Atlanta has spent $2.6 million recovering from a ransomware attack that demanded a roughly $51,000 payment.
The March 22 attack encrypted data across computers in Atlanta's city government offices, affecting which affected various internal and customer facing applications, including those in the Police Department, Watershed Management, Procurement, City Planning, Public Works, Human Resources, ATL311, the Municipal Courts, Correction and Parks and Recreation.
Atlanta's procurement website showed that, as of April 24, the city's Information Management Agency, the Municipal Courts and the Department of Law had paid $2.6 million to eight vendors. SecureWorks received $650,000 for emergency incident response services; the city paid $730,000 to Fyrsoft for Microsoft cloud, Active Directory and Windows 10 support; and $600,000 went to Ernst and Young for advisory services related to cyber incident response.
Read full story at GCN…
first published week of: 04/30/2018
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David Zolnowsky, the commissioner of the Bureau of Information and Telecommunications (BIT) for South Dakota, retired on March 30.
Gov. Dennis Daugaard said today David Zolnowsky retired. Zolnowsky is commissioner for the state Bureau of Information and Telecommunications.
Daugaard thanked Zolnowsky for a career in state government. Daugaard said he always enjoyed working with Zolnowsky and other cabinet members appreciated him.
“Dave has been an excellent leader within state government, and an advocate for cybersecurity and for greater efficiency in IT services,” Daugaard said about Zolnowsky, who has been commissioner since 2012.
Read full story at Pure Pierre Politics…
first published week of: 04/09/2018
Apple now has its last chance to fend off a lawsuit accusing it of price fixing on the App Store. The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments from Apple on November 26th as the company rejects claims that it uses its absolute control of iOS app downloads to keep prices high and take a 30 percent cut of each sale. In a filing, Apple portrayed itself as just a "sales and distribution agent" and said that developers were ultimately the ones who set the final price. It also said that objections to the 30 percent cut should come from developers, since they're the ones who pay directly rather than users.
The lawyers behind the suit maintain that customers have a direct relationship with Apple (and thus an antitrust case) since they send money to that company, not the individual app developers. The attorneys further argue that Apple has extensive control over pricing, to the point where prices must end in 99 cents.
Read full story at Engadget…
first published week of: 11/26/2018
California voters are being asked to tax big corporations to solve local problems. But is that the companies’ responsibility?
For decades, technology entrepreneurs have established their headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area, created products that changed the way we live, and reaped millions doing so. But at the same time, the cities around these companies have become harder and harder to live in. Housing prices and homelessness are rising, roads are clogged, transit is over capacity. Tech companies aren’t necessarily causing these problems, but they do have a lot more money than anyone else in today’s economy. So cities are asking those who benefit the most in this economy to pay more money to help solve urban and suburban problems.
Not all companies have proven willing participants. When Cupertino, California, proposed charging companies, including Apple, $124 per employee to raise funds to relieve traffic congestion, Apple pushed back, saying it had contributed $70 million to “public benefits” over the course of completing its headquarters in Cupertino. The city shelved the referendum until 2020. Amazon and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce lobbied so vociferously against a head tax passed in Seattle that the city council repealed it less than a month after it was passed. Google and LinkedIn contribute a lot of money and services to Mountain View, California—Google sponsors the city’s community shuttle, for example—but “other companies, not so much,” the mayor of Mountain View, Lenny Siegel, told me. “New wealth doesn’t give as much money as old wealth.”
Read full story at Nextgov.com…
first published week of: 11/12/2018
Mapping technology is an indispensable tool for DNR foresters.
With an electric current pulsing through the waters of a secluded stream, brook trout and other fish swirl into view – stunned briefly – before they are captured, measured, counted and released.
The information gathered from these sampling efforts helps fisheries biologists assess stream fish populations.
Meanwhile, the use of electroshocking is one example of how the Michigan Department of Natural Resources employs technology to help produce, retrieve or collect valuable data on a wide range of subjects.
Technology is defined as the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. From that perspective, the DNR has always been a high-tech agency.
But as technology advances, the DNR continues to adopt new concepts and techniques as it carries out its task of managing the state’s natural resources.
Some technological applications are explicit to the DNR’s various divisions, like those specialized for managing forests, fish or wildlife. Others are wide-ranging and involve the entire department.
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology, for example, is used across the DNR. GIS uses maps and aerial photography to display various layers of data, from political boundaries like county lines to forest types, locations of campgrounds or other information.
Read full story at The Voice…
first published week of: 03/05/2018
We live in an age of continuous disruption and transformation, which means CIOs have to become brokers, integrators and orchestrators.
The march of technological change and disruption to traditional government service delivery is fostering the reboot of the planet, said Steve Bates, principal, Advisory Services at KPMG. “We’ve evolved [technologically] so fast in just a few years,” he said, it may be hard to understand your role in government.
In Bates’ address last week to the Public Sector CIO Academy in Sacramento, hosted by Government Technology, he theorized that the human species is quickly evolving because of this technological change. “The reboot of the planet’s OS is more than just innovation; more than disruption, we are in the process of reprogramming humanity” he said. Just think about what you know about how rapidly politics, religion, markets and consumer behavior have changed [over the past five years].”
He pointed to the revolutionary implications of new technologies like 3-D bioprinting for no-wait list transplantation; a new process of growing steel with a little electricity and water that leaves behind the mining and smelting industries wholesale; and delivering all sorts of goods to consumers, whether they are banking online or need toilet paper, fast and cheap.
Read full story at GovTech…
first published week of: 03/19/2018
A new economic analysis suggests that when cities and states offer tax deals for large companies, public education suffers and incomes eventually fall.
Are the economic incentives cities and states offer huge companies worth it for local residents? That depends on who you ask. But for the cities and states vying for Amazon HQ2 by bartering bigger and bigger tax breaks, the answer matters.
New research from Timothy J. Bartik, an economist at the W. E. Upjohn Institute, suggests that while incentives do indeed have benefits for local economic development in the short term, negative effects begin compounding as soon as 22 years into an agreement. It’s public education that suffers most drastically from budgetary reshuffling; and vulnerable low-income populations that are afforded the smallest gains.
“There’s no free lunch,” said Bartik. “The incentives have to be paid for, and the money comes from somewhere.”
Bartik used a model of a typical local economy to find out where, and to put real numbers to some conventional wisdom (and controversial assumptions) regarding economic development agreements.
Read full story at CityLab…
first published week of: 04/09/2018
When Code.gov launched in November 2016, there was no search function. That didn’t much matter, however, because there were just 45 projects.
Today, there are more than 4,000 projects to explore, and they are fully searchable thanks to an Elasticsearch back end. A powerful application programming interface and a data harvester encourage modern software development practices. In addition, the platform helps agencies comply with the Federal Source Code Policy and avoid duplicative expenditures by reusing existing code that could meet their needs. It also identifies and protects code that is exempt from reuse due to national security or other concerns.
Read full story at GCN.com…
first published week of: 11/05/2018
Offshore federal land requires state infrastructure.
On Thursday, the Department of the Interior (DOI) announced a proposal to expand federal offshore drilling areas substantially, which could put more than 90 percent of the federal offshore land known to contain oil and gas up for auction in the five years between 2019 and 2024.
The offshore drilling areas include areas off the coast of Alaska, in the Pacific Region, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Atlantic Region. But states like California, Oregon, and Washington, as well as Virginia and Florida, are likely to push back on federal approval to drill off their coasts—even if the state itself doesn't have jurisdiction over the federally-owned ocean floor being sold.
Read full story at arsTechnica…
first published week of: 02/05/2018
An interview with Matt Cutts (of Google fame), who now heads the US Digital Service – a group of designers, engineers, and product managers who bring the best practices from industry into the government to try to make services work better for the American people.
Marquis Cabrera recently interviewed Matt Cutts, who is the Acting Administrator at US Digital Service, a non-partisan technology group in the Executive Office of the President whose ambitious goal is to deliver better government services and improve the lives of all Americans.
Matt initially joined US Digital Service in 2016 at the Department of Defense. Since 2017, he has served as Acting Administrator and is responsible for setting the overall direction and strategy for agency projects. Previously, Matt was an early employee at Google (joining in 2000). He was head of the webspam team, where he protected the quality of Google's search results and answered questions about search engine optimization and ranking algorithms. He also wrote the first version of SafeSearch, Google's family filter.
Matt is widely known for his 30-day challenges to try something new and is an avid (but slow) long-distance runner. Matt holds a master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and bachelor's degrees in both mathematics and computer science from the University of Kentucky.
Read full interview at CIO.com…
first published week of: 11/26/2018