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Posted admin, on May 18th, 2012 Up to 8,000 companies doing business with the Pentagon may be qualified to join a newly expanded U.S. effort to guard sensitive information on private networks, a senior Defense Department official said Monday.
The Pentagon on Friday invited all of its eligible contractors to join the voluntary pact aimed at fighting what U.S. officials have described as growing cyber threats that allegedly originate, above all, in Russia and China.
The Defense Department will provide intelligence-derived information on malicious Internet traffic to the companies; the firms are to share information on any cyber penetrations of their networks with the government.
“We think there are as many as 8,000 that are already cleared and could be participants in the program,” Richard Hale, the department’s deputy chief information officer, said in a teleconference.
Perhaps 1,000 companies are expected to take part in the permanent new program initially and if it grows beyond this, “We would be pleased,” he said.
Posted admin, on May 17th, 2012 The Big Apple’s burgeoning IT sector, led by fields that leverage the Web and mobile technologies, have put New York City in a position to take advantage of the growing IT market for years to come, and has emerged as a national leader in the technology space, second only to Silicon Valley, according to a report by the Center for an Urban Future. However, there are a number of important challenges to address, including the city’s dearth of top-flight engineering talent, the report noted.
The study indicates a remarkable turnaround for a city that was considered a second-rate tech center half a decade ago. Today, New York boasts thousands of tech start-ups across the five boroughs, drawing investment from venture capital firms across the globe and bringing high-paying jobs to the city—not to mention some of the best and brightest minds. “In 2006, I wouldn’t have put New York anywhere on the map [of leading tech hubs],” Vivek Wadhwa, a national expert on tech entrepreneurship said in the report. “Now it is literally number two. If there is any second to Silicon Valley, it’s now New York, not Boston.
Of the seven leading technology regions in the U.S., New York was the only one to see an increase in the number of VC deals between 2007 and 2011. In that period, venture capital deals grew by 32 percent in New York City, while they fell 10 percent in Silicon Valley, according to a MoneyTree report published by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association that was featured in the report. The report’s digital start-up index identifies 486 tech start-ups formed in the city since 2007 that have received some investment from angels, VC firms or other private investors.
Posted admin, on May 16th, 2012  Logo of Best Buy, US-based retail chain (Photo credit: Wikipedia) America’s biggest consumer electronics retailer Best Buy said Monday its founder Richard Schulze is stepping down as chairman after an investigation found that he knew that the CEO was having a relationship with a female employee and failed to alert the audit committee.
The company also said that despite the fact that its audit committee found that then-CEO Brian Dunn violated company policy by having a ‘close personal relationship’ with a female employee, he gets a severance package worth about $6.6 million.
Best Buy hired an outside law firm in March to investigate Dunn, who resigned in April. The committee found that Dunn’s relationship with a female employee that showed poor judgment. But they found he did not misuse company resources or company aircraft related to the relationship.
Still, the inquiry showed that Schulze, who has been with the company since its inception in 1966, acted inappropriately when he found out about the relationship. He is resigning and will be replaced by Hatim Tyabji, chairman of its audit committee.
Posted admin, on May 15th, 2012  Chargeback Free Solutions
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Posted admin, on May 14th, 2012 Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski, afterputting up his dukes with CTIA President Steve Largent at the CTIA Wireless 2012 show in New Orleans May 8, embraced a different opportunity to detail all that the FCC has accomplished of late and what it has planned. On May 9, he presented the FCC’s 2013 budget to the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations’ Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government.
Basically adjusting the 2012 budget for inflation, Genachowski asked for a 2 percent increase to $346,782,000.
But first, he ran through some facts and figures, nearly all of them related to the 2009 National Broadband Plan, the nation’s need for more spectrum or both.
In February, Congress approved legislation allowing the FCC to conduct “incentive auctions” to sell underutilized spectrum to meet the nation’s growing mobile broadband needs. Genachowski called these an opportunity to “unleash vitally needed spectrum” as well as one to raise billions of dollars for deficit reduction. Over the last two decades, spectrum auctions, he said, have raised more than $50 billion for the Treasury—though economists regard the value created by the auctions as being closer to $500 billion.
“Incentive auctions are unprecedented,” Genachowski continued. “The U.S. will be the first country in the world to conduct them. It will be a complex task affecting major parts of our economy and involving many challenging questions of economics and engineering.”
The need for spectrum was behind AT&T’s controversial, and ultimately unsuccessful, bid last year to acquire T-Mobile. More recently, it’s the motivator behind Verizon Wireless’ also controversial partnership with SpectrumCo, a joint venture between several major cable companies. During a Senate Subcommittee inquiry into the Verizon deal, Joel Kelsey, a policy adviser with the pro-consumer group the Free Press, testified that the “trend toward a duopoly in the wireless market would be exacerbated by putting close to a third of the nation’s broadband spectrum, measured by value, into the hands of Verizon.”
Posted admin, on May 13th, 2012 Queen’s speech unveils UK’s ‘Patriot Act’ Web monitoring plan
Summary: The Queen has officially lifted the lid on plans for the British government to monitor all U.K. Web, email and phone traffic.
HM the Queen, in her first speech to the British Parliament in two years, announced albeit briefly the U.K. government’s plan to monitor all Web activity in the country.It puts the U.K. en par with the United States, Russia, and China in how it monitors its citizens’ Web activity.
The Queen needs no persuasion in signing the bill into law as it is her sovereign obligation, but getting to the Royal Assent stage might be easier than many would hope. The government-written speech is spoken by the Queen to address the upcoming legislative agenda.
It’s not often you see a government hedging, but when you do, it does it in style. Addressing two key issues — the European “safeguard” issue, and the “subject to scrutiny” — the speech highlights how controversial and difficult the law-making process will be in this case.
The controversial plan would see every scrap of Web traffic, every email, and Skype and landline phone calls logged with the third intelligence service, GCHQ, charged with protecting the U.K. from cyber threats.
But the bill to law transition could still be riddled with obstacles and difficulties if the Europeans get their way.
Posted admin, on May 12th, 2012 Precise Payment Solutions – Virtual Terminals for ACH and Credit Card Processing
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Posted admin, on May 11th, 2012 The fees that Canadian merchants are charged to process credit card transactions are among the highest in the world, a federal Competition Bureau tribunal heard Tuesday.
Kent Thomson, the lead counsel for Canada’s competition watchdog, told the tribunal in Ottawa on Tuesday that the system of fees charged when retailers allow consumers to pay with credit cards goes against competition rules and add up too $5 billion in fees for the credit card industry annually
Under the current system, credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard charge fees sometimes in excess of three per cent to process credit transactions. Consumers, thus far, don’t pay those charges directly, but retailers say the fees on some premium credit cards are becoming exorbitant and eating into their thin profit margins.
Retailers have lobbied for permission to tack a surcharge on to purchases, so customers would be more aware of the costs. But the contracts offered by the major credit firms prohibit any such surcharges. They also forbid retailers from selectively accepting only credit cards from the same company with lower fees and denying customers with so-called premium cards.
Posted admin, on May 10th, 2012  Intel Inside Core i7 variation (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Lenovo, the world’s second-largest PC company—though according to enthusiastic Lenovo staff, much of the world thinks it’s a pharmaceutical company, if they think of it at all—is planning to roll out new ThinkCentre and Edge Series PCs later this year that take advantage of Intel’s recently released Ivy Bridge processors.
Small-business owners and IT managers, both likely to know the Lenovo name, are also likely to appreciate these machines’ third-generation Intel Core processors, 15-second boot-up times, multiscreen functionality and smarter cooling methods.
The ThinkCentre Edge 92z is Lenovo’s thinnest commercial all-in-one (AIO) to date. Looking more like a monitor than a whole computer, it measures 2 inches thick and features an Infinity Glass front panel covering a 21.5-inch high-definition IPS LED display. Processor options include up to Core i7, and the machine comes equipped with the Lenovo Solution Center powered by Intel Small Business Advantage—tools for remotely managing things like updates and energy settings.
The 92z can be wirelessly connected to an HDTV or other business display, using Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) technology. Also included are a high-definition camera, array microphone, and voice and video conferencing capabilities.
The ThinkCentre Edge 72 is a desktop, also with Intel Core processor options up to a Core i7, Lenovo Enhanced Experience 3 (EE3)—Lenovo’s trick for such speedy boot-up times—and a “full package” of productivity tools and features that includes the ability to support two independent displays with VGA and DVI ports, so users can work separately on two monitors, according to a May 7 statement.
Posted admin, on May 9th, 2012  Two tall metal file cabinets for work or home use (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Not a fan of Big Government? Well this will shock you: Government agencies will add a petabyte—that’s equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1,024 terabytes —over the next two years, according to a MeriTalk survey of 151 Federal government CIOs and IT managers. To put that in perspective, one petabyte of data is equal to 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text. Meanwhile, government agencies are struggling to reap the benefits of Big Data as information piles up, lacking the data storage and access, computational power, and personnel, the survey indicated.
The report, titled “The Big Data Gap,” found that as agencies look to leverage big data, the technology and applications needed to successfully leverage big data are still emerging. Sixty percent of civilian agencies and 42 percent of Department of Defense/intelligence agencies say they are just now learning about big data and how it can work for their agency. Federal IT professionals say improving overall agency efficiency is the top advantage of big data (59 percent) followed by improving speed and accuracy of decisions (51 percent) and the ability to forecast (30 percent).
Whether it is an opportunity or a challenge, data continues to grow: 87 percent of IT professionals say their stored data has grown in the last two years, and 96 percent expect their data to grow in the next two years (by an average of 64 percent). Agencies reported, on average, it would take them at least 3 years to take full advantage of big data. In fact, agencies are doing very little with their data, according to survey results. Only 40 percent of those surveyed said they are making strategic decisions with the data, and just 28 percent collaborate with other agencies to analyze shared data.
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