Is There A Silver Lining To The President’s Cyber War Policy?

By SeanLawson What started last week as a series of reports on domestic spying by the NSA took a turn towards cyber security on Friday when Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian published the top secret Presidential Policy Directive 20 (PPD–20), which deals with U.S. policy and planning for cyber conflict. Like theRead… Read more »

Commerce Wants Cloud-Based CRM

The Commerce Department wants its agencies to have a cloud-based system that would work to keep online information updated for citizens, Nextgov reported Monday. Joseph Marks writes the department intends to replace current software in its offices to comply with government mandates for federal departments to utilize new tools for storing and sharing data. MarksRead… Read more »

Spotlight: Bruce Haupt, City of Houston

Bruce Haupt (@brucehaupt) is the Director of Performance Improvement for the City of Houston. He also recently co-organized the city’s first hackathon for the National Day of Civic Hacking— a resounding success with nearly 300 participants, 215 datasets, and 26 demoable projects by the end of the day. We asked him a few questions: HowRead… Read more »

How the Houston Hackathon Happened

This post is co-authored by Bruce Haupt, Performance Improvement Director for the City of Houston, and Jeff Reichman, Principal at January Advisors. View the original post here. This is the story of how we planned and pulled off the first City of Houston Hackathon. It’s a story that has an ensemble cast filled with softwareRead… Read more »

Army to Expand ‘Net Zero’ Energy Program Across Entire Branch

A new U.S. Army report outlines efforts for sustainable energy practices as part of a pilot program aimed to achieve net zero energy, water and waste at military installations. The 2012 Net Zero Pilot Installation Initiative Progress Report overviews renewable energy projects such as a 10-kilowatt wind turbine system at West Point and a photovoltaicRead… Read more »

The Kepler Moment

Reading The Fractalist, Memoir of a Scientific Maverick, Benoit Mandelbrot’s autobiography, he was continually looking for the possibility of a Kepler Moment. If I had a science teacher who understood and communicated the concept, I probably would have ended up as more of a researcher. Mandelbrot’s lifetime search for the Kepler Moment is the gameRead… Read more »

What I Learned at the Summit

Kevin Roden serves District One on the Denton’s City Council. The belief that the citizens of Denton, Texas are our city’s greatest, yet most underutilized asset compelled me to run for City Council a little over two years ago. Convinced by Alexis de Tocqueville’s insight that “the institutions of a township are to freedom whatRead… Read more »

Pentagon Five-Year Cybersecurity Plan Seeks $23 Billion, Cyber attacks focusing on Infrastructure, not Data and more

By Ryan Kamauff Here are the top cyber news and stories of the day. Brace for malware-fighting IE, Office patches – Microsoft is finally patching the vulnerabilities in IE this week. The weakness is in versions 6-10 of the software. 19 of the 23 patches Microsoft is rolling out today are based around patching IE.Read… Read more »