July 2012

The state of Washington is an information enigma.

Some of the nation’s leading digital technology companies are headquartered in and around Seattle, yet vast areas of the state are starved of locally relevant public affairs news. Google and Yahoo are just two of the global Internet companies that have opened offices in the state, joining content giants like Amazon and MSNBC, yet only 20 towns have a daily newspaper, just 23 have radio stations with some form of local news, and TV is clustered in four cities with tightly defined coverage areas. T-Mobile is headquartered in the state, yet mobile dead zones are common outside the major towns. Facebook recently opened a major office in Seattle, yet Washington’s use of social networking platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is lower than many other states. In huge sections of Washington, citizens have little or no access to news about what is taking place in their own communities. The situation is particularly grim in areas populated by minorities and on some of the vast Native American reservations.

In short, Washington is a digital state with a rural information ghetto.

The European Commission’s panel on privacy is expected to endorse the concept of cloud computing as legal under the Continent’s privacy law and to recommend for the first time that large companies and organizations police themselves to assure that personal information kept in remote locations is protected.

The panel, known as the Article 29 Working Party, is expected to make the recommendation as part of its long-awaited guidelines on cloud computing, which have the potential, some industry experts say, to allay concerns over data privacy and pave the way for wider adoption of the remote-computing services that are more common in the United States. The report will highlight the advantages of using cloud computing to encourage innovation and economic efficiency, said a person with knowledge of the recommendations, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak for the group. This would reflect a new, more practical approach by European officials to remote computing’s role in the broader economy.

According to a report from The Indian Express, China-based hackers broke into the computer systems of India's Eastern Naval Command, where India's first nuclear submarine is undergoing trials.

Using a virus transmitted by USB thumb drives (which are banned from Indian Navy offices), the hackers were able to cache information that matched keywords and transfer it to another thumb drive when one became available. That allowed the data to be moved to Internet-connected PCs, where the virus then dumped the data and transmitted it across the Internet to servers in China. The virus is similar to one that attacked the US military's classified networks in 2008. Those led to a Department of Defense ban on the use of USB drives and any other writable removable media. The DOD partially lifted the ban in 2009, restricting the use of USB drives to "carefully controlled circumstances."

There are serious violations of worker rights at Apple's other suppliers in China, even as Foxconn tries to improve working conditions, according to a labor rights group in New York.

Conditions at Foxconn remain far from satisfactory, wrote Li Qiang, executive director of China Labor Watch, in a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook that is appended to a 132-page report on an investigation by the group. But Foxconn is better in treatment of workers than some of Apple's other suppliers in China, he added. Apple's suppliers in China mistreat workers, making them work overtime beyond legal limits, paying them low wages, and exposing them to dangerous working conditions, according to the report.