ComputerWorld

When Healthcare.gov was launched in October 2013, it gave millions of Americans direct experience with a government IT failure on a massive scale.

But the overall reliability of federal IT operations is being called into question by a survey sponsored by Symantec that finds outages aren't uncommon in government.

pecifically, the survey found that 70% of federal agencies have experienced downtime of 30 minutes or more in a recent one-month period. Of that number, 42% of the outages were blamed on network or server problems and 29% on Internet connectivity loss. The report, which provides a network for government IT professionals, suggest that downtime is a systemic issue.

Google, Microsoft and Facebook are cranking up an emerging wireless technology known as Wi-FAR to help reduce the digital divide in remote and unconnected regions of the world.

Wi-FAR is a recently trademarked name from the nonprofit WhiteSpace Alliance (WSA) that refers to the 802.22 wireless standard first approved by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2011. The standard shares the underused TV band of spectrum called whitespace to send wireless signals, typically over distances of six to 18 miles in rural and remote areas.

For an impoverished or sparsely populated region where businesses and schoolchildren have little Internet access, Wi-FAR could be a godsend when used to link base stations (typically found at the ground level of cell towers) in a distributed network.

Driven by adoption of vital-signs monitoring and in-vitro diagnostic (IVD) devices, the mobile health (mHealth) market will grow eight-fold from $5.1 billion in 2013 to $41.8 billion in 2023, according to a new report.

The report, from Lux Research, titled "mHealth Showdown: Consumer and Clinical Devices' Battle for Market Dominance," notes that after a slow start due to regulatory constraints and integration with physician workflows, clinical mHealth devices will overtake and far outpace their consumer counterparts, which include mHealth bracelets that measure physcial activity and some vital signs.

The report also notes that in-vitro diagnostic and vital signs devices will make up 75% of the mHealth device market by 2023. The smartphone boom has also spurred increased venture capital funding for mHeatlh device companies, the report stated.

Some good news for owners of Google's LTE Chromebook Pixel: Following my report that data plans for the device were being disconnected prematurely, Google is stepping up to make things right.

The LTE Chromebook Pixel was originally sold with a free two-year mobile broadband plan from Verizon -- 100MB per month, with the option to purchase more data on a pay-as-you-go basis as needed. Not surprisingly, the reneging rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

While Verizon has yet to change its stance, a Google spokesperson tells me the company will now offer $150 credits to all customers who purchased an LTE Pixel while the two-year data plan was still being offered.

"While this particular issue is outside of our control, we appreciate that this issue has inconvenienced some of our users," the Google spokesperson said. The credits will come in the form of Visa gift cards that can be used for any expense, including (but not limited to) the purchase of mobile broadband access.

[Commentary] When a company promises two years of free mobile data service with a device, you expect them to deliver. So what happens when a promise suddenly evaporates after you've purchased a product? Chromebook Pixel: Verizon Data Plan.

That's the situation owners of Google's LTE Chromebook Pixel are finding themselves facing right now.

The LTE model of the Pixel went on sale from Google's Play Store last April for $1450. At the time, the product was advertised as coming with a free two-year mobile broadband plan from Verizon -- 100MB per month, with the option to purchase more data on a pay-as-you-go basis as needed.

Fast-forward to one year later, and Pixel LTE owners are discovering their data plans have been disconnected.

The option to pay for data remains, but the free 100MB per month mysteriously vanished just one year into the promised two-year period. Verizon is telling customers that as far as it's concerned, the plans were valid only for one year -- and that's why those initiated last spring are now expiring.

A White House-led effort to show that the Internet of Things can save lives and create jobs is about to put on a big show. A one-day SmartAmerica Expo in Washington on June 11 will showcase pilot projects that demonstrate the potential of the IoT to control physical systems, or what the government calls cyber-physical systems.

Cyber-physical systems collect and analyze data, and then go a step further to feed this information into a system with the intention of closing the loop, or resolving a problem. "We really want to show and demonstrate that this is possible, but not just from a technical level," said Sokwoo Rhee, a Presidential Innovation Fellow and co-lead, along with Geoff Mulligan, of the SmartAmerica effort. "From a technology level we know it's possible," said Rhee. Without the demonstration projects, "it becomes just another technology or product play."

A project underway in Montgomery County (MD), illustrates Rhee's point. Similar to two dozen other such projects, there is a team involved, in this case researchers from the University of California at Irvine and MIT, along with multiple vendors, including IBM, Sigfox, a French-based, long-range, low-bandwidth provider, and Twilio, a cloud communication firm. The team is building a system for suburban Washington county that can monitor, on a very detailed level, what goes on inside the home. From a hardware perspective, the team are using off-the-shelf IoT technologies, low cost sensors and wireless radios, and some hackable smoke detectors.

The price war over data and voice costs among US carriers is having an impact on first-time smartphone buyers. For feature-phone customers planning to buy their first smartphone, 26% said they plan to change to another carrier, according to a survey released by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

Another 44% said they might change carriers. "The quest for cheaper calls and lower data plans is driving the need for change" to another carrier, the analyst firm said.

T-Mobile has been driving much of the low-price pressure in the market, along with no contract plans. Other major carriers have been quick to respond to, or even match those offers.

However, the survey shows that more T-Mobile's feature phone customers, 21%, are planning to change carriers when buying their first smartphone than Verizon customers, 19%. Sprint had the most feature-phone customers seeking to change carriers to get their first smartphone, with 36%, while AT&T was second, with 29%. Verizon also had the highest number of feature phone owners switching to a first smartphone who said they would not switch carriers, with 39%. AT&T ranked second with 30% on that measure, followed by T-Mobile, 29%, and Sprint, 21%.

A recent White House report on big data wonders aloud about the capability of sensors and smart meters to turn homes into fish tanks, completely transparent to marketers, police -- and criminals.

Smart meters with non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) technology, which can analyze individual power loads, make it possible to know what you are doing and using in your home. These systems can "show when you move about your house," said the White House, in its just released report on the privacy implications of big data.

The report explores both the benefits and perils created by these new systems, including ubiquitous deployment of sensors in the Internet of Things.

The White House concern about privacy in the home is based, in part, on research by Stephen Wicker, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University and a co-author of studies that have looked at some of the implications of "demand-response systems," or smart meters. The information these systems can discover can be useful -- and invasive. It can alert homeowners to failing appliances, as well as provide marketers with the age and make of appliances, information that can also be used to glean the socioeconomic status of a resident.

The smart meters are intended to help reduce electric costs by shifting some work, such as running a washing machine, to off-peak hours. After describing how smart metering system might be able to tell you what someone is doing inside their house, the White House report points out that once someone leaves their connected home, "facial recognition technologies can identify you in pictures online and as soon as you step outside. Always-on wearable technologies with voice and video interfaces and the arrival of whole classes of networked devices will only expand information collection still further.”

[Commentary] The new model is to harvest social signals from wherever and sell personalized ads wherever. Of course, none of the social networks are going anywhere.

They're still important both to their companies and to their users, and they still play an essential role in user identity and data harvesting and, for Twitter and Facebook at least, as places to display advertising. What's important for these companies from a future-facing business perspective is to have multiple mobile apps that harvest multiple dimensions of personal data that can be applied to highly customized and personalized mobile advertising at multiple locations.

The social networks are falling apart -- they're breaking up into multiple sites and apps that do in a scattered way what used to happen centrally. If you're in the personalized advertising business, why restrict yourself to a single social network? Users don't.

Courts have generally tended to dismiss consumer class-action lawsuits filed against companies that suffer data breaches if victims can't show that the breach directly caused a financial hit.

A federal court in Florida broke the mold by approving a $3 million settlement for victims of a data breach in which personal health information was exposed when multiple laptops containing the unencrypted data were stolen. The Dec 2009 theft of laptops belonging to AvMed, a Florida-based health insurer, exposed the patient records of tens of thousands of its customers. Several victims later filed a putative class action lawsuit against AvMed.

The plaintiffs suffered no direct losses or identity theft from the breach but nevertheless accused AvMed of negligence, breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and unjust enrichment. The US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, which heard the case, dismissed the claims against AvMed two separate times.

However, upon appeal by the plaintiffs, the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit allowed several of the claims, including those pertaining to negligence and breach of contract, to remain, and remanded the case back to the district court. When AvMed again filed a motion to dismiss the class action claims yet again, the district court refused to do so, prompting the health insurer and the plaintiffs to enter into settlement talks.

The settlement is believed to be the first in which victims of a data breach are compensated without having to show they suffered any losses from the theft of their personal data.