CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - McClatchy's Washington bureau chief has won the Nieman Foundation's first I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence for pre-Iraq war coverage.
I'm sorry to inform you all that my dad, Ed Foster, Died on Saturday of an apparent heart attack. He was 59. He was very proud of the work he had done and the community he had built here. He was very engaged in what you all had to say, and we had many running instant message conversations about comments or emails people had sent. He was an extremely smart man, and he loved to be mentally stimulated, whether it was a good book, an interesting conversation, or one of the many comments you posted that made him look at something in a slightly different way. As you can probably tell, I'm not half the writer my dad was, and it's very difficult for me to think of the words to say what I feel(It doesn't help that when I get stuck on a word or phrase, I think "I know, I'll ask my dad!") , but I just want everybody to know that this site and the people on it meant a lot to him. I'm going to miss him. More then words could express, even if he was here to help me think of them.
Capital Funding Slips, Slowing Business Development
July 23, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.
At OSCON yesterday Dave Recordon, of Movable Type, announced a new nonprofit organization. The Open Web Foundation has been created to support the development and protection of non-proprietary specifications for Web technologies.
The Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) has created a working group to establish mobile banking standards and best practices. The goal is to facilitate a model that allows for interoperability of a mobile payments infrastructure, according to the New York-based industry group.
When classes at the University of Washington resume this fall, some students at the school will be under the watchful eye of a Central Intelligence Agency spook. In fact, some of them will even be learning from him.
This fall, Dr. Tim Thomas, a CIA agent specializing in "open source" data mining, will begin a two-year stint as an officer-in-residence at the UW's Institute for National Security Education and Research (INSER), which is financed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That office is an umbrella organization for groups such as the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the CIA—which will provide the university with $2.5 million in grant money over the next five years.
HSToday has won the Gold Azbee Award for Excellence for the Central Southeast Region from the American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE) for its “2007 Homeland Security Report Card.”
Now nearly seven years since 9/11, not only are state and local law enforcement agencies across the nation questioning the efficacy of anti-terror information sharing pushed by the federal government and intelligence reform measures, but the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports the government isn’t able to effectively measure whether it has made progress in information sharing, or how effective it’s been in thwarting terrorism.
“Work remains, including defining and communicating the Information Sharing Environment’s (ISE) scope, such as determining all terrorism-related information that should be part of the ISE, and communicating that information to stakeholders involved in the development of the ISE,” GAO reported to Congress this week.
In those Cold War days, listening to and translating news items into English from Radio Moscow and satellite states’ broadcasts from Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, East Berlin, Sofia, Beijing, Pyongyang, Havana and, yes, even Tirana, proved invaluable to the agency, the White House and the rest of the intelligence community.
President Kennedy learned that the Soviet naval vessels were being turned around and would not attempt to cross the Cuban blockade from a news “flash” on Radio Moscow in 1962.
ision (www.cision.com) recently released figures that clearly demonstrate the growing influence of blogs in the mainstream print media. A study of the top 20 national magazines and newspapers shows that over the last 5 years, the number of times blogs and bloggers are mentioned in articles has increased more than 16-fold. ...
..."As stories with origins in the blogosphere begin to spill into magazines and newspapers, the benefits of developing relationships with bloggers continue to grow," Granat said.
Discovery Widget Launches on washingtonpost.com's MyPost Personal Profile Pages
The first gap in service occurred May 28, when 911 calls to report a house fire in the 4500 block of Kingston Road in Dale City went unanswered, McGee said.
Jennifer Meyer, who lives across the street, said: "In the time that I watched the fire spread while listening to the phone ring, it went from a small fire to a fire that was throughout the entire top story of the house. If the 911 call had been answered promptly, the family that was living there might still be living there and their house might be reparable, instead of gutted." No one was injured in the fire.
An investigation by the fire department and Verizon found that "software issues" left the calls "trapped in the equipment," causing 911 service to be out for five minutes and 20 seconds.
To prevent future glitches, Verizon has agreed to submit its plans to the county in writing before starting work and have qualified technicians on hand to fix all types of equipment, McGee said.
The 911 service failed three more times in the next 15 days, McGee said. On July 4, supervisors at the communications center discovered the problem and reported it to Verizon, which reestablished service.
The investigation found that Verizon was notified about the disruption but did not notify the county. The 911 operators were pushed off-line, Verizon said, when a server replaced May 28 rebooted itself. Verizon replaced the data switch that had caused the reboot the next day and revised how it notifies the county of system problems.
Federal News Radio Continues To Grow Staff
Lurita Doan On Board as Analyst and Commentator
WASHINGTON, D.C. July 22, 2008 – Washington’s Federal News Radio WFED (1050 AM) has announced the addition of the Honorable Lurita Doan, the candid and controversial former Administrator of the General Services Administration, as a regular contributor of commentary and analysis. Her segment - “Leadership Matters” - will focus on leadership challenges facing the federal government. “Leadership Matters” will air every Tuesday morning at 7:28 a.m. beginning July 29.
Administrator Doan has been described as controversial, outspoken, a contrarian, a catalyst, a breath of fresh air, and an “inside Washington outsider.”
“Those characteristics make her a perfect fit for commentary and analysis on Federal News Radio,” says Program Director Lisa Wolfe. “Her insights on how the federal government operates and her opinions on how it should operate will be food for thought for the senior executive, political and contractor. You’ll be able to hear her commentary on the radio and also read her OP-EDs on the web at FederalNewsRadio.com.”
Doan served as the Administrator of GSA from May 2006 to April 2008. Prior to her Senate confirmation, Lurita worked for 15 years as the CEO of a surveillance technology company she founded in 1990. Administrator Doan has received numerous awards, including the prestigious, tri-national 2008 “Friend of the Americas.” Previous recipients include Secretary Tom Ridge and then Governor George Bush. Other honors include the National Women’s Business Council Award for Entrepreneurship, the Committee of 200 Luminary Award for Innovation in Technology, the Office Depot Entrepreneurial Visionary Award, the Visionary Award from the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, Network Journal’s 25 Most Influential Black Women in Business and Washington Business Journal’s Women Who Mean Business.
Although common tracking systems, known as cookies, have counted a consumer's visits to a network of sites, the new monitoring, known as "deep-packet inspection," enables a far wider view -- every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered. Every bit of data is divided into packets -- like electronic envelopes -- that the system can access and analyze for content.
"You don't want the phone company tapping your phone calls, and in the same way you don't want your ISP tapping your Web traffic," said Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group. "There's a fear here that a user's ISP is going to betray them and turn their information over to a third party."
As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions . .. There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider's web, and if they materialized as rubber bands, buses; trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence.... Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads.
Since we're talking military cyber operations, a blog reader asked for my opinion of the new story U.S. Army challenges USAF on network warfare. I saw this first hand at a cyber conference recently. The Air Force colonel who will be vice commander of Cyber Command, Tony Buntyn, spoke, followed by an Army colonel, John Blaine, from NetCom. Col Blaine said the Army had been doing cyber operations for years, seemingly in contrast to the "new" Air Force Cyber Command. Of course, my previous history post noted that the Air Force Information Warfare Center was established in 1993, and the AFCERT was created the year earlier. Air Force cyber history is very extensive, especially if you expand to electronic warfare in Vietnam.
So a proposal for a new book has to do two main things: first identify a market niche that your idea will sell, and second, convince the publisher that you can write. You do that with an outline and a sample chapter. Those are the core bits of a proposal. There are other things, and most publishers have web sites like Addison Wesley's Write for us or Writing For O'Reilly. Think of each of these as a reason for some mean editor who doesn't understand you to disqualify your book, and make sure you don't give them that reason.
By a California court: The designer, Carter Bryant, has been accused by Mattel of using Evidence Eliminator on his laptop computer just two days before investigators were due to copy its hard drive.Carter hasn't denied that the program was run on his computer, but he said it wasn't to destroy evidence. He said he had legitimate reasons to use the software.
I have often recommended that people use file erasure tools regularly, especially when crossing international borders with their computers. Now we have one more reason to use them regularly: plausible deniability if you're accused of erasing data to keep it from the police.
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has asked the Swiss government to help in an expanding investigation of tax evasion by U.S. clients of banking giant UBS.
Securities regulators from several U.S. states on Thursday raided the St. Louis headquarters of Wachovia Securities, seeking documents and records on the company's sales practices. ...
... In April, the Securities Division launched a full-scale investigation, requesting documents, e-mails, transcripts and other records from Wachovia Securities and other banks.
Wachovia Securities has not fully complied with these requests, prompting Thursday's onsite inspection, Missouri officials said.
SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - July 14, 2008) - Identity Engines, a leading provider of role-based access control solutions for heterogeneous networks, today announced the Authenticated Network Architecture (ANA): the industry's first vendor-neutral best practices framework outlining how organizations can migrate from the static, IP-address based architectures of the past, to the newer identity-based controls enabled by recent standards including IEEE 802.1X.
Regulatory compliance mandates such as HIPAA, SOX, PCI, GLBA, NERC/FERC, FERPA, HSPD-12 across multiple industries have driven IT organizations to search for secure, efficient, cost-effective methods of controlling access to their network infrastructure. The ANA framework fulfills that need by leveraging latent enforcement capabilities present in most enterprise network equipment, enabling transparent role-based access across all existing infrastructure (wired, wireless, remote access).
The National Assembly, considering that it has been called to establish the constitution of the realm, to bring about the regeneration of public order, and to maintain the true principles of monarchy; nothing may prevent it from continuing its deliberations in any place it is forced to establish itself; and, finally, the National Assembly exists wherever its members are gatheredhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif.
Decrees that all members of this assembly immediately take a solemn oath never to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the realm is established and fixed upon solid foundations; and that said oath having been sworn, all members and each one individually confirm this unwavering resolution with his signature.
Bailly: I demand that the secretaries and I swear the oath first; which they do immediately according to the following formula:
We swear never to separate ourselves from the National Assembly, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the realm is drawn up and fixed upon solid foundations.
All the members swear the same oath between the hands of the president.
Over the past two years SmarDTV, backed by security company Kudelski, has worked closely with the major TV set manufacturers, the Italian broadcasters Mediaset, Telecom Italia Media, and Pangea, and with the DGTVi committee representing all TV broadcasters in Italy. The result of these efforts is not only the SmarCAM Italia product, but also a set of implementation guidelines, an interoperability partner program, and a broadcaster certification process.
NEW YORK In a move that was probably inevitable amid the ongoing wave of newspaper staff cuts, a subscriber to The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., is suing the paper -- for cutting its staff and issue size.
Keith Hempstead, a Durham lawyer and former reporter for the Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer, filed the suit last month in Wake Superior Court, the N&O reported. "He says he renewed his subscription in May just before the paper announced on June 16 the layoffs of 70 staff members and cuts in news pages," the paper added. "The paper, he says, is now not worth what he signed up for and therefore the cuts breached the paper's contract with him....
George W. Bush, who has expanded his power to access the e-mails and other electronic communications of Americans, is resisting congressional demands that White House e-mails be saved for later research by historians.
These awards honor corporations, governmental and nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, media outlets, and individuals who are innovating the use of social media, ICT, mobile media, online communities and virtual worlds and collaborative technologies in the areas of business, media, and professional communications, including advertising, marketing, public relations and corporate communications, as well as entertainment, education, politics, and social initiatives.Awards are granted in six divisions: Corporate, Government, Media, Nonprofit/NGO, Academic, and Technology Innovation (for New Communications and Social Media Technology Vendors), and in seven categories: Online Reputation Management; Behind the Firewall; Blogger Relations; External Communications & Communities; New Media Creation; Collaboration & Co-creation; and Mobile Media.
Tucked away on the iPhone 2.0 version of Apple’s Application Store is a counter for the number of times that each application has been purchased . When this information is combined with an application’s price, and the uniform 30% that Apple pockets on each download, it is possible to know how much Apple is making from the App Store. As of 4PM (PST), that number hovers around $55,000.
Government Marketing Best Practices 2008 returns to the Tower Club
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Where: Tower Club, 8000 Towers Crescent Drive, Vienna, VA, 17th floor
When: Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Time: 7:30 AM- 11:00 AM - Continental breakfast served
Investment: $195, includes workbook, 2 bonus CDs (Amtower on PR and a
second bonus CD tba)
Join Mark Amtower, the "Godfather of Government Marketing" in the first
session of Government Marketing Best Practices in over a year!
This is an entirely new presentation and will include the GMBP Web 2.0 Marketing Tactics.
Stay tuned for more info!
To Reserve Your Seat Today, click here now!
Der Spiegel wrote that the IMF had "informed" Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke of plans that would have been unheard of in the past: a general examination of the US financial system. The IMF's board of directors has ruled that a so-called Financial Sector Assessment Program is to be carried out in the US.
This, Der Spiegel wrote, "is nothing less than an X-ray of the entire US financial system", adding that "no Fed chief in US history has been forced to submit to the kind of humiliation that Ben Bernanke is facing".
Strategic word selection can catapult an announcement about a study, a product or a "breakthrough" onto the evening news instead of to its usual destination — the spam folder or circular file. "PR people want to invest time in things that are going to get picked up, so they try to put something to the 'who cares?' and 'so what?' test," says Kate Robins, a longtime public relations consultant. "If you say something is first, most, fastest, tallest — that's likely to get attention. If you can use the words like 'money,' 'fat,' 'cancer' or 'sex,' you're likely to get some ink in the general audience media," she said, the International Herald Tribune reports.
BALTIMORE, MD (July 1, 2008) – The Baltimore Sun will cut 100 jobs by August to reduce costs, the publisher told employees, reducing the workforce through voluntary buy-outs, layoffs, attrition, and closing job positions that have been left open.
The majority of the cuts are expected to come from the newsroom.
It will be harder than ever to place stories.
The National Venture Capital Association, the industry’s trade group, largely blamed a weak economy for the trouble its members are having finding profitable exits. But it said the government is to blame too, particularly for the dearth of initial public offerings. Were it not for excessive regulation in the form of Sarbanes-Oxley, it would cost less for companies to go public and there would be more offerings, the industry group said.
