Government

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on Tuesday announced a $2.25 billion plan to expand the federal Lifeline subsidy program to help low-income consumers afford broadband Internet service. Lifeline, which currently allows low-income consumers to buy mobile phone service at a discount, would let them buy standa...

The Obama administration is seeking $3.1 billion for a fund to update federal IT resources that need to be replaced with more efficient systems. The fund would bolster the government's annual spending on IT, which is set for a modest increase to $89.8 billion in the administration's fiscal 2017 budg...

Vivek Kundra, the former federal CIO, envisioned that 25 percent of the funds the federal government spends each year on information technology could productively be deployed through cloud-based systems. Two recent reports on the status of federal cloud procurement show that for government IT manage...

Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell on Tuesday testified before the House Judiciary Committee that his company should not be required write new code for software that would weaken the security of the iPhone in the wake of the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attacks. The FBI wants Apple to take ...

FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the government has the legal right to gain limited access to the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters and other suspected terrorists. Congress and the courts can create a mechanism to protect...

Microsoft founder Bill Gates on Tuesday attempted to clarify his position regarding Apple's conflict with the FBI, telling Bloomberg he was disappointed that his earlier comments had been construed as taking sides with the government. Apple has sparked a public debate through its resistance to a cou...

U.S. government agencies have spent more on cloud configurations than official budgets have predicted -- and those agencies will pick up the pace of cloud spending over the next five years. Federal agencies will significantly boost spending on cloud deployments with various "as a service" configurat...

In the days following the court order directing Apple to help the FBI unlock an encrypted iPhone associated with the San Bernardino terrorists, supporters have lined up behind both sides. A federal magistrate last week ordered Apple to create software that would let authorities access data in an iPh...

Jana on Thursday announced it has raised $57 million in Series C funding, enabling it to continue its plans to connect developing countries to the Web. Verizon Ventures led the funding round, with backing from Spark Capital and Publicis Groupe. The backing will give Jana -- which provides free, unre...

CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday took Apple's battle with the FBI directly to the public, penning an open letter in defense of the company's resistance to a court order mandating it to create a way to access data in the iPhone used by the San Bernardino terrorists. A federal magistrate issued the order becau...

Any effort to ban encryption or provide government agencies with backdoor access would be unenforceable and prone to failure, according to a Harvard University report released last week. Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Security, collaborator Kathleen Seidel, and...

Google is expanding the right of Europeans to be forgotten on the Internet to domains outside their countries, according to news reports Thursday. Searches made from European IP addresses for people whom Google has granted a right to be forgotten will turn up zero links, regardless of which version ...

The U.S. government is under pressure to improve cybersecurity and is meeting that challenge with a commitment to substantially enhance spending for protecting IT systems. The Obama administration projected that the federal budget for cybersecurity spending in fiscal 2016 would be about $14 billion ...

The Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday said it recently discovered and halted an automated bot attack on its electronic filing PIN application website. Identity thieves used malware in an attempt to generate E-file PINs for 464,000 Social Security numbers stolen from another source, the IRS said. T...