April 11, 2008 | Comments: (0)
The FCC this week approved a plan to create a nationwide emergency alert system that will deliver text messages to cell phone users should an emergency, disaster, or attack occur. The Warning Alert and Response Network Act (WARN Act) of 2006 gave the FCC the task ofcoming up with new ways to alert the public about emergencies.
According to CNN, cell phone companies that voluntarily opt into the system will send text messages to subscribers in response to three types of events: Presidential alerts such as terrorist attacks; natural disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes; and child abductions or Amber alerts.
FCC chairman Kevin Martin said, "The ability to deliver accurate and timely warnings and alerts through cell phones and other mobile services is an important next step in our efforts to help ensure that the American public has the information they need to take action to protect themselves and their families prior to, and during, disasters and other emergencies."
The plan may sound like a good idea, but not everyone subscribes to text messaging. In addition, according to InformationWeek, "subscribers will be able to opt out of receiving the messages ... [which] sort of negates the benefit."
Hopefully, there will be other measures taken to comply with the WARN Act for those of us who either don't get or choose not to read text messages on our cell phones.
Posted by Caroline Craig on April 11, 2008 09:23 AM
December 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Often it takes a high-profile disaster to get the wheels of government moving toward preventing a repeat.
Such appears to be the case with this year's infamous data-leak episode of millions of U.S. veterans' private information last May, which prompted the White House to issue a presidential mandate [PDF] requiring all agency mobile laptops and devices storing sensitive data to have fully encrypted hard drives.
Slowly but surely, the encryption-project ball is rolling, notes the Web site Full Disk Encryption: The government has posted RFPs (request for proposals), giving vendors a chance to line up and make their case for their respective encryption wares. "As with any other encryption product being used by Federal Government, the selected FDE product must have FIP 140-2 certification." (You can read the rest of the technical requirements here [Doc].)
Interested companies include Seagate, Mobile Armor, Pointsec, SafeNet, and Credant. According to Full Disk Encryption; the evaluation is expected to end in 90 days.
It will be interesting to see how much this encryption ends up costing, as well as just how effective it turns out to be. Hopefully it will help the Feds fare better than a D+ the next time its data security competence is assessed.
Meanwhile, perhaps more companies will follow the governments lead, given the rash of data leaks we've seen at corporations like Chevron, Boeing, Wells Fargo, Starbucks, and others over the past couple of years. If they're not sure where to start, they could check out InfoWorld's encryption special report from earlier this year.
Posted by Ted Samson on December 28, 2006 03:06 PM
November 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)
The SKIL Bill and Your Local Elementary School
The Republican lame duck Congress is toying with passing the SKIL (Securing Knowledge Innovation and Leadership) Bill, a top priority for the tech industry and its lobbyists that would raise caps on H-1B Visas by 20 % and exempt highly skilled workers (Master's Degree or higher from a U.S. institution) from the cap altogether. While tech executives may be keen on the law, many, many U.S. born IT workers are none too keen about this law, which they see as a backdoor way to keep wages low in the U.S. by importing cheap labor from India, China, Eastern Europe, or any other low wage country with a surfeit of engineers.
Nobody knows this better than my colleague Ephraim Schwartz, who had the temerity to raise the issue of the SKIL Bill's future in a TechWatch blog post last week.
Ephraim, who has covered the H-1B and outsourcing issues as closely as anyone over the years wasn't taking a stand on SKIL, but he got an earful from you folks, especially after a heartfelt post by Toni Chester, who described herself as "a 42 year old female American technical worker with one son who I have raised alone" and "over 17 years of technical industry experience... a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Mathematics (and) Statistics."
Toni talked about her experiences with the H-1B program: training what she considered under skilled workers from India who could barely speak English, required lots of oversight and hand holding, but made 30 percent less than she did.
"Many times, I was put in a position to mentor or train my H-1B peers. At the time, I had no idea that they were in my country to be my replacements. Nor did I realize that the program afforded corporations a means to rapidly escalate the off-shore outsourcing process."
Other comments were more visceral:
"I want you to know that the H-1B program has devastated my life and my career. The government should NOT meddle in the Engineering business and just let natural 'supply and demand' take effect," wrote a contributor using the handle "Displaced American Engineer."
"Let's just change our name to: The United Corporations of America," wrote "Ex-Engineer."
Some were tough on Toni. James wrote: "I'm in the software industry and I hardly believe the story that you portray. Get a grip and move somewhere that has jobs. In Orlando my company can't get enough people to submit resumes and spends mucho bucks running ads in the paper to attract candidates."
Still others pointed to GAO reports about corruption in the H-1B program.
Of course, the debate over H-1B is a multi-factor problem. Sure, technology companies are interested in keeping wages low. But that doesn't mean that claims of an insufficient supply of domestic IT workers aren't also true. Let's face it: given an ample supply of U.S. born tech workers coming out of the country's many colleges and universities, companies could still keep wages low enough to be competitive and not have to pay for the cost of immigration lawyers and other middlemen who help them bring H-1B workers to the country and keep them legal while they're here. And there's certainly evidence that at least part of the blame lies with the moribund U.S. education system, not (just) rapacious corporations.
The National Science Foundation's Science and Engineering Indicators report for 2006 raises a number of red flags on issues that indirectly contribute to the problems addressed by SKIL. The NSF reported that most 4th, 8th, and 12th graders did not demonstrate proficiency in math and science knowledge and skills taught at their grade level. And... "Despite showing some improvement in mathematics and science performance in recent years, U.S. students continued to lag behind their peers in many other developed countries."
That problem filters up to higher grade levels. As NSF points out, while students on temporary visas in the United States earned a small share (4%) of Science and Engineering degrees at the bachelor's level they earned double that number (8%) of bachelor's degrees in computer sciences in 2002 and 7% of those engineering.
Go higher up and the trend is even more pronounced:
Science and Engineering master's degrees awarded to students on temporary visas more than doubled in between 1983 and 2002, to 27,600 and are now 28% of all such degrees awarded. "Foreign students make up a much higher proportion of S&E master's degree recipients than they do of bachelor's or associate's degree recipients," with degrees are "heavily concentrated in computer sciences and engineering, where they earned 46% and 41%, respectively, of master's degrees in 2002."
Ph.Ds? Fuhgedaboudit. NSF reports that in 2003 foreign students on temporary visas earned 43% to 44% of doctoral degrees awarded in mathematics, computer sciences, and agricultural sciences, along with 55% of those awarded in engineering. To quote the Estimate "Noncitizens, primarily those with temporary visas, account for the bulk of the growth in S&E doctorates awarded by U.S. universities from 1983 through 2003..."
More data points: in the 20 years between 1983 and 2003, the number of S&E doctorates earned by U.S. citizens fluctuated from approximately 14,000 to about 17,000, and the number earned by temporary residents rose from 3,500 to a peak of 8,700 in 2003. The share of S&E doctorates going to temporary visa holders rose from 18% in 1983 to 32% in 2003, as S&E doctorates earned by U.S. permanent residents decreased from a peak of 3,614 in 1995 to about 1,200 in 2003 (appendix table 2-32 Excel table.) Yes, dear readers, only 1/3 as many U.S. citizens earned doctorates in Science and Engineering in 2003 compared with 1995. And nobody had a gun to their head forcing them to take a business or marketing/communications major instead of something demanding like CS.
Sadly, the real figures may be even darker. NSF notes that "in the mid-1990s, the number of doctorates awarded to U.S. permanent residents showed a steep increase when a large number of Chinese doctoral degree students on temporary visas shifted to permanent resident status under the 1992 Chinese Student Protection Act."
In other words, we can thank the Tiananamen Square Massacre in 1989 for that spike in U.S. S&E doctorates in the mid 90s. GO USA!!!
Hey, these are just the facts, folks.
Let's fess up to it: the U.S. has to change the way it educates its kids: improving science and math education, erasing the gross inequalities between schools in rich and poor communities and eliminating the poverty and violence that curtails the dreams of many future U.S. Nobel winners who happen to be born into the wrong neighborhoods. Most of all, our society has to start honoring educators and celebrating the accomplishments of scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists at least as much as it celebrates the accomplishments of athletes and obsesses over the misadventures of crass celebrities. There is, sadly, no ESPN or Entertainment Tonight for science and engineering.
These were thoughts that came home to me the other day when I was dropping my daughter off in kindergarten. Room 207, the third grade class next door has been working on graphing and, as an exercise, the teacher took a poll of the kids career aspirations, then made a bar graph of the results. I'll attach it below for your consideration. That big bar on the left, that's "Athlete." Roughly 35 percent of the class picked that as their career of choice. Next is the grab-bag "Other" with around 25 percent of the class. Third? "Actor/Actress" with around 20 percent. Teacher/Doctor is next with around 10 percent. Fireman, Policeman and Veterinarian (my first choice at that age) didn't register. Something to think about as the debate over SKIL, H-1B and immigration heat up.
Posted by Paul Roberts on November 15, 2006 08:06 AM
October 30, 2006 | Comments: (0)
FCC 811 mandate: Pandora's box?
Pursuant to the Pipeline Safety Act of 2002, the FCC has mandated that all telecommunications network carriers make available by March 2007 811 as a free dial in phone number for digging site information.
Some states and cities already have their own service, but this will be the first time it goes national. Vonage will be the first provider to offer 811 as a national service.
In case you've never heard of this before, here's how it works: If you are adding an addition to your home, installing a pool or just digging a ditch in your backyard, you dial 811 and that connects you to what is called a local one call center.
The center in turn connects to the local utility company in the area and lays out the location of pipes and or cables underground.
It is nice to know that my neighbor won't be cutting any power lines that turn off my air-conditioning in August or worse still hitting a gas pipeline.
But, what if my neighbor is a local terrorist? Then what? You never know what he might do with that info. In fact, he never says good morning to me, shouldn't that tell me something?
Now he is armed with information some governments actually try to keep secret.
It is a crazy world we live in an having to worry about these things just makes it crazier still.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on October 30, 2006 01:16 PM
August 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)
DoD eyes open-source recruitment
Enlisting open-source standards and development strategies can give the U.S. military an edge in the battlefield through greater speed and agility, according to DoD (Department of Defense) Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Sue C. Payton.
"To wage Information-Age warfare, we need business processes that allow us to evolve faster than our adversaries. The problem is that DoD software is acquired with the same Industrial-Age business processes used to acquire ships, tanks and other physical machinery. ... [W]hy are we buying lines of code the way we buy ordnance?" Payton writes in an article recently published in Military Information Technology.
She continues: "By 2015, the projected number of lines of code required for avionics, compared to the number of clearable software coders, will be overwhelming. There are not enough cleared American programmers to sustain the U.S. military's information technology infrastructure if we cannot leverage software across the defense enterprise. The current model of closed software development is broken; a new model is required."
In her article, Payton cites some governmental agencies that already are benefiting from open source. She writes that the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) reaped $15 million in savings by moving to open-source for managing traffic flow. Additionally, she says "in the Army's Land Warrior program, open source has mitigated the pain of software integration for the Stryker Brigades' 300-plus hardware and software interfaces. After software malfunctions, the Army replaced the commercial operating system with an open source operating system in its Land Warrior interoperability program for Stryker Brigades."
Payton acknowledges that, to some, open source is synonymous with insecure. Countering that argument, she writes that "an ad hoc working group from DARPA, , NIST and NSA found that a source code's wide availability is more likely to uncover changes that can have negative consequences. It also allows static analysis tools to detect malicious code or undocumented features."
She also notes that the number of people with write access to a new open source project is typically quite small. Further, she says that open source projects tend to have fewer bugs and glitches because more eyeballs are scrutinizing them.
Moving to an open-source friendly environment is not simple task, Payton acknowledges; it requires "changes in requirements, policies, procedures and reviews." As a guide down that path, she cites a report titled "Open Technology Development: A Roadmap Plan," released last April.
Posted by Ted Samson on August 21, 2006 12:00 PM
August 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)
DoD eyes open-source recruitment
Enlisting open-source standards and development strategies can give the U.S. military an edge in the battlefield through greater speed and agility, according to DoD (Department of Defense) Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Sue C. Payton.
"To wage Information-Age warfare, we need business processes that allow us to evolve faster than our adversaries. The problem is that DoD software is acquired with the same Industrial-Age business processes used to acquire ships, tanks and other physical machinery. ... [W]hy are we buying lines of code the way we buy ordnance?" Payton writes in an article recently published in Military Information Technology.
She continues: "By 2015, the projected number of lines of code required for avionics, compared to the number of clearable software coders, will be overwhelming. There are not enough cleared American programmers to sustain the U.S. military's information technology infrastructure if we cannot leverage software across the defense enterprise. The current model of closed software development is broken; a new model is required."
In her article, Payton cites some governmental agencies that already are benefiting from open source. She writes that the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) reaped $15 million in savings by moving to open-source for managing traffic flow. Additionally, she says "in the Army's Land Warrior program, open source has mitigated the pain of software integration for the Stryker Brigades' 300-plus hardware and software interfaces. After software malfunctions, the Army replaced the commercial operating system with an open source operating system in its Land Warrior interoperability program for Stryker Brigades."
Payton acknowledges that, to some, open source is synonymous with insecure. Countering that argument, she writes that "an ad hoc working group from DARPA, , NIST and NSA found that a source code's wide availability is more likely to uncover changes that can have negative consequences. It also allows static analysis tools to detect malicious code or undocumented features."
She also notes that the number of people with write access to a new open source project is typically quite small. Further, she says that open source projects tend to have fewer bugs and glitches because more eyeballs are scrutinizing them.
Moving to an open-source friendly environment is not simple task, Payton acknowledges; it requires "changes in requirements, policies, procedures and reviews." As a guide down that path, she cites a report titled "Open Technology Development: A Roadmap Plan," released last April.
Posted by Ted Samson on August 21, 2006 12:00 PM
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