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U.S. IT Infrastructure Highly Vulnerable
An anonymous reader writes "The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee in their February 2005 report to GW writes "...infrastructure of the United States, which is now vital for communication, commerce, and control of our physical infrastructure, is highly vulnerable to terrorist and criminal attacks." It goes on to say that "fundamentally new approaches are
needed to address the more serious structural weaknesses of the IT infrastructure" and finally offers "four key findings and recommendations
on how the Federal government can foster new architectures and technologies to secure the
Nation's IT infrastructure." Here is yet another, not surprising, bleak outlook for cyber security in the United States. The full 72-page report can be found here."
http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/CyberSecurity.pd f
Just a single example, but when you have a principal and an assistant principal at each school, both making 100,000+ $USD, that money gets used up in a hurry. Why don't they spend some of that money on teachers to lower class size? It's a bunch of stupid politics, and the students continue to suffer for it. There are dozens of other positions like that. I can see a need for a single principal, but what about all these other stupid positions?
In the High School at the K-12 district where I worked before, the "assistant principal" fixed his three sons' grades before he got caught and had to "resign to pursue other opportunities", and the "normal principal" was caught (by me) surfing porn after hours. Fucking brilliant.
Can you tell I'm jaded?
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
The only thing that piece of shit legislation does is give the kids more tests to suffer through. It adds no actual "accountability" to schools. Instead of teachers preparing their students for what they might actually need in life, they focus on only what's going to be on the test. What happens when some struggling inner-city school gets shut down because their kids don't pass their proficiency tests? They disperse into other schools and bring their scores down, resulting in less funding for those schools. Brilliant.
If Bush has added $13 billion in education funding, I'd like to know where it went. Districts all over are struggling just to keep the lights on. They are being forced to go to the voters for property tax increases. It's not a pleasant situation for anyone. The kids suffer because all their extracurriculars get cut and the property owners suffer because their taxes go up.
The state of education in Ohio (where both of my parents are in the field) is abysmal. Over 10 years ago, the state's Supreme Court ruled our school funding system was unconstitutional. Yet here we are 10+ years later, and the Legislature hasn't done a damned thing about it. My dad is convinced they're trying to kill public education, and from what I see, it's working. People are getting laid off, everything outside of the State Board of Ed.'s required curriculum is being cut, and the kids suffer. They've even cut bussing. It's really a very unfortunate situation.
In conclusion, fuck our incompetent politicans. I'm sick of agendas (as they almost always end up screwing the common man).
I located two other government sources here and here.
Another poster also found it here.
I'd like to point out that while there is no direct mention of Trusted Computing, it calls for a "fundamentally different architecture", some sections mostly later in the paper apprear to describe Trusted Computing functionality, the experts they cite all appear to be Trusted Computing speciallists and proponents (in particular David Spafford was the author of the semi famous WHY_TCPA and TCPA_REBUTTAL papers), at least some of the committee members appear to have Trusted Computing ties, and an earlier Cyber Security Advisor gave a speech at the Washington D.C. Tech summit calling for Trusted Computing and for ISPs to eventually make it a mandatory part of terms of service for internet access. A call to fight worms and viruses and to Secure the National Information Infrastucture against terrorist attacks, to defend against Osama bin Laden himself. Yes, he actually cited bin Laden by name. chuckle.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
They do not directly mention Trusted Computing, but it looks like every expert they cite is in fact a Trusted Computing advocate. Hell, David Spafford was the author of the fairly famous WHY_TCPA and TCPA_REBUTTAL papers. I have to do some more Googling, but I think pretty much the entire committee has Trusted Computing ties.
You might want to check your DNS entries as apparently you're using a different "google" than I am. For starters '"David Spafford" TCPA' returns 0 hits of Google. Secondly, it's Eugene Spafford that took part in, and is cited in the report. Googling for Eugene Spafford and TCPA gives a few hits, but nothing about him writing any papers on TCPA. Confused, I went to his homepage and looked up his list of publications. Lo and behold, not a single mention of TCPA in any of his numerous books, journal articles or conference papers. He did write "Practical UNIX security" available from O'Reilly.
I'm sure if you continue to completely make stuff up you can find all manner of other connections to trusted computing. On the other hand if you care to join the rest of us in reality you might find that the report really has nothing to do with TCPA at all.
Jedidiah.
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