The complaint argues that gag orders are in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
A leading civil liberties group is joining Microsoft’s lawsuit against the Justice Dept. in an effort to challenge the use of secrecy orders, which prevent tech companies from telling their customers when their data has been turned over to the government.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a motion Thursday asking a Seattle court to intervene in the case on its own behalf as an organization that relies on Microsoft’s services. continued…
first published week of: 05/30/2016
Agencies are spending about 76 percent of their technology budgets on old technology and only 24 percent on modern IT.
But that 3 to 1 spending ratio is on the move as the Obama administration pushes agencies to change their IT spending habits.
The Office of Management and Budget is expected to issue policy or guidance or some sort of strategy in the coming weeks to help move the spending pendulum back toward the development, modernization and enhancement (DME) side of the ledger.
“The ‘use it or lose it’ is a really real stat...”Ray Coleman, CIO, Natural Resources Conservation Service in the Agriculture Department.
At some agencies, that pendulum is moving already.
“One thing we have to realize that within the application perspective, there is a lot of DME going on in the operations and maintenance (O&M), which is also a reason why that number is going up,” said Ray Coleman, the chief information officer of the Natural Resources Conservation Service in the Agriculture Department. “The ‘use it or lose it’ is a really real stat. It’s one of the things I’m identifying for my efforts for legacy modernization for my 100 application pool is getting rid of that DME out of the O&M. I’ve made significant progress. I’ve actually reduced by 10 percent from last year to this year.” continued…
first published week of: 02/01/2016
Amazon Web Services, now 10 years old, dominates US cloud computing market
Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become a $10 billion business this year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a letter to shareholders this week.
While Amazon as a whole "became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales" in 2015, Amazon Web Services will hit the $10 billion mark "at a pace even faster than Amazon achieved that milestone," Bezos wrote. AWS is used by more than 1 million people from "organizations of every size across nearly every industry," he wrote.
AWS launched in March 2006 with the Simple Storage Service (S3). It expanded with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) a few months later, letting customers rent virtual machines over the Internet. The service allowed developers to obtain computing capacity on demand without having to operate their own servers, and over the years, many startups have built online businesses with Amazon's data centers and services providing the back-end infrastructure. It's not just small companies relying on Amazon, though, as big names like Adobe, Capital One, GE, MLB Advanced Media, Netflix, and Pinterest use the online platform. continued…
first published week of: 04/11/2016
Qualcomm, Intel, Samsung and more have joined to find one standard to rule them all
Major companies in the Internet of Things set aside their differences on Friday to work together toward a single standard for all IoT gear.
The group they formed, the Open Connectivity Foundation, could have the critical mass to make all embedded devices in homes and enterprises talk to each other. It includes vendors that have belonged to different, and in some cases competing, IoT organizations. Intel, Microsoft, Samsung, Qualcomm, GE Digital and Cisco Systems are among the founders of OCF.
The announcement came as the wireless industry gathered in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, which this year is expected to include a strong focus on IoT. continued…
first published week of: 02/22/2016
Technology comes to the rescue of your beleaguered tastebuds
There’s a good chance your tastebuds would tell you when you’re drinking stale beer, but now science has come to the rescue to spare them that pain.
You can thank the chemists at Spain’s Complutense University of Madrid, who have developed a sensor and Android app that can tell you when you shouldn’t even bother having a sip.
To monitor a beer’s freshness, brewers often use chromatography techniques to measure indicative chemicals including furfural, a compound that appears during the aging process and gives beer a stale taste. The problem is, those techniques can be time–consuming and expensive. continued…
first published week of: 05/23/2016
The iPhone keynote was a highlight of Apple's whole ride.
“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”
Like Bob Dylan strumming the first few notes of “Maggie’s Farm” on the Stratocaster at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, when Steve Jobs uttered these words at the 2007 Macworld Expo, it was clear that this was no ordinary keynote. What started as a relatively routine presentation—an update on the Intel transition, some stellar sales figures, even a little Windows bashing—quickly became one of his most legendary performances, a rock-star worthy stage show that has been watched and re-watched millions of times.
If it was a record, it would have gone multi-platinum years ago. And whether you were lucky enough to be there or you just watched it later on YouTube, Jobs commanded the stage like he was channeling Mick Jagger or Bruce Springsteen. It still holds up nearly a decade later. continued…
first published week of: 04/04/2016
Companies as diverse as Pitney Bowes, General Electric and Twitter are taking the plunge into machine learning. Here’s why.
After a long winter frozen in the technological permafrost, it's springtime again in the field of artificial intelligence.
A.I. is poised to take off in 2016 as enterprises begin figuring some element of it into their application portfolios. By 2018, artificial intelligence will be incorporated into about half of all apps developed, according to research firm IDC, and by 2020, savings fueled by A.I. — in reduced people costs and increased workflow efficiencies, for example —- are expected to total an estimated $60 billion for U.S. enterprises.
Why A.I. now, when it was considered dead and buried a decade ago? The answer is cheap computer processing power and the allure of secrets buried amid a torrent of data that didn't exist in such voluminous quantities then.
"During the 'A.I. winter,' we didn't have enough data and computer processing power" to make the field technologically or economically practical, says IDC's director of cognitive systems and content analytics David Schubmehl. continued…
first published week of: 02/15/2016
The new, “improved” United Cyber Caliphate—the power of four jihadi hacktivist cells fused together like some sort of cyber–Voltron.
Merger of ISIS–affiliated hacking teams an attempt to build credible threat.
The Islamic State has been deft in its use of the Internet as a communications tool. ISIS has long leveraged social media to spread propaganda and even coordinate targets for attacks, using an ever-shifting collection of social media accounts for recruitment and even to call for attacks on individuals ISIS leaders have designated as enemies. But the organization’s efforts to build a sophisticated internal “cyber army” to conduct information warfare against the US and other powers opposing it have thus far been fragmented and limited in their effectiveness—and more often than not they've been more propaganda than substance.
Now, ISIS is taking another crack at building a more credible cyber force. As analysts from Flashpoint note in a report being published today (entitled "Hacking for ISIS: The Emergent Cyber Threat Landscape"), ISIS earlier this month apparently merged four separate pro-ISIS “cyber” teams into a single group called the United Cyber Caliphate.
“Until recently, our analysis of the group’s overall capabilities indicated that they were neither advanced nor did they demonstrate sophisticated targeting,” said Laith Alkhouri, director of Research & Analysis for the Middle East and North Africa and a cofounder of Flashpoint. “With the latest unification of multiple pro–ISIS cyber groups under one umbrella, there now appears to be a higher interest and willingness amongst ISIS supporters in coordinating and elevating cyber attacks against governments and companies.”
But interest and willingness do not necessarily equal capability. There is room for doubt about the authenticity of this group thanks to mixed messages broadcast over Telegram (ISIS’ preferred secure communications channel for propaganda and recruitment) and Twitter. And ISIS’ hacking efforts so far have been less than sophisticated, with the most recent “wins” being a compromise of the Twitter and YouTube accounts of the US Central Command (CENTCOM) and Newsweek in January 2015. continued…
first published week of: 05/02/2016
AT&T gigabit customers will be upgraded to unlimited data.
AT&T is raising the data caps for U-verse Internet customers to 1TB a month and providing unlimited data "at no additional charge" to customers who subscribe to the company's 1Gbps service.
But DSL users on AT&T's network aren't getting any extra data, and those users must continue to make do with a 150GB monthly limit.
AT&T has been enforcing data caps on DSL users for years but only began enforcement of caps on its faster U-verse service in May this year. Data caps were set at 300GB, 600GB, or 1TB based on the speed tier. But the changes announced today—which take effect August 21—give all U-verse customers a monthly data cap of 1TB or no cap at all. Previously, a 1TB cap was only for customers with speeds from 100Mbps to 1Gbps.
While 1Gbps customers will be upgraded to unlimited data, U-verse customers with slower speeds can pay $30 extra a month for unlimited data. Customers can also get unlimited data if they sign up for AT&T's U-verse or DirecTV video service. continued…
first published week of: 08/01/2016
Throttled users forced into arbitration, but AT&T still faces FTC and FCC wrath.
Customers who sued AT&T over its practice of throttling unlimited data plans will not be able to pursue a class-action lawsuit against the company. AT&T argued that the customers could only have their complaints heard individually in arbitration, and Judge Edward Chen of US District Court in Northern California has sided with the cellular company.
The customers' contracts with AT&T required them to arbitrate disputes with AT&T on an individual basis. But customers argued that the arbitration cause would violate their First Amendment right to petition a court for a redress of grievances. While the arbitration clause allowed claims to be brought in small claims court, the plaintiffs argued that such a court would not be an adequate forum.
But Chen accepted AT&T's argument, noting that the Supreme Court previously upheld AT&T's arbitration provision in a 2011 decision. In the 2011 case, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the Supreme Court found that the Federal Arbitration Act preempted a California state law that limited the power of companies to force customers into arbitration.
Chen's ruling granting AT&T's motion to compel arbitration was issued on February 29 and highlighted in a MediaPost article Friday. continued…
first published week of: 03/28/2016