On Tuesday, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, unveiled Apps.Gov, a Web site where federal agencies will able to buy so-called cloud computing applications and services that have been approved by the government to replace more costly and cumbersome computing services at their own locations.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
There were a flurry of stories over the weekend about the electoral dreams of former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. Whitman is the current Republican front-runner in the race to be be the next governor of California.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Is Motorola planning to hold a fire sale?
Oppenheimer analyst Ittai Kidron observes in a research note that the company continues to plan the spin-off of its crumbling handset business sometime next year. But he says checks suggest the company is in the middle of strategic planning process that could lead to other asset sales as well over the next 12 months.
by Joshua-Michele Ross, Vice President, O'Reilly Media's Radar group
No corner of modern American life is untouched by technology. And no technology is more transformative than the Internet. The simple reason for this is that the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.
A provocative story from Reuters Monday ruminated on which companies are likely to replace Citigroup and General Motors in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Its conclusion: Google and Cisco are the most likely contenders, with Apple and Visa having a less likely chance.
As the exclusive U.S. carrier for the Apple iPhone, AT&T has had a lot to celebrate. Rivals hope to crash the party. A growing number of public interest groups want an end to the partnership that forces buyers of Apple’s iPhone to buy their mobile-phone service only from AT&T.
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The lack of security and privacy online has some technology experts pushing for a do-over on the Internet, according to a Sunday Week in Review article in the New York Times.
“What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a ‘gated community’ where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety,” writes John Markoff.
A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier’s systems, exposing customers’ voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003. “What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment,” Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told Threat Level. “I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that.”
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