August 7, 2005

AJAX and Windows

There’s a discussion on Slashdot about the potential for disruption in the operating system marketplace, especially Windows, as more applications can be ported to the Web using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). The consensus seems to be that AJAX doesn’t threaten…
August 5, 2005

Discussion about Wikipedia on Slashdot

Apparently there’s been an announcement about tighter editorial controls being implemented by the founders of Wikipedia, one of my favorite Internet resources. The point of a wiki is to enable anyone to edit any content as they wish, creating information that…
August 4, 2005

DefCon: Web Service Intrusion — Same Security Holes, New Technology

At DefCon 13, Alex Stamos of iSec Partners gave a very interesting talk entitled “Attacking Web Services”.  In summary, there are currently three known web service attack techniques: Injecting XML into an input box, overwriting tags set earlier in the SOAP…
July 30, 2005

DefCon: Google Ads Phishing Security Alert

DefCon (http://www.defcon.org) is a large annual hacking conference that attracts corporate security personnel, federal agents, and of course, hackers.  DefCon is significant since hackers use DefCon as a forum to unveil security vulnerabilities in tools and utilities we use daily.  The first…
July 27, 2005

VoIP and telework

The government’s been trying to get more people to work remotely for many years now, with legislation that mandates agencies to enable more staff to adopt this mode of working and prevents government contractors being penalized for the use of…
July 25, 2005

Forecastfox

I started using Forecastfox some time ago and absolutely love it. It’s a little Firefox extension that shows the current and forecast weather conditions wherever you wish in the browser. Until the latest version, the weather data came from Weather.com but…

IBM acquiring PureEdge

Woah! Government Technology reports that IBM is buying PureEdge, the producer of the e‑forms software that’s used by Grants.gov, among many others. I think this has been in the works for a while now, given that PureEdge seems to have obtained quite…
July 22, 2005

IT governance and efficiency

Somehow or other, I ended up reading this article on Nicholas Car’s blog about governance of IT purchasing in organizations. It highlights an important point: the governance structure should be focused on the objectives of the business, not as a means to…

Law enforcement IT standards

Another heads-up from Alice Marshall: DOJ is sponsoring an effort to develop law enforcement IT standards, called the LEITSC (Law Enforcement Information Technology Standards Council). With so much money at the levels of law enforcement closest to the feds, and…

EmergingTechnology.gov

Via a newly-found friend, Alice Marshall of the Presto Vivace Blog and GCN, I see that NIST has launched a new site, ET.gov, to help increase adoption of reusable components. I was wondering when something like this would crop up. CORE.gov is limited to…