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Free Wi-Fi trend expands

webmaster — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:07:06 -0700

Computerworld - Everybody wants free Wi-Fi, and McDonald's Corp. is responding to that demand with Wednesday's announcement that more than 11,000 of its U.S. restaurants will have free Wi-Fi in January.

"We've had Wi-Fi working in our restaurants for five years under the pay-to-play model, but now is the time, with the ubiquity of Wi-Fi devices -- including handhelds and laptops -- to extend that offer," McDonald's USA CIO David Grooms said in an interview today.

"We said, let's go with free Wi-Fi.... We talked to customers and asked what they wanted to see, and they really wanted us to go free. You don't need a lot of focus groups to find that out, and we take what customers say seriously."

Asked whether McDonald's sees free Wi-Fi as a draw for new or infrequent customers, Grooms said, "We'll appeal to customers who visit us already, the folks with a [Wi-Fi] device ...who want a cup of coffee and to visit."

The chain plans to expand the free Wi-Fi service to all 14,000 U.S. restaurants over time, he said.

External Drives are a security risk

webmaster — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:02:28 -0700

The Department of the Navy's CIO Privacy Office was notified on July 27 that a Naval headquarters office had been burglarized, and that the thieves had stolen at least 10 laptops and nine external hard drives. In the initial reporty by the Privacy Office said that one laptop contained a file with passwords and user names; personal financial data including bank accounts, investment accounts, and credit card information; a personal contact list with cell phone numbers, addresses, and birth dates; "government only" contract information; discrimination and hostile work environment correspondence; and other sensitive information.

Upon investigation, the Navy found that the laptop contained "high risk" personally identifiable information on only eight people. And the external hard drives were either still in their boxes or encrypted when taken.

The incident emphasizes the importance of security policies and continued vigilance over insider threats, according to Navy department of the CIO privacy team lead who disclosed the breach in a blog post on the Navy CIO's Web site.

"External hard drives are becoming as vulnerable as thumb drives," Muck wrote. "A best practice should be to physically secure them at the end of each work day."

The Navy Privacy Offices advised employees to never store personally identifiable information or unencrypted user names and passwords on government computers. And he reminded of the importance of inventory control policies.

Computer problems are everywhere

webmaster — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:39:00 -0700

A computer system used by airline pilots to file flight plans in the U.S. failed and that led to some flight delays, according to news reports

According to CNN, the National Airspace Data Interchange Network in Atlanta wasn't working properly, forcing pilots to process their flight plans through the network's office in Salt Lake City.

A check of several major airports, including those in Boston, New York City, Chicago and Dallas, showed that no flights destined for Atlanta would be allowed to depart before 10 a.m.

Although the problem was apparently fixed by mid-morning, the FAA site later showed several airports on the east coast with departure delays, some of them lasting more than an hour.

The problem occurred just a week before the Thanksgiving holiday, which is traditionally the busiest travel period of the year in the U.S.

Driod sales may not be enough to unseat iPhone

webmaster — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:53:06 -0700

Verizon Wireless sold over 100,000 of new Motorola Droid smartphones over its first weekend on store shelves, and the company is "very pleased" with the early returns, according to a spokesman for the device's exclusive carrier.

The number of Droids sold between last Friday and Sunday is about 100,000, or roughly half of the 200,000 Droid phones that Motorola had initially supplied to Verizon stores. Early sales figures are "encouraging."

However, some analysts disagreed with that conclusion. Othes say that selling only half the initial supply of Droids over the first three days is somewhat troubling for Verizon, and even more so for Motorola, which is staking much of its wireless phone future on Android devices like the Droid. The iPhone sold multiples of that amount in its first weekend for the original version."

Does Google know too much about you?

webmaster — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:47:35 -0700

Google has launched an all-in-one dashboard that attempts to show you what they know about you. It is an updated "Google Accounts" page that gives you more information than was available previously. Some of this can be classified as sensitive information.

The complete list of Google services that are participating in "Google Dashboard" include:

Google Account, Alerts, Blogger, Calendar, Contact, Docs, Finance, Gmail, Health, iGoogle, Latitude, Orkut, Picasa Web Albums, Product Search, Profile, Reader, Talk, Tasks, Voice, Web History, and YouTube

Not every Google service is represented - there are several that have not joined the Dashboard camp yet - including the likes of Google Analytics, Google News, Checkout, AdWords.

Computer Worm Has Infected over 7 million computers

webmaster — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:26:55 -0700

The Conficker has now infected more than 7 million computers, security experts estimate. One of the keys to controling the worm is a set of clear, concise, implemented, and followed security policies and procedures.

Researchers at the volunteer-run Shadowserver Foundation logged computers from more than 7 million unique IP addresses, all infected by the known variants of Conficker.

They have been able to keep track of Conficker infections by cracking the algorithm the worm uses to look for instructions on the Internet and placing their own "sinkhole" servers on the Internet domains it is programmed to visit. Conficker has several ways of receiving instructions, so the bad guys have still been able to control PCs, but the sinkhole servers give researchers a good idea how many machines are infected.

Although Conficker is probably the computer worm most known about, PCs continue to get infected by it, said a co-founder of The Shadowserver Foundation. "The trend is definitely increasing and breaking 7 million is pretty much of a landmark event," he said.

Conficker first caught the attention of security experts in November 2008 and received widespread media attention in early 2009. It has proved remarkably resilient and adept at re-infecting systems even after being removed.

Government Web Site Fails to Shows if IT Jobs Created

webmaster — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:33:33 -0700

WASHINGTON -- One of the primary reasons for the stimulus money is to create jobs and one of the primary things CIOs would like to know from this data is what kinds of jobs were created. There is no information at Recovery.gov concerning the types of jobs either saved or created from the $16 billion in contracts awarded so far, representing 2% of the $787 billion stimulus. One obvious follow-up question to the U.S. government's announcement that the federal stimulus has created or saved 30,000 jobs so far is this: How many were IT and engineering jobs?

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board that provides Recovery.gov, designed to allow citizens to track funding, is posting only what it gets in reports from recipients. A spokesman said theat they are not analyzing the data in terms of types of jobs but would do it "later". The lack of detailed information, the absence of data, the lack of consistency to the data collected, and insufficient rules governing how that data is supposed to be collected and displayed makes the site useless.

The Recovery.gov site includes interactive maps and spreadsheets showing companies that have received the data, the number of jobs created or saved, and a description of some of the work. This barebones information makes a rough guess possible about the quality of jobs based on description of the work.

Recovery.gov falls short in a number of respects in helping users understanding spending. Among the problems is site navigation difficulty and an inability to search by recipient. This prompted the creation of the Coalition for and Accountable Recovery, which represents about 30 groups.

Along with OBM Watch, some of its other members include the Center for Responsive Politics, OMB Watch, Sunlight Foundation, Economic Policy Institute. The groups criticized the usability of the Web site, and said it needed functions, such as ability to search by recipient.

The stimulus is expected to create IT jobs but there's never been any estimate about how many. Both IT and engineering jobs have declined in the recession.

However, IT firms are expecting the stimulus to perk up spending. IBM's chief financial officer, said this month that public sector was again the fastest growing sector with 2% growth, led by health care and education.

Evolving data threats - CIOs and enterprises adapt

webmaster — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 09:43:04 -0700

Businesses adapt to increased mobility and expanded connectivity: Evolving data threats

Mobile computing and global networking cast a new light on data security issues as, in response, organizations reassess the technologies in use within their IT infrastructures and reconsider the ways in which staff members, customers and partners communicate. Solutions that do not provide the appropriate balance between protection and usability must be discarded in favor of solutions that effectively minimize risks of data theft or loss achieve compliance with existing regulations and equip personnel with tools that help them work productively and securely.

The facts are that business processes today rely on vastly different methods of data storage and data exchange than even a few years ago. These changes in the computing landscape make it essential that companies adopt a very different approach to security. According to the a research report by a leading IT think tank, 90% of organizations say that data security is "important" or "very important" and would get high priority in 2009.

DHS to hire 1,000 IT Pros - Feds to hire 12,000 in total

webmaster — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:47:32 -0700

The Department of Homeland Security wants to hire 1,000 cybersecurity professionals in the next three years, according to agency Secretary Janet Napolitano. That along with the projections of other government agencies puts the feds in the driver's seat of the job market.

The DHS has the authority to recruit and hire cybersecurity professionals over the next three years in order to help fulfill its mission to protect the nation's cyber infrastructure, systems, and networks, she said.

"This new hiring authority will enable DHS to recruit the best cyber analysts, developers and engineers in the world to serve their country by leading the nations defenses against cyber threats," Napolitano stated.

DHS is the focal point for the security of cyberspace -- including analysis, warning, information sharing, vulnerability reduction, mitigation, and recovery efforts for public and private critical infrastructure information systems.

The hiring authority, which results from a collaborative effort between DHS, the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget, lets DHS staff up to 1,000 positions over three years across all DHS agencies to fulfill critical cybersecurity roles, including cyber risk and strategic analysis, cyber incident response, vulnerability detection and assessment, intelligence and investigation, and network and systems engineering.

The need for DHS to bolster its security realm is a hot topic. A Government Accountability Office report this year said that while DHS established the National Cyber Security Division to be responsible for leading national day-to-day cybersecurity efforts that has not enabled DHS to become the national focal point for security as envisioned.

Security and Privacy Under Congressional Scrutiny

webmaster — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:46:53 -0700

Four Democrat U.S. senators will introduce a bill to repeal a provision protecting telecommunications carriers from lawsuits due to their assistance to a controversial U.S. National Security Agency surveillance program. The new legislation, called the Retroactive Immunity Repeal Act, would allow lawsuits against telecom providers, such as AT&T Inc., to resume.

The original legislation repealed telecom immunity provisions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act, passed by Congress in July 2008.

The FISA Amendments Act provides some additional court oversight to the NSA wiretapping program, which former President George Bush's administration launched after terrorist attacks on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. The FISA Amendments Act allowed the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, which allowed the interception of phone calls and e-mail messages of people with suspected ties to terrorism, to continue until the end of 2012.

Critics of the NSA program said it illegally targeted U.S. residents' communications with people linked to terrorist groups without court-approved warrants. The program was illegal under the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure, critics said.