preserve basic Internet values,” declared FCC Chair Julius Genachowski, who called the Orde r“a strong sensible non-ideological framework that protects Internet freedom.”

The regulations ban content blocking and require transparency from ISPs.

They also require network management and packet discrimination to be “reasonable,” but they exempt wireless broadband from all but the transparency and blocking rules.

“Managed services” delivered over a last-mile broadband pipe will be allowed, as we expected, though the FCC does say it will monitor them for anti-competitive behavior.

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first published week of:   12/20/2010

Volume 31

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