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I thought the problem in Seattle was Director's Rules, where both the owner of the property adjacent to the node and 60 percent of other nearby property owners need to vote yes for any utility improvements, and not voting (such as an absentee landlord or a vacant property) was counted as a "no" vote. (Source: "What Happened to Seattle's Gigabit Network?" by Colin Wood)

How is this supposed to work on a rooted Smartphone?

I know nothing about Finland's system (even after reading the nearly content free article), but California considered a DL app several years ago, and several of these issues were raised.

If a cop pulls you over, they can look up your DL# and verify it matches what is displayed by the app, just like they can currently verify a physical card. So no underage driving.

In a bank, the teller can give you a multi-digit code, which you enter into the app, which then verifies your info through DMV's server. There is no reason that a licensed bar could not do the same. So no underage drinking.

Every problem that you list would actually be LESS of a problem with this system than with a physical ID.

I'm paying almost $40/month to Frontier for a 1.5 Mbps DSL connection. Country Cablevision has a fiber optic line running across my front yard but says I can't have any of it. I assume the line runs over the next ridge to the new gated community development... can't have us poor riff-raff cutting in on their bandwidth...
http://www.govtech.com/dc/arti...
"The grant funded a $25.3 million fiber-to-the home broadband project in Yancey and neighboring Mitchell County. Now completed, the network can deliver service at speeds from 25 mbps to 1 gigabit upload and download to every household in the county." That's just a God-damned lie.

https://ilsr.org/wp-content/up...

TFA that the submitter linked to is a junk article written by someone who didn't understand how the Coast Guard works and assumed "calls" meant phone calls. It's so badly written the only reason I can think of for someone to use it in a submission is to drive page clicks for ad revenue. TFA links to the actual article which is much more informative and better written, although it crucially never clarifies what type of "calls" the Coast Guard responds to.

VHF channel 16 is a dedicated marine emergency frequency around the world. In U.S. waters, the US Coast Guard monitors this channel 24/7 and responds to any mayday calls. So the "calls" here are VHF radio calls, not phone calls. A mayday call is supposed to identify your vessel, provide a location, state the problem, and how many people are aboard your vessel, in that order. But things rarely go the way they're supposed to and lots of mayday calls are partial or missing crucial information. The USCG has to assume these are real and the boat sank or radio died before complete information could be broadcast, and deploy search and rescue assets.

Unfortunately there is no universal caller ID on VHF radios. Some of the newer ones will automatically identify your vessel and/or provide your location, but most VHF radios used by recreational boaters are old analog units which simply broadcast only what you say into them. So the only thing the USCG frequently gets is a voice in the RF ether claiming people are in danger of dying. (The USCG will also respond to a cell phone call if it claims to be from a boat close enough to shore to get cell phone service, or if it's from someone reporting a vessel overdue based on a float plan that was filed before leaving.)

Going back to the original article, it sounds less like a black box that produces a Prank/No Prank decision, and more like a complex program that produces a list of characteristics present in the call, which the Coast Guard can then use to make the decision themselves.

For instance, it can match voices and even the sound of one's breath to previous calls, allowing the Coast Guard to recognize repeat pranksters. It can tell from the sound of a voice what sort of room the caller is in (e.g. lots of windows), enabling them to get a sense for whether the person might be lying about their location (e.g. "We're capsizing in this storm!" is a lot less believable if the person is in a concrete room).

In the meantime though, the Coast Guard indicated they're responding to about 99% of calls that they believe are pranks, despite believing they're pranks. As you said, the risk to not respond is too high. Thankfully, this software is giving them more tools to help in the post-prank investigation and enforcement side of things.

CenturyLink is notorious for burying startup ISPs that would compete with them in preliminary injunctions and then dragging the cases out in court until the startup goes bankrupt from lawyer fees. They're one of the major ISPs that shut down North Carolina municipal broadband. They have obtained an obscene government grant to expand rural broadband yet every rural area I go to has pretty much the same CenturyLink service as they did five years ago: you're lucky if you get one megabit. They got one five years ago too.

CenturyLink is about as evil of a corporation as you can get. They constantly cut off all attempts to bring better internet service to areas (even if they don't serve them yet!) while not improving their offerings significantly enough compared to the amount of cash they're raking in from customers and government grants.

Isn't it ironic that they're slated to get $3 BILLION in grants over the next six years, yet they claim municipal broadband funded by local-level tax dollars is "unfair competition?"

Posting anonymously only because CenturyLink could easily sue me otherwise.

It sounds HUGE to say "she won the popular vote by millions of votes", but context,perspective, and a sense of scale are needed here:

[1] That ACTUALLY means that she won the popular vote by fewer votes than she got in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Yes, Los Angeles is the largest populated county in the Country. In fact, it has 10 million people, and San Francisco, a consolidated City-County, only adds a million more people it. To put it in context, Los Angeles County, if it were a state, would be the 10th or 11th most populated. And in area, it's LARGER than Delaware and Rhode Island.

[2] California has millions of illegal aliens, and it gives them drivers licenses and it signs people up to vote when it gives them their drivers licenses - and California also does not allow anybody to look for voter fraud, while then saying there is no voter fraud because none has been seen. To win the popular vote, all she needs is a bunch of ineligible voters in a few big cities, which by pure coincidence are packed with immigrants many of whom are illegally present and protected by the Democrats who run the places.

Oh poor you, too bad for you, it's totally a inaccurate and made up story. The truth about What California DOES, is issue driver's licenses, and then has an office in the California Secretary of State register them to vote. So if you are arguing that the California Secretary of state is failing in their duties, let's see you present some proof. Oh wait, you won't even look for it.

You remind me of all the people who couldn't find Obama's birth certificate in Hawaii. You don't buy California's votes? Then fucking go through the voter rolls, I dare you.

[3] The Constitution says nothing about winning the popular vote. For the entire history of the country, our presidents have had to campaign all across the country in small states and large ones and in cities and rural areas because they have to win the electoral college votes - it's a core element of the stability of our Democratic Republic. Pretending that her popular vote count gives her some legitimacy is like claiming that the winner of the Super Bowl is not legitimate if the losing team had more passing yards - that's NOT the metric for winning the contest, and the contestants would play differently if it were.

Whereas you pretend that winning the electoral college gives Trump more legitimacy, like if the Winner of the Super Bowl was the one who got 15 points from kicks, while questioning that the MVP was a QB who got six TD passes.

But go ahead, blather on about the Electoral college, but don't forget what this conversation was about:

The American people have spoken, and they want Trump.

When answering that question, why would you be so stupid as to ignore the 70 million people who didn't want Trump enough to vote for somebody else? Let alone the 90 million who couldn't bother to vote.

They didn't rise up and call out for Trump. They, in a few places, said, Ok, Trump, whatever, and yet a larger share stayed home.

If we went by popular vote, campaigns would concentrate on the big cities and the rest of the nation would be ignored in national politics, which is a recipe for very corrosive and divisive politics in such a large and diverse country.

We have corrosive and divisive politics, so obviously your desire to avoid that failed. Instead, those areas feel ignored and mistreated. The Electoral College is a point of failure, it does not protect us, it does not defend us. Not unless by some chance, the electors punt on the issue. Which is possible, but doubtful.

The WiFi bands are unlicensed and users *must* accept interference from other users. The FCC already went through this with the Port Authority when they tried to ban their tenets from offering WiFi services.

http://www.govtech.com/policy-...
https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-...

INCORRECT. They are not putting a restriction on the devices operation, they are forbidding you from using the device. A restriction would be sub-licensing and not allowed. Not allowing their use at all is actually fine.

Really?

http://www.govtech.com/policy-...
https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-...

I wonder how long before we start seeing drones take the place of police in cars.

You mean like this, this, and this?

Is it fair to say these cars are currently safer than human drivers when a dedicated copilot is nearly always present and double checking on the cars and who then shuts it off for a human to take over at the slightest problem? How many accidents have been prevented?
For those of you that haven't seen the university of Michigan report

I wish I had mod points to give you more boost.
first thing I said was "holy shit"
then I was after reading, No way....

I can not believe what I read, but your advice is solid,
go independent and consult and try to keep the
IP rights.

as a past employer, I never let any consultant keep
the IP rights. but I bet their are suckers

Just look what happened to Hoboken NJ when they did not
renew the software license for the automated parking garage
it stopped working http://www.govtech.com/magazin...
funniest thing ever

it's clear that the major players in the K-12 market today are Apple, an ascendant Google, and Microsoft, which has only shown hints of its strategy for the market segment.

Here's another :

Apple is still the main and dominant player in the [education] market

The software side was Pearson. LAUSD is now allowing Chromebook purchases.

I've had no contact with the Care Oregon people, but my 20-plus years of contact with State Department of Human Services (DHS) IT management (as a contractor to local governments) has shown me just the opposite. Over that time what I observed was a massive NIH complex that can reasonably be described as arrogant, paired with equally massive incompetence.

Their trail is littered with failed projects. For example, look at Oregon Pathways, with which I was closely involved in its early stages. Pathways spent more than $500k and actually won national awards for excellence--without producing more than a mocked-up demo. Lots of time and money sent swirling down the drain.

Better still, look at a project that actually was built and is in use today: Oregon Access. It was conceived in the 1990's by DHS as a PC-based (Sybase/Powerbuiler) replacement for mainframe systems used to administer Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs. It also was intended to give local governments that do the actual case work extensive 'access' to client data in the system for their own use in management--hence the project name. The first parts of the system were put into production use in the late '90s (I worked on some local-gov installs).

The first casualty occurred early on and it was. ironcally, access. Only one county (Lane) was able to connect to the system before direct database access was eliminated, so that only the inteface devloped by DHS could be used. The mainframes never were replaced, so the poor users had to learn two systems: Windows-based Access and text-based mainframe running in a terminal emulator (later replaced by an IE6-only Web interface).

My view of Access was from the user end. A substantial amount of my business came from developing software for users that filled gaps in Access. For example, Medicaid-funded Adult Protective Services. State management decided that they needed extensive statistics that Access did not provide. Their solution was simple: tell the local offices to generate it themselves. I was engaged by one to develop a database application that would enable them to do that. Plus, we added such obvious things as searching cases by name so they could get a case number--which was the only way to find a case in Access! (When, a few years later, that unit was transferred to the State, they killed the application so that the work had to be done by hand.)

For the user, Oregon Access is a nightmare. Consider this page of case management tools for APD (Aging and People with Disabilites) staff. I particularly like the 191-slide Powerpoint stack that explains the "basics" of using just the client assessment portion of Access. And note the PDF forms that have to be filled out and emailed to Salem.

Better still are the forms (not seen there) that are generated from within Oregon Access using internal data, which are then printed by the case manager and faxed or mailed (USPS) to Salem, where they are processed by someone using Oregon Access. Duh. I can't tell you the hilarity that ensued when the local folks received notice of the State's response to complaints about this lunacy: install a "Print to file" printer and PDF-conversion software, then for each use of a form, go through the many-step process of printing, converting, and attaching it to an email instead of fax or surface mail. Problem solved!

Now, Cover Oregon is a product of the Oregon Health Authority, which was split off from DHS. Bruce Goldberg, OHA director during this mess, was previously director of DHS. The evidence seems to refute the notion that all the incompetence of DHS was left behind when OHA branched off.

My personal view is that this affair is nicely characterized by: "Incompetent Mark Meets Con Artist".

A better question is, how do so many of these projects have budgets in the several hundred million dollar range? And we're not even talking about the feds, this is at the city level, ONE CITY! And it seems this article is giving them more credit than they deserve, other articles claim they are $1 billion over budget, not the total cost mind you but that is the overrun, and another 7 to 10 years to go on top of that.

About 2 years ago I read NYC was something like $600m over budget on some timekeeping software called "City Time" (or something similar). I'm not clear if this is the same project, but it looks like this is something else, seriously WTF?

I would have to work full time for 10 years to finish a $1 million software project myself. Looking at what I produce, or any developer can produce, in a single year makes it hard to comprehend how even the most complex software ever conceived of would take someone over 10,000 years working full time to complete.

A fucking billion dollars? And then we get to listen to these same beaurocrats lecture about how critical the deficit is and responsible spending that, as they order another hundred $350 million dollar jets that will never see combat. It just makes me sick to my stomach. This is the shit we sacrifice 1/3rd of our income for.

This wealth of data allowed scientists to estimate the intensity, wave height and projected time of landfall for the tsunami that struck Japan and then came ashore on the rest of the Pacific Rim. This lead time gave local authorities around the world the ability to close beaches and evacuate low-lying areas in advance.

...Hundreds of miles away, many people working in Toyko skyscrapers knew the earthquake was coming.

We don't know how many lives it saved, but it seems, many. It's nice to know something was learned in 2004, and something was done about it.

Well, not necessarily... but considering what IBM has done to the states of Indiana, Texas and California, do you really want to trust Snake Oil Sam with the whole federal government?

Actually, from the article, you would have seen that the contract was signed back in 2005, when Virginia enjoyed the presence of Mark Warner, Democrat, and now US Senator for Virginia.

Amusingly, Aneesh Chopra, the current CTO of the Obama administration, was the Virginia Secretary of Technology starting shortly after this was signed, and he never added redundancy to the service contract. This was during Warner's tenure and during Tim Kaine's (D-Va) tenure.

Also, counter to your argument, it was actually Bob McDonnell, the current Republican Governor, that renegotiated the contract to include redundancy.

With all of that said, I do not think Northrop Grumman was the best fit for this job and after so many egregious failures, they deserve to have their contract reworked in VA's favor, but bureaucracy being what it is, regardless of party politics, I doubt this will change. I really feel like this kind of contract could have gone to a small-to-medium sized VA business that could have handled it extremely well, and locally, for much less. The real sad thing is that the guy who's largest job was to oversee this contract, and did nothing, is now the CTO for the entire country. I don't care what party you are, that's a scary thought.

Klamath falls, in Southern Oregon is already very much Geothermally active.

My Alma Mater, Oregon Institute of Technology is now the only school 100% powered by renewable energy. None of those sissy offsets or credits purchased like other schools, they dug a geothermal well in a parking lot, and generate their own power. They sell their spare power to the hospital next door. The whole college has been geothermally heated since it was built, and before the power plant was built, they spent something like $15k a year to heat and cool 800,000 sq. feet of buildings.. The big stair cases on campus, are also geo-thermally heated to keep ice off them. Downtown Klamath Falls has a geothermal heating grid, and they heat most downtown buildings, sidewalks (for winter snow), and a high school for the cost of running some well pumps. Many houses on the north side of town also have their own geothermal heat

Nevada has very long ways to go to catch up.

This was reported back in Dec of '09 with an iPhone App. There's even an wiki dedicated to Open311. In the US the app was created by CitySourced.

You have a point, ceoyoyo, but I don't think it's a very good one. Your point is that the cloud's servers are private, so the owners are free to use them any way they please. Certainly that is true, but this doesn't exclude the fact that they are censoring content if they disallow the sharing of material that they have, alone, whimsically determined to be "offensive." The building metaphor is persuasive, but misleading--a building is not an information medium. Graffiti is offensive, indeed a crime, not because of its semantic content but because of the paint. A more apt metaphor would be that of a private school library refusing to shelve Salinger's "Catcher in The Rye" because it offends the librarian. He has every right to exclude anything from his library that he likes, but it's still censorship.

The argument that I can share my material elsewhere, like here at Slashdot for example, doesn't change the fact that the cloud owners are censoring content, it only changes the *effect* of the censorship. A sophomore in the private school can always get "Catcher in The Rye" in a public library, or buy it himself. If, however, municipalities ban the book from their library shelves, and then private bookstores prefer not to stock it for fear of offending their customer base, then we have a problem. A bunch of yahoos burning books in a parking lot is pretty harmless, but if the yahoos are the majority or the authority then it becomes frightening. Somewhere in between "harmless" and "frightening" is cause for alarm--the question is, where?

I raised the point (hardly a rant), because I believe that there is some cause for concern here. First, the very private companies that market their clouds have, in the past, colluded with governments in order to censor content. Clearly, for the people of China, this is bad--the equivalent of the "frightening" scenario above. One may argue who cares, we don't live in China, but our own federal government and some states have moved or are planning to shift their information services to privately owned clouds. So ultimately, even here in the USA, a private cloud can actually be public.

That is why we should all be wary of censorship on private cloud computing platforms.

The Department of Homeland Security only gives the kiss of death to public works projects. Here's what's going to happen; A bunch of committees will be called, and they're going to make a whole bunch of suggestions about what it "should" do. Each organization will want to have at least one feature included, a vote, etc. Tens (possibly hundreds) of millions will be lost doing this. It'll be filed under "R&D costs". At least a third of those suggestions will be crap or impossible/unfeasible to implement. It'll be recycled a few times on the General Schedule before some hapless corporation wins the contract. Then all hell breaks loose as delays in the project force reductions in scope, and the process of defining "core features" begins. By this point, everyone will be pointing fingers, and it'll be half-implemented and broken in many places. The project's surviving assets will be quietly transferred after a GAO inquiry regarding cost overruns and lack of deliverables -- just ahead of a congressional committee being called on the matter. Two years later, someone gets the idea that the US should have a multi-band radio project...

I only say this, because they've tried it with different scopes over and over and over and over again. Their technology department is understaffed due to high turnover and leadership problems.

Fundamentally, these things never leave the pilot phase, or if they do, they face deployment problems because the requirements are so obtuse and ambitious that existing technology can't adapt. Even if it can, bureaucratic problems usually end a project before it sees wide-scale deployment due to reluctance to adopt new technology and failures in leadership -- namely, not communicating with people in the field before trying to put something there.

But there's another beneft from the technique. Humans have a unique pattern of transmission that makes them easy to tell apart from machines that send spam. So the new method could be used to spot spambots too.

What is to stop spambot operators from duplicating or at least attempting to mask their email spam patterns to seem like those of humans?

Am I missing something? What is this unique pattern? Is it that humans only send emails at certain times during the day?

What is the proposed anti-spam filter? Is it a time of day filter?

They found two distinct types of emailer. They termed the first "day labourers" because they tended to send emails throughout the normal working day between 0900 and 1800 but not at other times. The second group they called "emailaholics" because these people sent emails throughout the waking hours from 0900 to 0100.

So there are only two extremes? This study is awful.
- - -

Spam email accounts for anywhere from 81% to 97% of all emails sent per year depending on what statistics your are using.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7988579.stm
http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2008/07/dirtydozjul08.html
http://www.govtech.com/gt/259865?topic=117671

Message from the State Chief Information Officer
Michael Locatis, State CIO
"As the Chief Information Officer for the State of Colorado, my role is to provide the momentum and strategy for wide-ranging activities from promoting high end research and development of cutting edge technologies to creating strategies for service delivery supporting the day to day operations for the State of Colorado - thereby making a difference in the lives of the people of Colorado and delivering Governor Ritter's 'Colorado Promise'."

http://www.govtech.com/pcio/articles/386146
Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter and CIO Mike Locatis Launch IT Consolidation
Aug 21, 2008
Before his Cabinet appointment in Colorado, he was CIO of Denver, where he showed his centralization skills (and caught Ritter's attention) by consolidating 20 separate municipal and county departments into a single, citywide IT agency. It's also where Locatis learned how fragmented the state's IT systems were.

"It was while I was working in local government that the issues surrounding state IT were immediately apparent because they impacted how services were delivered at the local level," he said.

Before becoming a public-sector CIO, Locatis was the senior director of enterprise technology strategy for Time Warner Cable Inc., part of Time Warner Inc., a Fortune 50 company and the country's largest entertainment firm. Locatis honed his skills at aligning customer-service delivery systems, standardizing desktop capabilities and managing tech and support teams for huge enterprise resource planning applications.

Despite Locatis' knowledge of the state's IT systems' problems, he wasn't expecting the mammoth job he faced. "It was significantly siloed and fragmented IT delivery, which was a root cause of a lot of the issues - including inefficiencies, a lack of leveraging an enterprise approach and just about every [IT] department in the state doing its own thing," he said.

Pancini said Drummond did paperwork to create Google Italy, but has never lived in the country

What, you mean you can be sentenced to several years in jail in a nation that you're never even visited? Imagine the shock.

I wonder if we'll ever see an American extradited to Europe, Australia, or even China for breaking intellectual property laws. The US is currently lobbying for criminal law to be used to enforce patents in the EU - it would be amusing to see the response if Europe actually started requesting the extradition of Americans who are suspected of violating EU patents!

In other news, treaties that are only enforced by one side suck.

yes paper has transportation costs, but e-books do too. my point was ebooks have 2 transportation costs, the network to distribute them, and the physical distribution and production of all the parts.

books only have the one distribution network to support.

and you are right, at some point in the future, ebooks could become more environmentally friendly than paper books. The problem is 3 fold 1. the battery. http://www.govtech.com/gt/146829 if the 'hype' about thin film batteries is real, then we're already on the road to a 'green' battery.

2. the microprocessor. all microprocessors based on lithography use many toxic chemicals, just because Intel has policies to reduce the amount of pollution their plants release into the environment, doesn't mean it's a non-polluting technology. how long until some Chinese firm that just dumps all the chemicals in a river can produce chips faster, and cheaper than Intel ever could. Oh wait, thats already been happing with small electronics for as long as i can remember. the future from this angle looks bleak, people want cheap ebook readers, and china will produce the cheapest, because they will pollute the rivers. no matter how small and energy efficient ebook readers get, if they become 'greener' than paper, this will be the 'sore thumb' where ebooks pollute the most.

3. the network. true the network is used for a lot of other aspects,and every year more and more is capable of being done with less energy, so someday in the future perhaps with renewable energy as well, the environmental impact will be so greatly less that even with number 2 ebook readers become 'greener' than paper.

At least greener than 'wood pulp' paper. I don't think they can possibly get greener than kenaf paper. if the distribution network for kenaf paper is using biofuel from algae, organic dyes are used, and of course hydrogen peroxide beaches the kenaf and then turns into harmless water in the process... ah a pipe dream i suppose. i might as well ask that we build massive solar and wind power plants in the respective corridors, and build a green power distribution network, and stop needing to burn coal for power. that would go a long way towards making e-books greener, even with today's technology.

Yes, TFA is sparse on the details, but if this is the attack, it is detected by several anti-virus packages.

That rootkit is very stealthy. It might most easily be detected by watching your httpd server logs for random javascript files being served. Some details here.

Note: I don't know that the above is the exploit described in TFA. I believe this subject was discussed earlier on slashdot. It was in The Reg as well.

The random js attack is performed by dynamic embedding of scripts into a Web page. It provides a random filename that can only be accessed once.

Ok, it appears that due to my unfamiliarity with GSM (I understand it broke 50% US market share a year ago, http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/100821, although CDMA then took 50.3% of the North American market share, breaking 50%, for the first time in Q1 2007, to GSM's 38.5%, http://www.cellular-news.com/story/24950.php), I was not aware that unlocked phones can be used at will on GSM networks with appropriate SIM cards. Can one buy just the SIM card when subscribing to a GSM cellular provider?