Monday, June 23, 2003

Food and Nutrition The US Department of Agriculture has created a new online intergovernmental system that will allow state and local officials who work with the Food and Nutrition Service to place orders online. In addition, the FNS has created a new food stamp elegibility screening system.  Similar functionality is built into GovBenefits. 5:29:20 PM    comment []

Security Groups The first national Infragard conference is being held today in Washington, DC.  I just came across the local ISACA website.  Many ISACA members are also involved with Infragard.  The fifth annual Network Security Conference sponsored by ISACA will be held in Las Vegas in September.  The agenda looks useful. 2:39:55 PM    comment []

Weblogs in Iran I have been interested in the explosion of weblogs in Iran which are a major force in the developing social revolution.  A year ago, the Iranian blogger was relatively alone.  Currently, PersianBlog hosts thousands of new weblogs.  Many more, such as Ayandegan are hosted on BlogSpot.  According to the Christian Science Monitor, there are now 20,000 bloggers in Iran.  It is also estimated that there are now 3 million internet users in the country, an increase of 90% from a year ago.  Weblogs are quickly becoming the primary source of information and idea exchange in the country.  I'll be watching closely to see how this develops. 2:10:35 PM    comment []

Online License Renewal Popular According to the Deseret News, 18,300 contractors have used the State's online contractor license renewal service that was launched in March.  That appears to be a healthy adoption rate for a new application.  Klare Bachman, who was the Department of Commerce Deputy Director and eGovernment Product Manager is strongly committed to online services and was just appointed to be the new executive director, so expect many more new services from Commerce. 9:13:25 AM    comment []

Judicial Hearing Video Here's the video from the Senate Judicial Committee hearing where Senator Hatch suggested supporting the destruction of personal computers involved in peer-to-peer transfer of copyrighted material (his comments are found beginning at 1:21:20 on the stream).  Since that time, the Senator has issued the following statement on his website. “I am very concerned about Internet piracy of personal and copyrighted materials, and I want to find effective solutions to these problems. “I made my comments at yesterday’s hearing because I think that industry is not doing enough to help us find effective ways to stop people from using computers to steal copyrighted, personal or sensitive materials. I do not favor extreme remedies – unless no moderate remedies can be found. I asked the interested industries to help us find those moderate remedies.” 8:59:14 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.