Monday, January 13, 2003

Utah Supreme Court Governor Leavitt will be reviewing candidates to fill two open seats in the Utah Supreme Court.  The nominating commission has forwarded 14 names for the Governor's review.  He has already appointed three of the five justices and dozens of trial-level judges.  The Senate has stated that they will weigh in more heavily on these appointments.  One interesting name is Senator Lyle Hillyard who has been involved in Utah politics for years. Senator Hillyard is currently sponsoring a bill that would require that the code change from collecting taxes at the point-of-sale to point-of-delivery to make it consistent with the way many other states collect. The bill is part of a tax simplification effort.  Utah is working with a group of states on the Streamlined Sales Tax (SST) initiative.  The initiative is shaping into a debate between cities, towns, and the state.  Roger Tew has prepared this overview of the initiative for the Utah League of Cities and Towns. 9:52:40 AM

Search Engines: ZWorks Try out ZWorks, a meta search engine that returns results based on searches against ten different search engines.  I have really liked their prioritization algorithm.  If a search result is found to be in the top ten results from at least four different sources (Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, Fast Search, LookSmart, Alta Vista, HotBot, Open Directory, Teoma and Northern Light), it qualifies as an "Experts Choice", meaning it is most likely to be highly relevant to your search.  Really, it's a new and improved Dogpile. By the way, what's the deal with Northern Light?  I'm not impressed at all with their results. 8:03:49 AM

eConsumer.gov Sabrina Pacifici, who blogs regularly about egov issues, points out eConsumer.gov, where thirteen countries have teamed up on a joint effort to gather and share cross-border e-commerce complaints. 6:30:43 AM

Internet Storm Center I'm currently preparing a presentation on cybersecurity for the infrastructure protection committee that will meet on Wednesday.  In the process, I came across the InternetStormCenter.  This is an excellent resource.  Trend Micro had something similar back in 1999 that we used in the months leading up to the Y2K rollover, but this is even better.  I think we could use an entire infragard meeting just to discuss ways to utilize the resources available at the storm center.  Looks like James Gilmore, former Governor of Virginia, is getting into the infosec and homeland security scene. A Harvard study is suggesting that enterprises that share sensitive data about network attacks are less attractive targets and less likely to be attacked. Simon Moores points out that guerrilla leader, Mounir Maqdah, is using information technology to direct attacks against Israel. Incidentally, Troy Jessup who recently fired up a new blog, is the security guy up at UEN. 6:07:00 AM

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.