No need for government Net controls, say U.S. tech workers
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Poll of 600 information technology workers, intended to help influence presidential campaign priorities, finds most prefer to let tech preside.
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Tech workers are holding on to their jobs tighter than they have in more than 20 years.
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It is legal for employers to prohibit workers from using company e-mail to send out union-related messages, a federal board has ruled.
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The enhancements, which will be incorporated early next year, are designed to provide enterprises with protection from worms and viruses, without forcing customers to install firewalls at each location in a network, the company said.
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CHICAGO _ If you have a job, you have no privacy when it comes to using the office computer.  From monitoring e-mails to capturing instant messages among friends, employers can do as they see fit with the information passing through a company network.
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The Internet is the wave of the future, the technology that changes everything. Just donât try to get a job in it.
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Imposing government security standards on software companies is not the answer to improving the security of the country&#39;s computer networks, a US Department of Homeland Security official said Thursday.
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America Online Inc. on Thursday  shunned a Microsoft Corp. proposal to help weed out unwanted  "spam" e-mail because Internet engineers are reluctant to adopt  technology owned by the dominant software company.
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U.S. regulators said Microsoft Corp. does not have to include in its proxy a shareholder proposal demanding that the software maker justify its support for Net neutrality, according to a decision made public on Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. is lagging behind other industrialized nations in the availability and use of high-speed broadband connections according to a report released today by the Washington-based Communications Workers of America. The report, based on aggregated data from nearly 80,000 broadband users, found that the median real-time download speed in the U.S. is 1.9 Mbps, compared with 61Mbps in Japan, 45Mbps in South Korea, 17Mbps in France, and 7Mbps in Canada. The report is based on data collected through the speed test at SpeedMatters.org, a CWA project launched last September "to help bridge the digital divide and keep America competitive by encouraging the government to adopt national policies to bring about universal, affordable high-speed broadband access for all Americans, no matter where they live." The CWA is a labor union with a membership of more than 700,000 in fields like telecommunications, media, manufacturing, health care, and aviation. According to the report, the U.S. is 16th in the world in deployment and availability of high-speed networks. "Speed defines what is possible on the Internet. Speed determines whether we will have the 21st century networks and communications necessary to grow our economy and jobs," said CWA President Larry Cohen. "It's clear that other nations -- all of our economic competitors, in fact -- have made the decision to promote true high-speed networks. The longer we delay, the more we put our economic growth at risk." The CWA said it supports many of the provisions in the Broadband Data Improvement Act, a bill introduced in May by Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii). The legislation would require the collection and evaluation of data on broadband deployment, an upgraded definition of "high speed," and grant programs for states and local communities to conduct their own broadband mapping. "The first step in an improved broadband policy is ensuring that we have better data on which to build our efforts," Inouye said at the time. "In a digital age, the world will not wait for us. It is imperative that we get our broadband house in order and our communications policy right. But we cannot manage what we do not measure." The CWA report also ranks individual states based on average Internet download connection speeds. The state with the fastest connection speed is Rhode Island, at 5.011Mbps, followed by Kansas at 4.167Mbps, New Jersey at 3.68Mbps, New York at 3.436Mbps, and Massachusetts at 3.004Mbps. The states ranking at the bottom are Wyoming at 1.246Mbps, Iowa at 1.262Mbps, West Virginia at 1.117Mbps, South Dakota at 0.825Mbps, and Alaska at 0.545 Mbps. That means that it would take 15 seconds to download a 10MB file in Rhode Island and nearly two and a half minutes to download the same file in Alaska, the CWA report found. The voluntary speed test was conducted online at SpeedMatters.org between September 2006 and May 2007. Most of the people who took the test had either a DSL or cable modem connection. Because 30-40 percent of Americans still use a dial-up connection, the median speeds in the report were higher than if dial-up users had also participated, the report said. In May, U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, held a hearing on draft legislation to address broadband mapping and data collection in the U.S. Markey said at the time that the current data-collection methods used by the Federal Communications Commission are "inadequate and highly flawed." He said that according to the FCC, a single broadband subscriber in a certain ZIP code area could indicate that the entire ZIP code area has broadband availability, even if the sole subscriber is a business and not a residential consumer. Such interpretations could result in inaccurate measurements of broadband availability and use, Markey said. He also said that the federal Telecommunications Act compels the FCC to assess the nationwide availability of "advanced telecommunications capability," which Congress defined as having "high speed" capability. However, he said, the FCC defined "high speed" in 1999 as meaning 200Kbps. Markey said the draft bill proposes increasing the definition tenfold to 2Mbps. Markey also said that the U.S. lags behind other nations when it comes to cost of broadband access. He said speeds of 50Mbps, which are not available to residential consumers in this country, are available to Japanese consumers for roughly $30 per month. U.S. consumers typically pay $20 for about 1Mbps service and $30 to $40 for about 4Mbps service.
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By BRIAN BERGSTEIN  CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - In a perfect world, there'd be no wires. They clutter the view, get tangled behind desks and limit how far networks can reach. That's why the telegraph gave way to the radio. Cell phones unstrung telecommunications. Wi-Fi liberated computer data.
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New cybersecurity standards proposed by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) to protect the nation's power infrastructure are not broad enough and fail to cover a significant number of interdependent assets.The standards also give electric utility owners, operators and users too much discretion when it comes to implementing the prescribed controls, a group of experts told members of the House Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science, and Technology on Wednesday.James Langevin (D-R.I.), chairman of the committee, said the NERC's proposed standards require stakeholders in the power grid to establish plans, protocols, and controls for safeguarding physical and electronic access to the control systems that manage the national's electric infrastructure.The problem is the standards are focused purely on the reliability of "bulk power systems" and don't require electric sector owners and operators to secure their generation systems, distribution systems, or telecommunication equipment, Langevin said in prepared testimony."We know from countless real-world examples that these units are highly vulnerable to intentional and unintentional cyber-events. Knocking any of these units off could affect the power supply to our nation's critical infrastructure," he noted in his statement.The narrow focus of NERC's proposed cybersecurity standards is especially troubling, Langevin said, in light of a recent simulated attack against a power utility control system that was carried out by Department of Homeland Security researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory. The same methods that were used in that experiment could be used to carry out attacks against larger generators and other equipment and cause "widespread and long-term damage to the electric infrastructure," he warned."I'll be blunt: If this administration doesn't recognize and prioritize these problems soon, the future isn't going to be pretty," Langevin said.Joseph Weiss, managing partner of Applied Control Solutions, testified as an expert at the hearing. He said the growing interconnectedness of control systems with other networked computing systems is happening without a corresponding appreciation for the security risks resulting from such connectivity.For the most part, he stated in written testimony submitted to the committee, security issues have been the purview of the IT organizations within utility companies, whose control system groups manage grid and plant operations. As a result, it's often the case that some parts of the system are sensitized to security while others do not fully appreciate the risks, he said.Exacerbating this issue is the fact that many control system applications run in Windows and Unix environments and are therefore susceptible to the same security threats as other systems are. Traditional IT security controls, Weiss said, can help alleviate some of these issues, but they can also cause control system reliability problems.Against this backdrop, he said in his prepared remarks, the NERC's proposed standards are too narrowly focused on bulk power grid reliability, and not, for instance, on smaller substations that might support a major oil or gas pipeline in a remote locale. Similarly, there's not much priority given to securing the continuity of electricity to facilities such as municipal waterworks, manufacturing plants, refineries, hospitals and military installations.Experience has already shown the significant impact that an attack or a security incident against a control system can have on the electricity infrastructure, said Gregory Wilshusen, director of information security issues at the Government Accountability Office. Wilshusen provided written testimony to the committee.As examples, he cited a 2006 incident in which a foreign hacker planted malicious software capable of affecting a water treatment plant's operations, and another incident in which excessive traffic in a nuclear power plant's control system caused two circulation pumps to fail -- forcing the unit to be shut down manually.David Whiteley, executive vice president of the NERC, said that the security issues raised by the interconnectedness of the electric infrastructure and other infrastructures are important and need to be addressed. However, under its existing mandate, the NERC has the authority and responsibility for enforcing reliability standards on only the bulk power grid, not on the distribution system. Developing and enforcing standards on connected infrastructures is beyond the capability of a single body, he said.Whiteley said that in July of this year, the NERC sought comments from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on a proposal for approving eight CIP reliability standards. Those cybersecurity standards have been in development for several years and were developed with extensive input from industry experts.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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America Online has shunned a Microsoft proposal to help weed out unwanted &quot;spam&quot; e-mail because Internet engineers are reluctant to adopt technology owned by the dominant software company.
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Top executives of Verizon and Comcast called for less regulation of communications at the Telecom '04 trade show .
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It lets businesses protect themselves from a variety of threats without having to deploy firewalls at each of their locations. By Networking Pipeline News.
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Despite real threats and little sense of urgency by many company executives, now is not the time for the U.S. government to mandate cybersecurity standards to private industry, a panel of of government officials said.
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US regulators on Thursday said big local phone companies will not have to share new fiber-optic lines built for high-speed Internet and other services, spurring one carrier to speed roll-out plans.