Government

U.S. government agencies are moving briskly into the mobile era, spurred by the fast pace of technological change. The scope of the federal mobile market is broad-based, and to some degree depends upon what is meant by such terms as "wireless," "mobility" and "digital." The parameters of that market...

A British intelligence agency indiscriminately collected photos from the webcams of Yahoo users and stored them on its servers over a period of several years as part of a surveillance program called "Optic Nerve." The operation was run by the UK's NSA counterpart, GCHQ, according to a top secret doc...

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reportedly have submitted four proposals to reform the National Security Agency's phone surveillance program. The recommendations come well before the March 28 deadline set by President Obama. Three deal with havi...

The explosion of the Internet of Things, or IoT, promises great opportunities for improving quality of life -- but also for creating both seen and unforeseen dangers. The IoT generally refers to a network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to sense, communicate and interact with th...

U.S. government agencies have faced significant obstacles in meeting a federal mandate designed to foster the use of cloud technologies, but those challenges are unlikely to derail federal adoption of the technology, and there are indications that cloud deployments will accelerate at a much faster r...

A group of 18 organizations on Thursday announced the formation of WifiForward, a coalition that aims to persuade policymakers to open more unlicensed wireless spectrum for use by WiFi-enabled devices. Members include the American Library Association, Best Buy, Comcast, the Consumer Electronics Asso...

Federal agencies spend considerable portions of their budgets on their legal offices. For example, the U.S. Department of Justice awarded a $1.1 billion multiyear contract in 2013 for a wide range of information technologies and legal support services. Yet legal staffs across the federal government ...

The European Commission has accepted Google's latest proposal to settle a probe of its practices pending agreement with the 125 companies and organizations that filed complaints against the Internet giant. Google last week made its third settlement offer, following a warning from the Commission on J...

Federal employees quickly have become strong adherents of mobile devices. In a recent survey, 90 percent of government employees said they used at least one mobile device -- laptop, smartphone or tablet -- for work purposes. However, the enthusiasm by federal workers for the use of mobile devices ha...

Democratic members of Congress this week moved to replace by legislative means the Net neutrality rules that a court decision last month suddenly rendered defunct. Lawmakers introduced the Open Internet Preservation Act in both chambers. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last month changed the telec...

Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son reportedly was scheduled to meet with the FCC on Monday to discuss a possible purchase of T-Mobile, although the DoJ already has signaled its opposition. Both U.S. government bodies would have to approve of a merger, but they would view it from different perspectives. S...

Google reportedly is close to settling the antitrust case the European Commission brought against it more than three years ago. This is its third offer to the EC so far, and it reportedly includes commitments from Google on how it will treat rivals and how it will use content from other providers. "...

The widespread problems in implementing the Affordable Care Act have provided some momentum to the efforts by the Obama administration and Congress to ratchet up reforms in the management and procurement of information technology. President Obama conceded the need to put more emphasis on such reform...

It doesn't make too much sense to send a sanitation truck around a predetermined route to empty street-side trash bins if half the bins are empty. It's a waste of employee time and truck fuel for work crews to stop at thousands of bins that don't need attention. If the bins could speak for themselve...

Software developers have long been able to protect their innovations by virtue of a favorable provision of U.S. patent law that gives them almost monopoly power to maximize financial returns. The law also enables developers to take action against any other party that comes close to duplicating or im...