gManZboy - Slashdot User

Submission + - Windows 8: Do I Really Need A Single OS? (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Friday October 12, 2012 @04:56PM

gManZboy writes: "If you skip Windows 8, you lose the appealing opportunity to synchronize all of your devices on a single platform--or so goes the argument. If you're skeptical, you're not alone.

OS monogamy may be in Apple's interest, and Microsoft's, but ask why it's in your interest. Can Microsoft convince the skeptics? "If the hardware and software are the same at home and at work, one can't be "better" than the other. It would help if Microsoft convinced users like me that their platform is so good, we'd be fools to go anywhere else," writes Kevin Casey."

Submission + - FAA's New Flight Control System Has Security Holes: Researcher (informationweek.com)

Submitted by gManZboy on Thursday July 26, 2012 @03:06PM

gManZboy writes: A key component of the FAA's emerging "Next Gen" air traffic control system is fundamentally insecure and ripe for manipulation and attack, security researcher Andrei Costin said in a presentation Wednesday at Black Hat 2012. Costin outlined a series of issues related to the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system, a replacement to the decades-old ground radar system used to guide airplanes through the sky and on the ground at airports. Among the threats to ADS-B: The system lacks a capability for message authentication. "Any attacker can pretend to be an aircraft" by injecting a message into the system, Costin said. There's also no mechanism in ADS-B for encrypting messages. One example problem related to the lack of encryption: Costin showed a screen capture showing the location of Air Force One--or that someone had spoofed the system.

Submission + - General Motors Will Slash Outsourcing In IT Overhaul (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Monday July 09, 2012 @03:43PM

gManZboy writes: "GM's new CIO Randy Mott plans to bring nearly all IT work in-house as one piece of a sweeping IT overhaul. It's a high-risk strategy that's similar to what Mott drove at Hewlett-Packard.

Today, about 90% of GM's IT services, from running data centers to writing applications, are provided by outsourcing companies such as HP/EDS, IBM, Capgemini, and Wipro, and only 10% are done by GM employees. Mott plans to flip those percentages in about three years--to 90% GM staff, 10% outsourcers. This will require a hiring binge.

Mott's larger IT transformation plan doesn't emphasize budget cuts but centers on delivering more value from IT, much faster--at a time when the world's No. 2 automaker (Toyota is now No. 1) is still climbing out of bankruptcy protection and a $50 billion government bailout."

Submission + - Should FDA Assess Medical Device Defenses Against Hackers? (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Tuesday April 24, 2012 @02:54PM

gManZboy writes: "The vulnerability of wireless medical devices to hacking has now attracted attention in Washington. Although there has not yet been a high-profile case of such an attack, a proposal has surfaced that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or another federal agency assess the security of medical devices before they're sold.

A Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) study showed that between January 2009 and spring 2011, there were 173 incidents of medical devices being infected with malware. The VA has taken the threat seriously enough to use virtual local area networks to isolate some 50,000 devices.

Recently, researchers from Purdue and Princeton Universities announced that they had built a prototype firewall known as MedMon to protect wireless medical devices from outside interference."

Submission + - Update: U.S. Suspends Controversial Outsourcing Training Program (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Monday April 23, 2012 @05:17PM

gManZboy writes: "As noted on Slashdot last week, the USAID's JEEP (Job Enabling English Proficiency) program has been using U.S. taxpayer dollars to train students in the Philippines to work at outsourcing call centers.

An update: After Congressman Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) and a colleague protested to USAID, USAID decided to suspend funding to the effort.

"In response to the concerns you have raised, the Agency is suspending its participation in the English language training project in Mindanao pending further review of the facts," said USAID deputy assistant administrator Barbara Feinstein, in a letter Monday to Bishop. "Furthermore, the Agency has established a high-level taskforce to review these matters."

Bishop says that USAID needs to find ways to assist developing regions without compromising the jobs of U.S. call center workers"

Submission + - Asian Call Center Workers Trained With U.S. Tax Dollars (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Wednesday April 18, 2012 @03:34PM

gManZboy writes: "Despite President Obama's recent call for companies to "insource" jobs sent overseas, it turns out that the federal government itself is spending millions of dollars to train foreign students for employment in some booming career fields--including working in offshore call centers that serve U.S. businesses.

The program is called JEEP, which stands for Job Enabling English Proficiency. It's available to college students in the Philippines through USAID. That's the same agency that until a couple of years ago was spending millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to train offshore IT workers in Sri Lanka.

Congressman Tim Bishop (D-New York), told about the program on Tuesday, called it "surprising and distressing." Bishop recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts."

Submission + - FBI's New Sentinel System: Exclusive Look (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Friday March 30, 2012 @01:03PM

gManZboy writes: "Six years and $450 million into the project, the FBI's Sentinel case-management system appears to be almost ready for deployment. Sentinel aims to replace a hodge-podge of digital and paper processes with purely digital workflows, helping FBI agents collaborate and "connect the dots" on investigations. The question now is how well the problem-plagued system will live up to those expectations.
FBI CIO Chad Fulgham demonstrated Sentinel for InformationWeek on March 28, the first time the agency has shown its new case-management system to an outsider.
"This isn't just a case-management system. It's a great platform to grow on," Fulgham said during the demo at FBI headquarters. The agency's IT team plans to move other apps over to Sentinel, giving them a similar look and feel on the same underlying hardware."

Submission + - DARPA Works On Virtual Reality Contact Lenses (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @05:28PM

gManZboy writes: "Binoculars and night-vision goggles have their limits. So DARPA is doing work at Washington-based Innovega iOptiks to create wearable eye lenses with tiny, full-color displays onto which digital images can be projected, to give soldiers better situational awareness.

The lenses would allow users to focus simultaneously on images that are both close up (perhaps a display) and far away (perhaps a battlefield.)

Using virtual reality technologies to improve how soldiers perform on the battlefield has been a particular interest of the U.S. military for some time. Two goals: improve not only intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities but also training."

Submission + - States Allow Voting Via Cloud For Citizens Oversea (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Wednesday January 25, 2012 @12:19PM

gManZboy writes: "If a ballot was lost in the cloud, would anyone know?

Several states are using an online balloting website based on Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing platform to allow U.S. voters living overseas to cast their votes via the Web in 2012 primary elections.

In addition to a now complete Florida primary, Virginia and California will use the system for their primaries, and Washington state will use it for its caucus.

To ensure the ballots are from legitimate voters, people use unique identifying information to access their ballots online, according to Microsoft. Once received, the signature on the ballot is matched with registration records to further verify identity."

Submission + - The Problem With Personalized Medicine (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Thursday January 19, 2012 @06:02PM

gManZboy writes: "Talk of individually tailored medical treatment isn't pie in the sky. This approach eventually will help us address risk factors even before a disease can invade our cells, and detect preclinical disease before it gets out of hand. What role will medical informatics play in this brave new world? Hint: Little data projects may be as important as big data projects such as gene sequencing.

At a recent symposium on personalized medicine, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, chairman of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health at the University of Pennsylvania, questioned whether it would make more sense to target all the lifestyle mistakes that patients make rather than analyze genetic defects. His view: "Personalized medicine misses the most important fact about modern society--little ill health and premature death is genetic, much more is lifestyle and social."

Is Emanuel a dinosaur or a pragmatist?"

Submission + - Post-9/11 DOJ Tech Project Dying After 10 Years? (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Thursday January 19, 2012 @05:51PM

gManZboy writes: "A secure, interoperable radio network that the Department of Justice has been working on for more than a decade and that has cost the agency $356 million may be headed for failure, according to a new report by the agency's inspector general.

Called for in the wake of 9/11, the Integrated Wireless Network (IWS) project has already been repeatedly scaled back.

Today, the Department of Justice continues to rely on several separate land mobile radio systems, some of which are unreliable, obsolete, and fail to interoperate with one another. Agents often have to swap radios, share channels, or refer to a book of radio frequencies and manually switch between those frequencies to stay online. Radios remain insecure, as much of the current equipment fails to meet encryption requirements. Much of the agency's equipment is more than 15 years old and is no longer even supported by the manufacturer."

Submission + - Supercomputer Cools Off Using Groundwater (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @04:52PM

gManZboy writes: "The Department of Energy is no stranger to supercomputers, and its Pacific Northwest National Lab has proven that it can continue to be an innovator in the field by using what the lab calls a unique groundwater-fed cooling system in the lab's newest supercomputer, Olympus.

The novel cooling system translates normal groundwater into big savings for the new 162 teraflop supercomputer, which is being used in energy, chemical, and fluid dynamics research.

The setup translates into 70% less energy use than traditionally cooled systems."

Submission + - Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Turns 10: What's N (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Thursday January 12, 2012 @06:21PM

gManZboy writes: "Bill Gates fired off his famous Trustworthy Computing memo to Microsoft employees on Jan. 15, 2002, amid a series of high-profile attacks on Windows computers and browsers in the form of worms and viruses like Code Red and "Anna Kournikova."

The onslaught forced Gates to declare a security emergency within Microsoft, and halt production while the company's 8,500 software engineers sifted through millions of lines of source code to identify and fix vulnerabilities. The hiatus cost Microsoft $100 million.

Today, the stakes are much higher. 'TWC Next' will include a focus on cloud services such as Azure, the company says."

Submission + - Virtualization Meets ATMs, To Secure Banking Data (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Wednesday January 04, 2012 @03:21PM

gManZboy writes: "Automatic teller machine maker Diebold has taken a novel approach to protecting bank customer data: virtualization. Virtualized ATMs store all customer data on central servers, rather than the ATM itself, making it difficult for criminals to steal data from the machines.

In places including Brazil, customer data has been at risk when thieves pulled or dynamited ATMs out of their settings and drove off with them. With threats increasing worldwide at many retail points of sale, such as supermarket checkout counters and service station gas pumps, Diebold needed to guarantee the security of customer data entered at the 50,000 ATMs that it manages.

Diebold last year partnered with VMware to produce a zero-client ATM. No customer data is captured and stored on the ATM itself."

Submission + - FBI's Troubled Sentinel Project Delayed Again (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

gManZboy

on Wednesday January 04, 2012 @02:51PM

gManZboy writes: "The FBI's Sentinel project, a digital case-management system meant to replace outdated, paper-based processes, has been delayed again. The FBI's CIO and CTO bet big on using agile development to hasten the project's completion.

But now performance issues have arisen in testing and deployment has been pushed out to May.

It's the latest in a series of delays to build a replacement for the FBI's 17-year-old Automated Case Support system. In 2006, the FBI awarded Lockheed Martin a $305 million contract to lead development of Sentinel, but it took back control of the project in September 2010 amid delays and cost overruns. At the time, the FBI said it would finish Sentinel within 12 months, using agile development strategies."

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