Government

GOVERNMENT IT REPORT

Feds Give Commercial Off-the-Shelf IT a Closer Look

Federal information technology purchasing often involves large amounts of money based on the small print of acquisition requirements. Arcane procurement language seemingly can have a big impact on transactions. For IT vendors, provisions of recent legislation are prime examples of why it pays to scr...

The Seattle City Council this week approved an ordinance that will allow drivers for Uber and Lyft to form unions, becoming the first U.S. city to pass such legislation. The City Council voted 9-0 in favor of the ordinance, which doesn't require the mayor's signature to pass. Drivers for Uber and ot...

Alibaba Group last week announced that it has entered an agreement to buy the South China Morning Post and other media assets of SCMP Group. Alibaba, which claims to be the world's largest online and mobile commerce company, said its vision was to provide objective coverage of China to readers aroun...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., on Tuesday reintroduced a bill that would require technology companies to alert law enforcement of certain activities that might be related to terrorist threats. Cosponsored by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the Requiring Reporting of Online Terrorist Activity Act would ...

The good news for federal information technology managers -- and the vendor community -- is that government IT budgets will remain stable for the next few years in terms of projected spending. An additional potential benefit is that a recent budget agreement will support agencies for two years, remo...

Just when the U.S. federal budget situation seemed about to settle down -- it didn't. With tens of billions of dollars at stake, federal acquisition managers and the IT vendors who support government agencies were breathing a sigh of relief when Congress and the White House agreed to a two-year gove...

BlackBerry on Monday announced that it will cease operations in Pakistan at the end of the year. The move is the result of a shutdown order from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, which in July notified the company that its BlackBerry Enterprise Service servers would no longer be allowed to o...

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman this week sought an injunction to keep DraftKings and FanDuel from operating in the state, according to press reports. He also subpoenaed Yahoo as part of his effort to end the operation of daily fantasy sports platforms in New York, press reports said....

CEO Satya Nadella on Monday made a bid to reintroduce Microsoft to professionals working in a brave new cyberworld of virtual, interconnected computing. Speaking at the Microsoft Government Cloud Forum in Washington, Nadella presented a broad new vision of a cloud- and mobile-first enterprise that p...

Microsoft on Wednesday said it would offer its Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM cloud services to business clients using two Germany-based data centers hosted by a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. The arrangement will protect the integrity and privacy of customer data, the company said. The data ce...

GOVERNMENT IT REPORT

NIST Seeks Review of Email Safety Doc

Email systems have become so routine that consumers and workers often regard them as simply part of the furniture. However, the technology is more complex than most users appreciate -- and that complexity makes it vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. Email is a central application of large-scale com...

GOVERNMENT IT REPORT

NIST Seeks Business Partners to Boost Email Security

The controversy over the management of email systems by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been in the spotlight since March. More recently, the CIA director acknowledged that his personal email had been hacked. Both situations highlight the continuing vulnerability of email. That's why t...

GOVERNMENT IT REPORT

OMB Prohibits 'Wasteful' PC Purchasing Practices

Consumers who purchase desktop or laptop computers are able to select various options, such as screen size or type of processor. When it comes to paying for the device, however, each consumer has the buying leverage of exactly one. If the customer is the U.S. government, which buys computers by the ...

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