Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Allan Holmes

Comcast Promised Poor Americans Cheap Internet, But Most of Them Didn’t Get It

Allan Holmes, Quartz — Wed, 28 May 2014 13:34:07 -0400

As Comcast Corp. tries to convince the federal government to permit it to buy Time Warner Cable Inc. for $45 billion, opponents of the deal will inevitably bring up people like Ed.

Every morning at 8:15, Ed climbs into his red, 1999 Mazda sedan and drives 15 miles down Main Street in Scranton, Pa. He passes mom-and-pop sandwich shops, a shuttered elementary school and a computerized shooting gallery for archery on his way to a friend’s 86-year-old house where coal miners once lived — and where there’s an Internet connection.

Ed, who comes here because he can’t afford the parking fees at a library six miles away, first reads his email and then turns his attention to job sites such as snapjobsearch, glassdoor, Monster and Craigslist. He’s been following this routine for nearly four years, looking for an opening in the hotel or restaurant business where he’s got some experience, but he has yet to land a job. Without the Internet connection, he’d have no hope.

“You can’t walk into a Wal-Mart without filling out an application online first,” said Ed, who doesn’t want to use his last name because he fears employers may avoid hiring him. “The Internet today is like electricity. If you don’t have it, you’re screwed.”

Ed wouldn’t have to rely on the goodwill of friends and make the daily 30-mile round trip if Comcast, the only fast, wired broadband provider in the Scranton area, offered its low-priced Internet service to people like him. But the $9.95-a-month program, called Internet Essentials, is available only to low-income families with school-age children.

Not for everyone

Ed, 53-years-old and single, isn’t eligible, even though he’s living on $169 a month in food stamps and the generosity of family and friends.

Comcast offered Internet Essentials shortly before its last big acquisition, when it bought NBC Universal in 2011. To ease federal approvals of the transaction, the company promised that it would offer low-priced Internet connections and computers to low-income families. But the Federal Communications Commission, which approved the merger, didn’t set any participation requirements, or metrics to define success.

Now the cable and broadband giant, wants to buy Time Warner Cable, and again in an attempt to show regulators the deal is in the public interest, is offering to extend the program indefinitely and offer it to all Time Warner’s customers too. The deal, if approved, will give Comcast control of about 40 percent of U.S. Internet users.

The program makes for good public relations, but its real impact on the persistent problem of low-broadband adoption rates among the poor is negligible and is a weak substitute for a national strategy, advocates say.

Of the 7.2 million low-income people in Comcast’s service area, only 2.6 million are eligible for Internet Essentials, according to data compiled by the Center for Public Integrity. The program requires the participant’s household to include a child who is eligible for the federal school lunch program. Of that 2.6 million, only 300,000, or 12 percent, have signed up since Internet Essentials was launched in 2011.

Did You Get the Memo?

Allan Holmes — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 18:02:07 -0400

Part of the government's push to tighten cybersecurity is to educate the public and to increase awareness - like federal agencies did to boost the use of seat belts and the "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires" campaign.

Purdue University seems to have received the memo. It's organizing a panel discussion on "Our Shared Responsibility" for cybersecurity. The discussion is scheduled for Oct. 20.

From the announcement of the panel:

According to Purdue Calumet Assistant Director for Information Security and Assurance James Pardonek, better understanding is necessary of how individual actions can collectively affect cyber security and internet protection.

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Federal Pension Insights

Allan Holmes — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:50:19 -0400

Government Executive's Editor-in-Chief Tom Shoop helped bring some facts to the debate over the generosity and funding of government employee pension plans when he appeared on the Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio on Thursday.

One of Shoop's main points, as he wrote in Government Executive's FedBlog:

My job was to explain why the federal system is at considerably less risk than state and local plans. (The main reason of course, being that the Federal Employees Retirement System has shifted more of the burden to the individual to be responsible for retirement savings via the Thrift Savings Plan, while plans at lower levels of government still tend to rely heavily on a pension component.)

Listen to the show here.

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Dick Tracy Inspired

Allan Holmes — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:25:44 -0400

The Army continues to push into the Buck Rogers Age.

The service tested eight displays that are worn like a watch. At Fort Dix in New Jersey, the soldiers used the devices to watch a real-time video from an unmanned air vehicle and other images sent from computers, UPI.com reports.

The Army has been testing other technologies in its ongoing effort to build a digital Army.

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Reading NASA Case Tea Leaves

Allan Holmes — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:40:00 -0400

A follow up to Nextgov's Tuesday article on the Supreme Court hearing arguments from NASA employees that background checks for new ID cards violated their privacy, the Denver Post reported early on Wednesday that it looked like almost all the justices weren't buying the workers' argument.

[Justice Elena] Kagan did not participate in Tuesday's argument, but all of her new colleagues -- with the exception of Justice Sonia Sotomayor -- sounded as though they would take her advice and uphold the use of background checks.

The Post pointed out that when Kagan was solicitor general in 2009 she urged the high court to reverse the ruling of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found the open-ended questions in the background check violated their right to privacy, stressing the employees, who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, held "low-risk" jobs.

The background checks are part of the federal government's billion-dollar-plus program to issue new high-tech standard ID cards to all government employees. The program was launched under Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12. The case has implications for all government workers and their claims to privacy.

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Guns Mean Butter

Allan Holmes — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 18:08:42 -0400

John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote a blog post for The Huffington Post on Tuesday musing about this weekend's gathering in Washington of "tens of thousands of people . . . to push the government on the jobs issue."

Feffer made the point that progressives were making an issue between spending on war versus spending on jobs. But, he wrote, there's a problem with this stance.

Many unions, although perhaps willing to oppose the war in Afghanistan, are hesitant to advocate cutting Pentagon spending. With a base that continues to shrink, they fear losing dues-paying members who manufacture weapons. Politicians, too, don't want to appear anti-job by voting for anything that would close down production lines in their district.

We may not like it, but war is good for jobs, something that economists on the left and right agree on.

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Finding Uses for the Mundane

Allan Holmes — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 16:45:03 -0400

Improving health care outcomes depends on a lot of things, including expanding the use of telemedicine, which will make it easier for patients in remote areas to see a primary care physician or a specialist. The downside is the required equipment can be costly. But that could change if technologists come up with innovative ways to use every-day computer equipment, say, like webcams.

A graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has done just that. He found a way to turn the low-cost camera that connects to a PC into a stethoscope. Writing in the Optics Express journal, a team led by Ming-Zher Poh, a student in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, showed how a webcam could be used "to monitor a person's pulse by tracking minute changes in the way light reflects off their face as blood flows beneath the skin," the White Coat Notes blog reported. The team is working on altering the camera so it can measure oxygen saturation, respiration rate and blood pressure.

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Canada's Cyber Strategy Vague, Too

Allan Holmes — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 15:37:31 -0400

Canada released its Cybersecurity Strategy plan this month, calling the protection of government and corporate computer systems "a daunting challenge."

There is no simple way to detect, identify and recover from attackers who cannot be seen or heard, who leave no physical evidence behind them, and who hide their tracks through a complex web of compromised computers.

The $90 million (Canadian) strategy lays out three broad areas to build on:

1. Secure government systems. The government will put in place the necessary structures, tools and personnel to meet its obligations for cyber security.
2. Create partnerships to secure nongovernmental systems. In cooperation with provincial and territorial governments and the private sector, the government will support initiatives and take steps to strengthen Canada's cyber resiliency, including that of its critical infrastructure sectors.

3. Help Canadians be secure online. The Government will assist Canadians in getting the information they need to protect themselves and their families online, and strengthen the ability of law enforcement agencies to combat cybercrime.

If this sounds familiar, it is. As the authors of the strategy, Canada's Public Safety Ministry, say,

Three of our closest security and intelligence partners, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, recently released their own plans to secure cyberspace. Many of the guiding principles and operational priorities set out in those reports resemble our own. This complementarity reflects our shared experiences in dealing with cyber security, and demonstrates our determination to enhance our collective security by leveraging each ally's domestic cyber regimes.

It also shares the lack of details on how it will defend networks past what we already know, just as the White House's Cyberspace Policy Review released in 2009 did -- including, by the way, lack of a defined and detailed strategy.

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Cut Benefits, See Retirement Go Up

Allan Holmes — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:22:49 -0400

For years, government officials have predicted a wave of federal retirements, but it has yet to materialize. New Jersey may have found a way to make it a reality.

Gov. Chris Christie has proposed reforming the public pension system, and state workers believe he is serious, so much so that an increased number are planning to retire.

From WHHY in Delaware:

So far this year more than 19,000 state employees and teachers have filed applications for retirement. That's a 55 percent increase from last year.
Rutgers University public policy professor Carl Van Horn says Gov. Christie's call to change pension and health care benefits is one reason why workers who want to preserve their current benefits are leaving. But, he says there are other factors.

"With budgets being reduced and personnel being reduced the pressures on the remaining workers increase and so the environment for working in government in general has declined. The satisfaction that people get from the job and the pressures they feel have increased."

Considering the current unemployment rate, Van Horn says the government should not have trouble attracting new workers in the short term. But he says it could be more difficult once the economy improves.

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Why Legacy? It Works

Allan Holmes — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 18:13:09 -0400

NASA has taken some hits for having decades-old computer technology running the shuttle program and the International Space station. For example, the space agency uses some technology that the moon programs relied on in the 1960s and the space station uses processors more than two decades old. Sounds like a typical government operation? Well, no, when you have scientists explain it.

A silicon.com article reports:

When it comes to spacecraft, design reliability - and not bleeding edge technology - is the watchword, with onboard chips having to undergo extensive testing to prove their robustness and compatibility with the spacecraft's onboard software.
. . . "A spacecraft is not accessible - once it is launched it is there, so you have to be extremely sure that things work," said [Alessandro] Donati, [head of the advanced mission concepts and technologies office at the European Space Agency's Space Operations Centre at Darmstadt, Germany].

Upgrading computing hardware is another task that is normally straightforward on the ground but that becomes an expensive and time-consuming job in space.

Simply put, any upgrade or new technology has to work from the beginning -- always, or else. That's why it takes nearly three years to do a software upgrade. Everything has to be tested and tested again.

But NASA plans to upgrade processors on the space station next year - "the station's first major avionics computer redesign in the 12 years it has been in orbit," silicon.com reports.

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Texting to Fight Counterfeit Drugs

Allan Holmes — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:45:20 -0400

Counterfeit drugs are big problem in developing countries and technology might have found a way to fight it. In an article on how wireless technologies are expanding in the health field, especially in the developing world, Fast Company posted an article today on how simple texting can combat fake drugs, which result in not curing a disease or ailment, and it erodes confidence in modern medicine. From Fast Company:

Using fake drugs has tragic consequences -- there is decreased immunity and people lose faith in life-saving medicine. Technologists came up with a solution: individuals can verify the authenticity of medicine by sending a text message with an ID number printed on the box of legitimate medicine, then the drug company text back verifying that the medicine is ok to use.

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Israel Targets Iran with Stuxnet Worm?

Allan Holmes — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 14:46:30 -0400

The Stuxnet computer worm - described as possibly the most dangerous malware because it can target and control specified industrial machinery - is thought to have been created in Israel to specifically target a nuclear power plant in Iran, reports the Guardian in London.

[The worm] has been most active in Iran, says the security company Symantec -- leading some experts to conjecture that the likely target of the virus is the controversial Bushehr nuclear power plant, and that it was created by Israeli hackers.
Speaking to the Guardian, security experts confirmed that Stuxnet is a targeted attack on industrial locations in specific countries, the sophistication of which takes it above and beyond previous attacks of a similar nature.

CNN explains Stuxnet this way:

It's an attack that goes straight after the PLC (programmable logic control) software of an industrial machine, which is effectively the brain of the unit. It uses four zero-day exploits in one package, with a zero-day exploit being an undiscovered flaw in a piece of software; it's the time between the hackers finding a hole in the system and when the developers patch it. And in this case there are four of these exploits, meaning that they've already exponentially increased the chances of finding a way into the system in case any of the holes happened to already be plugged.

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Rather Pay Than Install EHR

Allan Holmes — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 18:12:13 -0400

A lot of work went into the development of meaningful use standards -- those requirements that an electronic health record system has to do to be considered a bona fide electronic health record system.

But the federal government has some work to do to inform physicians that the standards exist and that there are serious financial repercussions for not following them, according to a recent survey conducted by Physicians' Reciprocal Insurers in Long Island, N.Y. Healthcare IT News reports:

While 85 percent of physicians were aware of the financial incentives for implementing the systems, more than 35 percent did not know that they face government-assessed financial penalties for not complying beginning in January 2015.

Maybe more disturbing, was the finding that of the two-thirds of doctors who were unaware of the financial penalties, more than 65 percent - once they were informed that they faced costs equal to a 1 percent reduction of their annual Medicare payments per year up to 5 percent -- said that fact would not make them purchase an EHR system.

That works out to about 20 percent of all doctors not willing, despite financial loss, to install an EHR system, making it more difficult for the Obama administration to meet its goal of having a large majority of Americans in possession of an electronic health record by 2015.

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What's the IT Cost of Legislation?

Allan Holmes — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:48:15 -0400

This item was updated at 11:45 a.m. on Sept. 24 to provide another example of how Congress affects IT.

When Congress passes legislation, it rarely thinks about how much work is involved in putting a new policy into place. And that includes information technology labor.

One example I wrote about was the requirement in the 2001 USA Patriot Act that mandated the creation of an entry-exit system that would keep track of when a foreign visitor entered the country and when he or she left. The deadline to build the network was unrealistic, to say the least. But then again, the country was pretty shaken and wasn't thinking through its policy decisions.

Then there was the cost to rework computers at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to process Medicare Part D, which ocngress passes to alleviate the high cost of prescription drugs for elderly and disabled Americans. "The legislation required upgrades to the IT systems of pharmacists, insurance companies, state governments and CMS alike," Robert Charette wrote in Government Executive in December 2006. Computer problems "became so bad that more than 20 state governors had to step in and order temporary payment of drug benefit claims for their senior citizens."

Another, earlier, example occurred when some members in Congress wanted to privatize part of Social Security in the late 1990s (and the proposal has come up periodically since then). SSA officials told me then that to retrofit computer systems at the agency to track what was private and what wasn't would cost upwards of $1 billion. (Some congressional members were dubious.)

Which brings us to this week, when a Republican introduced a bill calling for two weeks of unpaid leave for federal employees. How does that affect payroll systems? What's involved in reprogramming payroll and human resource systems to track that accurately? Maybe it's merely just a box you check in the systems. Or maybe a lot more is involved. Not sure. How many extra work hours would it take to make the change, and was that taken into account when Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., figured out it would save the government more than $5.5 billion?

It would be helpful for federal IT managers and programmers out there who may know how much work is involved to comment on this. Is it significant or is it real easy?

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Stimulus Boosts EHR Sales

Allan Holmes — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:15:21 -0400

The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) Act seemed to have given sales of electronic health records systems a pop.

KLAS Enterprises wrote in its annual report on EHR adoption in hospitals that while sales hit a seven-year low in 2008, purchases of the systems doubled in 2009 because of the law, according to an article on Health Data Management's website. The winning vendors: Epic and Cerner Corp.

Sales volumes were not reported.

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Time to Get App Savvy

Allan Holmes — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 17:49:29 -0400

The apps culture is here, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

In a survey released on Wednesday, the project reported 29 percent of adult cell phone owners have downloaded apps to their phone. Of the 82% of adults today who are cell phone users, 43% have software applications or "apps" on their phones, according to the survey. The most popular apps are games, news and weather, and maps for navigation and searching, followed by social networking, music and entertainment apps.

This activity prompted Roger Entner, co-author of the report and senior vice president and head of research and insights for the telecom practice at Nielsen, to call the finding "pretty remarkable . . . if you consider that there was no apps culture until two years ago."

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More on Cyberwar

Allan Holmes — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:12:15 -0400

The debate about what constitutes a cyberwar still rages on. The latest installment comes from a conference put on by cybersecurity vendor ArcSight on Monday in National Harbor, Md., where Eneken Tikk, head of the legal and policy branch of the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia, discussed the 2007 attacks on that country's networks.

Shortly after Estonia officials removed a Russian statue from a square in the capital, several Estonian ministries came under denial-of-service attacks, in which computers worldwide sent huge amounts of data into the ministries' networks, overloading the systems. Other systems supporting Estonian banks and media companies also were attacked. But Tikk said the hits didn't constitute a legal definition of cyberwar, IDG News reported.

She defined cyberwar as an attack that would cause the same type of destruction as the traditional military, with military force as an appropriate response. "That means a smoking hole in the ground," said Tikk.

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Canada to U.S.: Step Up

Allan Holmes — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 19:07:14 -0400

Canada's privacy commissioner took a swipe at her U.S. counterparts on Monday.

Jennifer Stoddart, speaking to members of the Canadian Bar Association, discussed efforts to investigate Google's allegedly inadvertent collection of private data and Facebook's noncompliance with Canada's private-sector privacy law, The Vancouver Sun reported.

"Why is Canada paying for the cost of this enforcement for this technology that's coming to us out of Mountain View (Calif.), so we're looking for the U.S. federal government to step up there," she said.

Facebook had a year -- until July -- to follow "the commissioner's directives to provide users more detailed control over their personal information and to curtail the access of outside software and website developers to their data," or face court proceedings, the newspaper reported.

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Even When It's Good, It Isn't

Allan Holmes — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:44:46 -0400

Agencies may find it difficult to attract information technology workers now, but could the government lose even those that it has convinced to join the workforce when the economy improves?

Maybe, according to the September GenTrends newsletter sent out on Monday. The Center for Generational Studies publishes the newsletter, and it says surveys indicate that as many as 78 percent of workers say they will look for other employment when the economy improves. One reason is that employers are now hiring experienced workers for less than they would pay in a good economy, because they can.

The federal government could find themselves in the same situation, but maybe not from a pay perspective so much (although the federal sector does pay less than the private sector, or doesn't, depending on whom you choose to believe) but because it isn't the employer of choice.

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It's Hatch Act Season

Allan Holmes — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 17:57:00 -0400

It's election time, so that means it has to be Hatch Act time, too.

At least two federal employees are entangled in the nuances of the law, which prohibits federal employees from running in partisan elections. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported on Friday that Christopher Newcomb, identified only as a military employee, is running for the Alpine Union school board. From the Tribune:

School-board elections in California, by law, are supposed to be nonpartisan. But the U.S. Office of Special Counsel informed Newcomb in an April letter that if other candidates pick up partisan endorsements, he could be deemed ineligible even though he is running as an independent.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Newcomb, challenging the special counsel's investigation.

In Virginia, the Alexandria Times reported this week town council member Alicia Hughes may be the subject of an inquiry by the special counsel. Hughes works for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Like Newcomb, Hughes is an independent with no partisan endorsements. But as the Times reported:

Hughes ran for City Council as an Independent last year but was backed by factions like the Alexandria Republican City Committee. Her photograph and name appear on the ARCC website under the heading "On Council," below Republican Councilman Frank Fannon and above a photo President Ronald Regan.

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Sammie Winners Rely on Tech

Allan Holmes — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 18:06:16 -0400

The Partnership for Public Service handed out its top honor to federal employees on Wednesday, awarding eight individuals with its Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals.

Check out the the winners, and the descriptions for why they won. What jumps out at me is that many of the recipients relied on information technology to do some heavy lifting. At least half rely on IT to advance the delivery of services, and the others, it sounds like, relied on complicated computer models and programs to munch some heavy-duty numbers. Here are four:

--Shane Kelley, director of the Center for Automation, and Eva Ristow, project manager, both work at the Social Security Administration, won for improving the delivery of benefits to citizens living in impoverished and remote locations by using a two-way video service.

--Sandy Brooks, deputy director of intelligence and security and chief of innovation and technology, received recognition for amassing information and sharing it with military, law enforcement and homeland security agencies to stop semi-submersibles carrying drugs and possibly terrorists.

--FBI Intelligence Analyst Jamie Konstas helped stem sexual exploitation of children by helping build "a groundbreaking national online database that allows federal, state and local law enforcement officials to access detailed information about pimps and child victims."

--Teri Glass, the Army's acting project manager at the Medical Support Systems Project Management Office, developed a state-of-the-art medical evacuation kit for transporting severely wounded soldiers.

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Turning to Interns

Allan Holmes — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 18:37:47 -0400

Government Executive reports the Army is looking to hire hundreds of entry-level and midcareer contracting specialists and insource more than 4,000 acquisition-related jobs during the next five years.

The civilian contracting workforce of 5,300 employees is expected to grow about 25 percent, GE reports.

The Army is aware that there just isn't enough job seekers with those kinds of specialized skills, so they will have to turn to training workers. One way to do that is through an internship program.

In 2010, the Army brought on about 800 interns, and will hire another 70 next year, according to [Jeffery] Parsons, [executive director of the Army Contracting Command]. "We are in a huge developmental cycle right now," he noted. The program quickly leads to well-paying jobs for qualified participants. Interns, essentially entry-level personnel who go through a rigorous training program, typically move from the GS-7 to GS-9 pay grade within one year and could be quickly promoted afterward. Annual pay for senior procurement analysts, for which the Army has multiple vacancies in the Washington metro area, ranges from $98,798 to $163,275.

Internship programs may be part of the answer to the worker shortage in government. In a feature in the October issue of Government Executive magazine, Brittany Ballenstedt reports on a couple of internship programs that agencies have started that are showing promising results. An excerpt from the article:

. . . [A]gencies are struggling to fill even entry-level IT jobs. Many have created internships and woven the programs into hiring and succession plans, says the Partnership's McManus. He heads up an effort called FedRecruit IT, in which five government agencies have established or expanded their IT internship programs so they work as a pipeline to fill full-time positions.

"What the five agencies are trying to do is make an effort to tie internships to their job openings down the line," McManus says. "If I know we need 10 people who have cybersecurity experience and expertise, then what I need to do is make sure my interns are coming in with that type of expertise." How well the programs worked will become part of a guide on how agencies can improve entry-level IT recruiting and hiring, McManus says.

Look for the issue in two weeks.

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Obama: IT Improves Government

Allan Holmes — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 11:17:43 -0400

President Obama plans to send a memo to senior executives in government urging them to focus on the administration's Accountable Government Initiative, which aims to cut waste, reform contracting and close the information technology gap, among other goals. And IT is at the center of the reforms.

The Washington Post obtained a draft copy of the president's memo, which includes some specific remarks about the importance of IT in reforming how government works.

As the most senior managers in the federal government, you know how essential the work you and your colleagues do is to the nation. You also are aware what happens when your best efforts are thwarted by outdated technologies and outmoded ways of doing business. You understand the consequences of accepting billions of dollars in waste as the cost of doing business and allowing obsolete or under-performing programs to continue year after year.

The administration will rely on the new website Performance.gov to track managers' progress in meeting the initiative's goals, as federal Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients outlined in a Sept. 9 memo.

We have made this performance information accessible to all Federal managers through Performance.gov, and will be opening the site to the public later this fall. This one-stop shop for Federal performance information will provide access to management dashboards related to each performance strategy. It will also provide in-depth information on agency priority goals and key performance indicators, measures, and milestones. Performance.gov will provide unmatched transparency on government performance and will help create the clarity and the culture of accountability required to achieve meaningful improvements.

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What's the Future of Cyber Spending?

Allan Holmes — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 19:19:49 -0400

Tim Stevens, a blogger and researcher in the War Studies Department at King's College in London, pondered on Monday at risk the United Kingdom's cybersecurity budget may be in the future given the nation's tight budget and poor economic outlook. Writing for Forbes.com, Stevens says despite the promises to spend more on cybersecurity - "the Tories labeled the U.K. the ," he wrote - the called-for Â£2 billion or so for network security may fall to financial realities.

Could the same be in store for the U.S. government as it finalizes its fiscal 2012 budget?

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Flu Shot Time, or Maybe Not

Allan Holmes — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 19:00:41 -0400

From the Cobbler's Children Have No Shoe File. Delawareonline reported on Monday that 25 percent of all health care workers in the state's seven acute-care hospitals did not receive a flu vaccinated in 2009. That's about 4,000 health care professionals. In one hospital, St. Francis in Wilmington, nearly 55 percent of workers said they didn't get a shot.

The reasons:

-- no time.

-- "I never catch the flu."

-- Fear the shot will give them the flu.

And, this one is rich:

-- scared of needles.

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