Tsunami evacuation plan had glitches, state and county to examine

The phone book was the first place many people turned to Saturday after a tsunami evacuation warning to find out if they live in an evacuation zone. There were many complaints the maps were not specific enough but a member of County Civil Defense says, changes are coming, “the maps in the phone book were put in place in 1990, we are looking to put new models in the next year.” For most, the biggest issue with the phone books maps is that you cannot look up your exact street address, but you can online. But during this tsunami warning several websites with evacuation maps were bogged down and some even crashed because of so much traffic, “the site did get slowed down....I am wondering how many hundreds of thousands of hit there were,” he said. Some web pages like the Pacific Disaster Center are in the process of making their bandwidth more robust - saying this warning was a good test of their system. Online activity was at a peak, Hawaii News Now’s website got 2 million views just on Saturday alone.

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first published week of:   03/15/2010

U.S. Defense official discloses cyberattack

Now it is official: The most significant breach of U.S. military computers was caused by a flash drive inserted into a U.S. military laptop on a post in the Middle East in 2008. In an article to be published August 25 in Foreign Affairs discussing the Pentagon’s cyberstrategy, the Deputy Defense Secretary said malicious code placed on the drive by a foreign intelligence agency uploaded itself onto a network run by the U.S. military’s Central Command. “That code spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control,” he said in the article. “It was a network administrator’s worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary.” The Deputy Defense Secretary’s decision to declassify an incident that Defense officials had kept secret reflects the Pentagon’s desire to raise congressional and public concern over the threats facing U.S. computer systems, experts said.

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first published week of:   08/30/2010

Undue process: how Uncle Sam seized BitTorrent domain names

Back in November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Special Agent Andrew T. Reynolds signed an affidavit asking a judge to put five domain names under the control of the US government. All were accused of contributing to online piracy, and it was essential for the domain names to be seized without a trial and without giving the sites a chance to respond. Why? Such sites are destroying the US economy. Reynolds lays it out for the judge:

“Based on my participation in the investigation, I have learned that there is a ‘domino effect’ to online piracy… Domestic industries lose approximately $25.6 billion a year in revenue to piracy, the domestic economy loses nearly 375,000 jobs either directly or indirectly related to online piracy, and American workers lose more than $16 billion in annual earnings as result of copyright infringement.”

Reynolds didn’t “learn” any of this by researching the complex effects of illegal file-sharing on Big Content (bad), concert revenues (good), consumer bank balances (good), superstars (possibly bad), and lesser-known artists (probably good). He learned it from speaking with the movie and music businesses, whose representatives appear to have basically directed this investigation.

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first published week of:   12/20/2010

US is considering whether to haul China in front of the WTO over its Internet restrictions.

U.S. trade officials have asked for more information as they weigh whether to pursue a case against Chinese Internet restrictions that impede Google and other companies, an attorney for a U.S. free speech group said on Friday.

“They’ve asked us for more detail about it. We are trying to put that together right now,” said Gilbert Kaplan, a partner at King and Spalding, which represents the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday challenged Beijing and other authoritarian governments to end Internet censorship, an issue that has strained U.S.-China ties after Google threatened to leave China due to hacking incidents and web restrictions.

The U.S. free speech group, known then as the California First Amendment Coalition, first approached the U.S. Trade Representative’s office in late 2007 with the idea of challenging China’s barriers to Internet access at the World Trade Organization.

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first published week of:   01/25/2010

US to free some federal spectrum for wireless broadband use

In its zeal to provide more spectrum to the mobile broadband sector, the United States government will tap into its own considerable spectrum holdings, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced on Monday.

“Without public action to free up both Federal and non-Federal spectrum for emerging wireless uses, there is a risk that America may fall behind other countries in the wireless broadband revolution,” a new report from the NTIA warns.

NTIA spectrum boss Larry Strickling released a sneak preview about this move several weeks ago. Government spectrum transfers will include some of the regions licensed to guide weather balloons, altimeters, and Defense Department military testing sites.

But that just totals about 115MHz of bandwidth—plenty shy of the 500MHz the government thinks the wireless industry needs to serve the huge demand for data-hungry smartphones.

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first published week of:   11/15/2010

US, Russia kick off talks on IT

A delegation from the United States will meet with Russian officials starting today to discuss a range of information technology-related topics such as Internet governance and cybersecurity.

The discussions are part of a U.S.-Russia Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Roundtable and bilateral talks with Russia's Ministry of Communications in Moscow, the State Department said. The talks are the first U.S.-Russia ICT Roundtable since 2004, the department added.

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first published week of:   05/10/2010

Volume 31

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