December 2010

Denial-of-service attacks in the aftermath of the WikiLeaks incident show the vulnerabilities agencies face as they shift to cloud computing, say several cybersecurity specialists.

The online infrastructures underpinning WikiLeaks and the cloud -- where the White House wants to move government information technology systems -- depend on third-parties to stay up and running. This month, Amazon, a cloud provider, kicked the WikiLeaks website off its servers and online payment service PayPal stopped processing funds for the site, after determining the organization's release of troves of classified documents violated acceptable use policies. While cloud service providers are unlikely to turn off federal users' IT systems, other reliability threats lurk in the cloud that firms formerly associated with WikiLeaks now know all too well.

[Commentary] Surely most of you are familiar with the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — that heart-warming classic where Jimmy Stewart exploits arcane Senate procedure to challenge political corruption and shady inside deals. There's a sequel playing out now in D.C., with a real-life Mr. Smith, but it's not the same kind of feel-good story.

Let's call it: Mr. Smith Stayed in Washington — And Now He's Killing Community Radio. The Mr. Smith in question is Gordon Smith, the former Republican senator from Oregon turned lobbyist-in-chief at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), one of the Capitol's most entrenched and powerful lobbies. In the original Mr. Smith, Stewart launched a filibuster to expose the smear campaign being waged against him buy a corrupt political machine. In this unfortunate follow-up, Mr. Smith is persuading his former colleagues to use a rolling series of secret holds to keep a bill off the floor that would create thousands of new hyper-local community radio stations.

French authorities have finally got some kind of ruling against Google -- but it turns out to be rather toothless.

The competition watchdog, L’Autorité de la Concurrence, in an opinion expressed to the finance minister, says Google is “dominant” in search advertising (no surprise there - Google’s search share in Europe is far higher than in the US). But it did not rule Google that is abusing that dominance, instead saying: “This dominance is, of course, not wrong in itself: it is the result of a tremendous effort of innovation, backed by significant and ongoing investment. Only the abuse of such market power could be sanctioned against.” The authority says it has reviewed the search advertising market and defined what would constitute anti-competitive acts within it. But it has stopped short of actually testing Google or anyone else against those definitions, saying: “The authority, which is acting in an advisory capacity, did not rule on the legality of such practices ... investigations are often long and complex.” In other words, the authority’s determination in no way leads to a kind of “Google Tax” that some had been considering.

Only about one in four doctors, mostly in large group practices, is using an electronic health record system. A vast majority of physicians in small offices, the doctors who serve most Americans, still track patients’ illnesses and other problems with pen and paper. The thousands of sometimes deadly medical errors tallied by an Institute of Medicine study in 1999 are still all too common, according to a recent report on North Carolina hospitals in the New England Journal of Medicine. And the electronic record systems are themselves increasingly attracting concerns that computer errors, design flaws and breakdowns in communication sometimes endanger patients. Taking a fresh look at such concerns, the Institute of Medicine created the Committee on Patient Safety and Health Information Technology to run a yearlong study and issue recommendations. The 16-member panel is meeting for the first time on Dec 14 in Washington.