March 2012

President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies have opened up a big advantage over Republicans when it comes to high-tech voter targeting. And this year conservatives are making an ambitious push to change that ahead of the 2012 election.

The Republican National Committee and the Koch brothers are spending millions on dueling voter file projects and a tea party group is set to unveil a new voter database platform March 29. Yet, even as Republican and conservative groups are poised to spend millions ahead of Election Day on new efforts to catch up to Democratic data and technology to target likely voters, some conservatives say there might not be enough time to have an impact. One of the biggest challenges for the GOP this year, they fear, could be that when it comes to mobilizing volunteers, donors and voters, they are sitting on the wrong side of a digital divide.

Books on iPads and some e-readers like the Nook Color or the Kindle Fire are fun. They include music, animation and other interactive elements that make reading a book feel like playing a video game.

In “Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes,” an e-book for children ages 3 to 7, they can change the color of Pete’s shoes by touching them, sing along to music with the lyrics that roll along the page, listen to a narrator or record their voices as they read aloud. But is it better than a book? It may take a generation to ever know for sure, and even 10 or 20 years from now it will be debated as the effects of television or video games are still discussed today.

The House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology held a hearing to examine threats to America’s communications networks, what the public sector is doing to address those threats, how it is working with the private sector, and what role the federal government should play in securing communications networks. The Subcommittee heard from witnesses representing the Federal Communications Commission, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team, and Sandia Laboratories.

In general, Republicans said the government should encourage voluntary industry standards and not insert itself in a way that would reduce private industry's flexibility in responding to threats.

Democrats on the panel gave a shout-out to those ISP efforts, but suggested that the government also needed a way to ensure accountability to those voluntary standards. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) made the strongest case for stronger government involvement. He suggested that reliance solely on voluntary efforts might not be sufficient, say, dealing with a company that was less diligent in its best practices and caused a cyber-breach to critical infrastructure. He said that if industry wants exemptions from antitrust and other consumer laws in order to share info with the government -- it does -- then it should be willing to be held accountable for not abusing that freedom.

James Barnett, chief of the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, said he supports giving the government new regulatory powers to protect against cyber attacks. He endorsed the regulatory provisions of the Cybersecurity Act, a bill authored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). The legislation would give the Homeland Security Department the power to require that critical systems, such as electrical grids, meet minimum cybersecurity standards. Barnet also said that ensuring cybersecurity doesn't mean giving up privacy or undermining Internet freedom. "Sacrificing privacy or Internet openness for security is a false choice," Barnett said. "We must insist on having all three, and we strongly believe that this is achievable."

Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden characterized some of the testimony as disturbing, then even more disturbing as witnesses talked about the threats. They included an attack on the Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration that took the network down for several weeks and counting. It also included this sobering assessment from Bob Hutchinson, of Sandia National Laboratories, a government-funded national research lab: "The most important lesson I have learned in my career is that computer systems can never be fully trusted, can never be proven free of compromise, so we must focus on finding ways to conduct business, even critical business, on machines that are presumed to be infected," he said.

The fervor over iPhones, iPads and other tablets and smartphones has stoked the market for all that makes people want to get their hands on them. With shipments of touch-screen displays booming, the market for touch-controller integrated circuits has nearly tripled during the past five years and is projected to continue growing, according to IHS iSuppli.

If demand continues to grow at this rate, shipments are projected to reach 2.4 billion units in 2015, up from 865 million two years ago, IHS reports. Guess who's to thank for their booming popularity? “Apple almost single-handedly ignited the market for touch in 2007 when it introduced the iPhone, which featured a multi-touch screen based on a projected capacitive touch technology," said Randy Lawson, principal analyst for display and consumer electronics at IHS. "Since the appearance of the iPhone, many other smartphone manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon by deploying sophisticated touch sensors for their products.”