Cody Taylor

CWmike writes “While new federal CIO Vivek Kundra gave a speech here this morning on his vision for the US government’s use of technology, the FBI conducted a search of the District of Columbia’s IT offices — where Kundra worked until last week — and arrested an employee and another person who works for an outsourcing vendor, say reports. There was no indication that Kundra was connected in any way to the FBI’s raid, which was part of a bribery sting operation. And if Kundra was aware of what was going on at his former offices or concerned about the raid, it wasn’t evident during his speech at FOSE 2009, a trade show focused on government IT. The FBI would not comment on the reports. President Barack Obama last week appointed Kundra to be the federal government’s first official CIO.”

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News programme ‘Click’ takes over a botnet.The BBC has deliberately hacked into 22,000 PCs to prove the power of botnets, and the damage that can be done with a network of compromised computers.

You might not think it’s newsworthy when the Department of Homeland Security fills a job vacancy. But it’s news when a department that has security in its name actually appoints someone with security in his background.Unfortunately, in this case, the security background comes courtesy of Microsoft

Muad’Dave writes “CNN is reporting that the crew of the International Space Station was forced to take refuge from a possible collision of the ISS with a piece of space debris Thursday. From the article: ‘Floating debris from a satellite forced the crew of the international space station to retreat to a safety capsule Thursday, according to a NASA news release. .. The debris was too close for the space station to move out of the way, so the station’s three crew members were temporarily evacuated to a the station’s Soyuz TMA-13 capsule, NASA said.'” Update: 03/12 18:42 GMT by T : The original story incorrectly said the ISS had 18 crew members. Luckily for the three in the Soyuz, that was a mistake.

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In this article we’ll take a look at the websites of leading fashion companies, as well as some fashion news sites, and see when fashion, style and web design come together.

The US Department of Homeland Security is studying lies, damned lies, and smells. They hope to prove that human body odor could be used to tell when people are lying. The department says they are already “conducting experiments in deceptive behavior and collecting human odor samples” and that the research it hopes to fund “will consist primarily of the analysis and study of the human odor samples collected to determine if a deception indicator can be found.”

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krebsatwpost writes “The Department of Homeland Security has named Microsoft’s “chief trustworthy infrastructure strategist” Phil Reitinger to be its top cyber security official. Many in the security industry praised him as a smart pick, but said he will need to confront a culture of political infighting and leadership failures at DHS. From the story: ‘Reitinger comes to the position with cyber experience in both the public and private sectors. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2003, he was executive director of the Defense Department’s Computer Forensics Lab. Before that, he was deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property section, where he worked under Scott Charney, who is currently corporate vice president for trustworthy computing at Microsoft.'”

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Cigarra writes “There was much public debate going on during the last several months here in Paraguay, regarding the “liberation of Internet”, that is, the lifting of the restriction on ISPs to connect directly to international carriers. Up until this week, they were forced to hire wholesale service from the State run telco, Copaco. During the last month, when the new regulation was almost ready, the real reason supporting the monopoly made it to the headlines: Copaco would fight for the monopoly, fearing VoIP based telephony. Finally, the regulator Conatel resolved today to end the monopoly, but a ruling on VoIP legal status was postponed for “further study”. I guess this kind of “problem” arised almost everywhere else in the world, so I ask the international slashdotters’ crowd: what is VoIP legal status in your country / state / region? How well did incumbent telcos adapt to it, and overall, just how disruptive was this technology to established operators?”

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longacre writes “A man on trial in New York for possession of a weapon has been acquitted after subpoenaing his arresting officer’s Facebook and MySpace accounts. His defense: Officer Vaughan Ettienne’s MySpace “mood” was set to “devious” on the day of the arrest, and one day a few weeks before the trial, his Facebook status read “Vaughan is watching ‘Training Day’ to brush up on proper police procedure. From the article,’You have your Internet persona, and you have what you actually do on the street,” Officer Ettienne said on Tuesday. “What you say on the Internet is all bravado talk, like what you say in a locker room.” Except that trash talk in locker rooms almost never winds up preserved on a digital server somewhere, available for subpoena.'”

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Harry writes “I was amused, appalled, and angry — yes, all three — when I spotted signs above every register at my local Office Depot with handy scripts for clerks to use in ‘recommending’ that customers buy extra-cost, extremely profitable protection plans. And now Laptop Magazine has posted an eye-opening investigative report that charges local Office Depot stores with instructing staffers to lie and tell people who want to buy laptops without service plans that they’re out of stock.”

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