Government

Amazon and Wells Fargo Education Financial Services this week suddenly ended a partnership to offer low-cost loans to college students, less than six weeks after announcing the program. Wells Fargo, the largest lender of private student loans among all U.S. commercial banks, had offered a 0.50 perce...

The FBI has launched investigations into malicious cyberattacks on the electronic election infrastructures in Illinois and Arizona, and federal officials last month warned states to take steps to protect their systems as the presidential campaign heats up, according to reports that surfaced this wee...

The European Union on Tuesday nailed Apple with a $14.5 billion bill for back taxes. "The European Commission has today has adopted a decision that Apple's tax benefits in Ireland are illegal," said EC Competition Chief Margrethe Vestager at a press conference in Brussels. Tax breaks Ireland grant...

GOVERNMENT IT REPORT

Federal Agencies Told to Share Their Software

U.S. government agencies have been directed to share with each other software code that has been developed on a customized basis. Much of the code involves commercial vendor offerings. In addition to interagency sharing, government units are required to share portions of their customized code with t...

GOVERNMENT IT REPORT

Defense Department Drifts Toward Commercial Cloud

The U.S. Department of Defense plans to spend nearly half a billion dollars on a project that is designed to further the incorporation of commercial cloud capabilities into DoD's information technology operations. Vendors have been asked to submit bids for the project, known as "Mil-Cloud 2.0." The ...

GOVERNMENT IT REPORT

Feds Make Big Strides in Big Data Management

U.S. government agencies gradually have been getting a handle on utilizing the potential of big data and data analytics. At the same time, the Obama administration has recognized that significantly more investment will be required for federal big data research in order to guide agencies toward maxim...

A Russian regulatory authority earlier this week named Apple, along with more than a dozen Russian retailers, as a target for an investigation into price-fixing activities. The Federal Antimonopoly Service, or FAS, has seen signs of price-setting coordination among iPhone resellers in Russia, accord...

Amazon, which has appealed to U.S. regulators for years for permission to test package delivery with aerial drones, last week announced a new partnership with the UK government to launch a pilot program there. A cross-government team, supported by the UK Civil Aviation Authority, has granted Amazon ...

GOVERNMENT IT REPORT

Federal Agencies Seek Cyberdefenders

The U.S. government is in the process of hiring a small army of IT specialists to bolster its efforts to protect data held at federal agencies from cybersecurity threats. The feds hired 3,000 new cybersecurity and IT professionals in the first six months of the current fiscal year. In addition, the ...

Ransomware has become a scourge on the Internet -- but two information security companies, along with a pair of law enforcement agencies, this week launched an initiative to do something about it. No More Ransom is the centerpiece of a collaborative effort involving Kapersky Lab, Intel Security, the...

The number of government requests to Google for citizens' personal data rose in the second half of 2015, according to the company's latest Transparency Report, released Monday. The number has been trending upward for the past few years as the number of people connected to the Internet has increased....

Officials at the United States Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures deposits in U.S. banks, made false statements to Congress and failed to make timely notification of serious cybersecurity breaches, according to a U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technol...

Google and its parent company Alphabet are facing new charges in the European Commission's ongoing investigation of allegations that Google's comparison shopping and online advertising platforms violated antitrust laws. The EC on Thursday alleged that Google had abused its dominant position by syste...

E-Commerce Times Channels