Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Monday, November 26, 2012
NSA declines to release presidential Cyber directive
More:
www.gsnmagazine.com/node/27881
The National Security Agency (NSA) said it will not publicly release a Presidential Directive document that would establish a broader set of standards that would guide federal agencies in confronting Cyber threats.
Presidential Policy Directive 20, first reported in the Washington Post on Nov. 14, was reportedly signed by president Obama in October and explicitly makes a distinction between network defense and cyber-operations to guide officials charged with making often-rapid decisions when confronted with electronic threats.
The Electronic Privacy and Information Center (EPIC), filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to make the document public because it said the measure could expand NSA's Cyber security authority. "Transparency is crucial to the public's ability to monitor the government's national security efforts and ensure that federal agencies respect privacy rights and comply with their obligations under the Privacy Act," said EPIC's request.
More:
www.gsnmagazine.com/node/27881
Thursday, November 15, 2012
DARPA transfers advanced Cyber net testing facility to DoD
More:
http://www.gsnmagazine.com/node/27823
A vast new Internet-like test bed that can probe complex defense and commercial critical infrastructure networks' Cyber security-worthiness is now in the hands of the Department of Defense.
On Nov. 13, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said it had officially transferred the National Cyber Range (NCR) it developed to the DoD's Test Resource Management Center.
A fact sheet posted on the White House's Web site, said the NCR "will enable a revolution in national cyber capabilities and accelerate technology transition in support of the President's Comprehensive National Cyber-Security Initiative (CNCI)."
According to DARPA, the NCR can realistically and quickly replicate globally interconnected networks to securely test new Cyber tools and capabilities in a realistic environment. The test bed, which is actually a collection of smaller test beds that can be combined and recombined to provide larger or smaller scale experimental environments, provides the complex interaction found in real-life networks, according to DARPA. The NCR can test component to the system level events, for things like buggy code, misconfigurations, and user actions on the vast complex scale found in the real Internet, said the agency's NCR fact sheet.
More:
http://www.gsnmagazine.com/node/27823
Friday, November 9, 2012
GDT European wildlife photographer of the year 2012 – in pictures
Stunning images of animals from land and sea feature in this selection of the best wildlife snaps of the GDT European wildlife photographer of the year awards
More:
http://m.guardiannews.com/environment/gallery/2012/nov/06/gdt-european-wildlife-photographer-in-pictures?cat=environment&type=gallery
Thursday, November 8, 2012
2014 Edition Draft Test Methods | Policy Researchers & Implementers
2014 Edition Draft Test Procedures
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has begun to post waves of draft Test Procedures and applicable test data and tool files for the 2014 Edition EHR certification criteria. The Test Procedures, once finalized and approved by the National Coordinator, will be used for testing and certifying EHR technology under the ONC HIT Certification Program (formerly referred to as the Permanent Certification Program or PCP). The Test Procedures are being developed in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Monday, November 5, 2012
UAV video encryption remains unfinished job
http://defensesystems.com/articles/2012/10/31/agg-drone-video-encryption-lags.aspx
The U.S. military is still broadcasting nearly half of its drone video streams without encryption four years after it learned that its adversaries can see the same information, reported Wired's Danger Room.
Although military officials have been aware of the problem since the 1990s, the issue received widespread coverage in 2008 when U.S. warfighters discovered drone video footage on the laptops of Shi'ite militants in Iraq. The militants were actively intercepting feeds via a $26 piece of software, the story said.
Four years later, only "30 to 50 percent" of America's Predators and Reapers are using fully encrypted transmissions, a source familiar with the retrofitting effort said in the story.
More:http://defensesystems.com/articles/2012/10/31/agg-drone-video-encryption-lags.aspx
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Romney Avoids Taxes via Loophole Cutting Mormon Donations- Bloomberg
Romney's CRUT, which is only a small part of the $250 million that Romney's campaign cites as his net worth, has been paying him 8 percent of its assets each year. As the Romneys have received these payments, the money that will potentially be left for charity has declined from at least $750,000 in 2001 to $421,203 at the end of 2011.
More:
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-29/romney-avoids-taxes-via-loophole-cutting-mormon-donations.html
More:
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-29/romney-avoids-taxes-via-loophole-cutting-mormon-donations.html
Friday, November 2, 2012
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
The best time of day to send emails [infographic]
Email blasts may seem like the out-of-touch old fogey of online marketing, but there's a reason they keep hanging around: They still work. But that doesn't mean most businesses understand how to get the most out of them. One of the biggest, hardest-to-answer questions has always been: When is the best time to send out messages? Finally, we have some hard information.
More:
http://www.adverblog.com/2012/10/12/the-best-time-of-day-to-send-emails-infographic/
Email blasts may seem like the out-of-touch old fogey of online marketing, but there's a reason they keep hanging around: They still work. But that doesn't mean most businesses understand how to get the most out of them. One of the biggest, hardest-to-answer questions has always been: When is the best time to send out messages? Finally, we have some hard information.
More:
http://www.adverblog.com/2012/10/12/the-best-time-of-day-to-send-emails-infographic/
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Romney: 'Some Gays Are Actually Having Children. It's Not Right on Paper. It's Not Right in Fact.'
Romney hadn't even previously fathomed that gay people had children. Boston Spirit magazine reported last month that when gay activists met with him in his office in 2004, as Romney was backing a failed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in the state, Romney remarked, "I didn't know you had families." Julie Goodridge, lead plaintiff in the landmark case that won marriage rights for gays and lesbians before the Supreme Judicial Court, asked what she should tell her 8-year-old daughter about why the governor would block the marriage of her parents. According to Goodridge, Romney responded,"I don't really care what you tell your adopted daughter. Why don't you just tell her the same thing you've been telling her the last eight years."
Romney's retort enraged a speechless Goodridge; he didn't care, and by referring to her biological daughter as "adopted," it was clear he hadn't even been listening. By the time she was back in the hallway, she was reduced to tears. "I really kind of lost it," says Goodridge. "I've never stood before someone who had no capacity for empathy."
More:
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Legal Voice - Parental Rights of Rapists
This is unacceptable.
Each year, an estimated 32,000 women in the United States become pregnant as a result of rape. Of those women, many decide to terminate their pregnancies, rather than cope with the psychological torment of going through the pregnancy. Many others, for just as legitimate reasons, decide to carry the pregnancies to term. Most would assume that in this latter situation, the rapist would have no legal parental rights to the child. Sadly, this is not the case. For many women in this situation, there is a high likelihood under state family laws that the rapist could, indeed, gain parental rights.
More:
http://legalvoice.org/focus/health/rapists-rights.html
Each year, an estimated 32,000 women in the United States become pregnant as a result of rape. Of those women, many decide to terminate their pregnancies, rather than cope with the psychological torment of going through the pregnancy. Many others, for just as legitimate reasons, decide to carry the pregnancies to term. Most would assume that in this latter situation, the rapist would have no legal parental rights to the child. Sadly, this is not the case. For many women in this situation, there is a high likelihood under state family laws that the rapist could, indeed, gain parental rights.
More:
http://legalvoice.org/focus/health/rapists-rights.html
Monday, October 22, 2012
Fresh Windows, but Where’s the Start Button?
Over the years, Keith McCarthy has become used to a certain way of doing things on his personal computers, which, like most others on the planet, have long run on Microsoft's Windows software.
But last week, when he got his hands on a laptop running the newest version of Windows for the first time, Mr. McCarthy was flummoxed.
Many of the familiar signposts from PCs of yore are gone in Microsoft's new software, Windows 8, like the Start button for getting to programs and the drop-down menus that list their functions.
It took Mr. McCarthy several minutes just to figure out how to compose an e-mail message in Windows 8, which has a stripped-down look and on-screen buttons that at times resemble the runic assembly instructions for Ikea furniture.
"It made me feel like the biggest amateur computer user ever," said Mr. McCarthy, 59, a copywriter in New York.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Odd. One of Romney's favorite books is L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth,"
That bad, hyperbolic simile was written by L. Ron Hubbard, and it's in "Battlefield Earth," Hubbard's massive 1982 sci-fi novel, listed on Romney's Facebook page as one of his favorite books.
Much about Romney the public figure — and about his opponent and presidential candidates in general — seems depressingly scripted. But "Battlefield Earth" is a work that's so odd, and such an unlikely choice for any political candidate to name as a favorite, I have little doubt that Romney actually read it. Why else would the first Mormon presidential nominee of a major political party name the founder of the Church of Scientology as one of his favorite authors?
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Saturday, October 13, 2012
READ: Paul Ryan's Letters Requesting Stimulus, EPA Funds
 | READ: Paul Ryan's Letters Requesting Stimulus, EPA Funds | |
| WASHINGTON -- During Thursday night's vice presidential debate, Vice President Joe Biden attacked Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) for criticizing the president's stimulus act despite having sent two separate requests for stimulus funds for his district. Biden was wrong. Ryan sent at least four requests. A Freedom of Information Act request for correspondence between Ryan's office and the Environmental Protection Agency, filed by The Huffington Post, unearthed two additional instances in which the Wisconsin Republican petitioned for American Recovery Act funds. In addition, there were many other occasions in which the GOP vice presidential nominee asked the EPA for grant money for projects in Wisconsin's 1st District, which encompasses Ryan's hometown of Janesville and has a slight Democratic lean. Combined, the letters muddy Ryan's claim that the stimulus wasn't helpful and that government spending, more broadly, doesn't assist small businesses. The letters, Ryan's spokesman Brendan Buck said, were sent as part of the congressman's basic responsibility to advocate on behalf of his district. "Part of being a congressman is vouching for constituents and helping them navigate the federal bureaucracy when asked," he said. But the letters' language reveals a congressman who was involved in reviewing the applications and determining that taxpayer money could be useful economically. Moreover, the direct petitioning of the EPA could prove awkward for the Republican ticket, owing to the insistence among many in the GOP that the agency is a hindrance and should be eliminated. The Associated Press reported on some of the letters on Friday morning. It did not post copies of the letters, which The Huffington Post has done below. Paul Ryan Letters On May 4, 2009, Ryan wrote a letter to the EPA office in Chicago expressing his "support for the National School Transportation Association's (NSTA) application to the Recovery Act National Clean Diesel Funding Assistance Program, which was submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency." "I have reviewed the grant proposal that the NSTA has submitted, and I am confident that they would make effective use of the requested funds," Ryan wrote. According to EPA records, the National School Transportation Association was awarded $2.442 million in stimulus funds. Other efforts by Ryan were less successful. In late December 2009 and early January 2010, Ryan wrote three separate letters to the EPA on behalf of the Village of Sharon in an attempt to secure $550,000 in stimulus funds for utility repairs. The village, as Ryan noted, had worked to get the projects "shovel ready" so that they met requirements for the American Recovery Act. But despite Sharon operating under the assumption that the grant would be awarded, it wasn't. "The Village insists that while they were getting the project 'shovel ready,' no actual construction commenced before October 1, 2008. The Village also contends that it met all of the requirements of the grant, scoring extremely high in the grant evaluation process," Ryan wrote on Dec. 2, 2009. "To rescind a grant award after it was announced and after a project was completed under the assumption that those funds would be paid would be economically devastating to this small community." On Jan. 7, 2010, Ryan wrote again, asking for feedback and information. On Jan. 20, 2010, he wrote once more, saying that the "timeline" for the EPA's response "is not acceptable." An official with the Village of Sharon told the Huffington Post that Ryan's efforts were for naught. "When it came to getting the stimulus funds we were not approved," the official said. Many of these correspondences were in line with what virtually every lawmakers does in carrying out his or her constituent duties. But as Biden charged in Thursday night's debate, for Ryan -- who has taken a hard line against both the stimulus and government spending in general -- the requests have opened him up to charges of hypocrisy and insincerity. "I love that," Biden said. "This was such a bad program, and he writes me a letter saying, writes the Department of Energy a letter saying, `The reason we need this stimulus, it will create growth and jobs.' His words. And now he's sitting here looking at me." As the AP noted, Ryan made many such petitions while in Congress. He asked the Food Stamps Access Research program to approve a grant proposal by the Kenosha community center for purposes of educating families about the nutritional benefits of food stamps. In 2002, he wrote the Agriculture Department to help with a loan guarantee to develop a pork packing and processing plant for farms. In 2010, he wrote the Department of Health and Human Services to send money to a Kenosha health center to help "thousands of new patients" get coverage. The dozens of letters that Ryan wrote to the EPA underscore the dichotomy of Ryan's approach to the role of the government. The vast majority of the letters were banal efforts to help constituents with rules and regulations. Several of them were formal complaints about EPA overreach. But a number were requests for financial help. Many of those requests sought funding to study area brownfields that could be redeveloped. Brownfields are former industrial properties -- a boarded-up factory, a shuttered gas station -- that might be contaminated by hazardous materials. When Ryan's hometown of Janesville requested federal monies to study its numerous brownfields, as previously reported by HuffPost, Ryan did not write a letter of support. But he did lobby the EPA on behalf of Kenosha and Racine brownfields projects. On Oct. 10, 2006, Ryan wrote EPA administrator Stephen Johnson, expressing his "support for the Milwaukee Community Service Corps' (MCSC) application for the Brownfields Job Training Grant, which was recently submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency." On Dec. 8, 2006, he wrote again, this time in support of the City of Kenosha's grant application to the Brownfields Assessment Grant Program. On Oct. 9, 2009, he wrote EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, backing Racine County's application for the EPA's Brownfields Site Assessment Grant. "I have reviewed Racine's County's grant narrative, and I believe they would make effective use of the funds they would receive from the EPA," Ryan said. "I was pleased to learn that their proposed Brownfield's assessment project will help sustain, clean up, and restore the local community and the ecological systems that support them." In the fall of 2011, Ryan wrote a regional administrator of the EPA, urging her to consider an application from a constituent whose business -- BioGenesis Enterprises -- had approached the EPA two years earlier seeking funding. BioGenesis, which had already received federal funding through an earmark under the Weather Resources Development Act, got consideration for additional federal money after Ryan's letter. BioGenesis had sought funds to use the company's new technology for decontaminating sediment. The EPA ultimately rejected the funding request after several back-and-forths with the company. "As the company provided more details, it became increasingly clear that there were a number of insurmountable programmatic constraints and procurement requirements," the agency wrote Ryan on Dec. 28, 2011. "Unfortunately, it was not feasible to proceed." The EPA went on to note that it was "unfortunate" that the agency simply didn't have the funding to support BioGenesis' "promising" technology. BioGenesis did not return a request for comment. Ryan's success rate in helping out constituents is hard to ascertain. The Huffington Post contacted several, many of who said they didn't end up receiving help. Ronald Andersen is one those constituents. The owner of All Clean Pressure Washing of Wisconsin pursued a contract with the EPA in 2007 to help clean up federal buildings. He got a hand in the matter from Ryan. The congressman wrote a letter to the agency asking it to "carefully review" Andersen's "unsolicited proposal." The EPA did review did review the proposal, and decided to pass. Andersen continues to blame Ryan for not doing more. "He said he is for small business -- he didn't help nobody in small business," Andersen told The Huffington Post. "He sent me a letter, that's about it. I thought he would help. All he did was give me excuses. ... He didn't do nothing for me. So I will never vote for him again." | ||
Friday, October 12, 2012
Biden Should Rip Ryan on Neglect of Hometown Workers
What Ryan said about "Detroit West" and his commitment to maintaining a muscular auto industry sounded great.
"Know this: We want the strongest auto sector. We want American manufacturing to have a comeback," he declared. "And the way we do that is we stop sending all our decisions to Washington in a government-driven economy."
But a "government-driven economy" didn't harm the auto industry. It helped.
When the industry was tanking, President Obama convinced Congress to support an auto bailout that, by most accounts, renewed General Motors and Chrysler, keeping factories going and saving hundreds of thousands of jobs.
It was Mitt Romney who wanted to "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt."
And what of Ryan?
He voted for "free-trade" agreements—particularly the extension of permanent "Most-Favored Nation" trading status to China—that were devastating for the auto industry in what he refers to as "Detroit West." He opposed moves to mitigate against the damage, including the Currency Reform and Fair Trade Act. He rejected industrial policies and planning initiatives that might have helped "Detroit West."
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Mother Of Navy SEAL Killed In Libya Demands Romney Stop Talking About Him In Stump Speech
Boston's local NBC affiliate WHDH reported this morning that Doherty's mother objected to Romney using the story in a campaign speech. "I don't trust Romney. He shouldn't make my son's death part of his political agenda. It's wrong to use these brave young men, who wanted freedom for all, to degrade Obama," said Barbara Doherty. WHDH even suggested that it reached out to Romney's campaign for comment, reporting that "there was no response from the Romney camp."
More:
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/10/10/986301/romney-navy-seal-mother-libya/?mobile=wp
More:
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/10/10/986301/romney-navy-seal-mother-libya/?mobile=wp
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