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Archive for the 'Government' Tag
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CNCI – A new cybersecurity program
It’s G.W. Bush’s single largest request for funds in the 2009 intelligence budget and its a “highly classified, multiyear, multibillion-dollar project“.
It goes by the name CNCI aka “Cyber Initiative” and the director National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, calls it a pro-active measure to protect the US Government computing infrastructure and in the future potentially also the computing environments of (US) private entities.
While the secrecy surrounding the program does not even provide specific funding figures or a breakdown, the House Intelligence committee in its report on the program “recognizes” that “…it will be imperative that the government also take into account the interest and concerns of private citizens, the US information technology industry, and other elements of the private sector…“.
They call it a public-private partnership and outlined how the oversight should happen by a panel of lawmakers, executive branch officials and some private sector representatives. And the House has already approved 90% of the requested budget.
So far so good, sounds all nice and positive – a fresh start, “unlike any model currently existing“, well, well, well if your memory in that branch of IT goes back long enough (10 years+) then you will say together with us: Nice words but we have heard them before and when we acted within the scheme we got heavily burned and a bunch of gov. crooks around the world filled their pockets with Billions of Dollars.
So if its a “fresh start” back up your words with actions!
Demonstrate that you have learned from the past mistakes and…
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News: Disgruntled IT Admin blocks access to SF city network
From time to time there are stories passed around how a single tech employee is holding a company or agency hostage over a personal dispute or after being fired. This time its a story about an senior admin from San Francisco.
As the SF Chronicle reported yesterday he was arrested by Police this weekend and is being hold in jail on a USD 5 Million bail. He’s accused of having tampered with San Francisco’s new fiber network that provides access for officials to government documents, their emails and the administrative systems…
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US Credit Crisis: Fed borrowing shown as a chart
If you would like to see the “official version of how much money the Fed is pumping into banks and financial institutions recently, have a look at the chart below.
The gray shaded areas are times officially recognized as recessions. The underlying data is available at the St. Louis Fed web site together with a charting application that allows you to further customize the range and other parameters.
To better visualize the substantial change we have split the data into two charts:
The larger chart shows the borrowing from the FED for the period 1919 to 2007 and the smaller one data for 2008 only. As you can see during these almost 90 years borrowing remained continuously within a range of almost none to max 8 Billion USD per month.
Since the beginning of 2008 the numbers have drastically changed and are now at about 155 Billion USD per month. The monthly figures for 2008 in detail…
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Germany: Rent a Demonstrator for your Political Protest
If your shouting days are through – Fred Kasulzke shouts for you! That’s how German/French songwriter and singer “Reinhard Mey” was singing in the 70s about the business idea of renting people for demonstrations and riots. Seemingly these days “claqueurs” are getting popular again in Germany particularly with the bureaucrats and stakeholders in the state backed German health system…
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Bush approval rating chart
The BBC has created a very nice interactive Approval Rating Tracker on their web site. Together with the chart for one year or five years users can display details for key events. The charts are created with data from weekly and monthly opinion polls. Click on the image for the jump
Yes Minister: EC Vice-President speaks up against administration
Many of us do know it and all of the EC commissioners know it. But until yesterday no high ranking official has ever publicly admitted it. In an interview (in German) with German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Guenter Verheugen, Vice-President of the European Commission said that, over the years, the power of high ranking civil servants [...]
