Obama appointee Vivek Kundra’s new job as chief information officer has gotten off to an inauspicious start. After just a week on the job, Kundra is taking a leave of absence following an FBI raid on the District office he previously led. Yusuf Acar, a D.C. government official who previously worked for Kundra, was arrested on bribery charges this week.
It can survive a three-foot drop and withstand water sprayed from a fire hose. It’s sea fog-resistant. It meets military specifications for thermal shock and explosive environments. And if you hit someone with it hard enough, you’d probably kill him. What is it? A Dell laptop, believe it or not.
Vivek Kundra, chief technology officer for the District of Columbia, made headlines last year when he switched the District’s 38,000 employees from Microsoft Office to Google’s Web-based office suite. He may soon do the same to the White House as well, now that he’s been tapped as the nation’s first chief information officer.
What an uncomfortable moment for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the CIO Summit Wednesday. Fielding questions at the event, Ballmer was asked how best to handle workers who prefer consumer handsets like the iPhone to Windows Mobile devices, which are more apt to meet the security requirements of large organizations. His answer left something to be desired.
The market was expecting the worst in the government’s latest monthly employment report and it was not disappointed. “Job losses were large and widespread across most major industry sectors,” the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The U.S. economy lost 524,000 jobs in December, closing out the worst year for job attrition since World War II, according to the BLS. Total job losses for 2008: 2.6 million, the largest decline since 2.750 million jobs were lost in 1945. A 16-year high. Congratulations, folks….
“Google abandoned [its deal with Yahoo] not because pressing ahead with it ‘risked’ a protracted legal battle, but because it guaranteed one.” I wrote that on Nov. 6, following the official dissolution of Google’s proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo. Turns out the guarantee to which I referred was an ironclad one. Sanford Litvack, the attorney who would have been lead counsel in the event of a government antitrust case against Google, tells American Lawyer Daily that the Department of Justice was literally hours away from suing the company when it bailed on the deal.
A few weeks back, Google wasn’t at all deterred by regulators’ heightened scrutiny of the company’s advertising agreement with Yahoo. It had no plans to delay the deal with its struggling rival, which was to begin this month. “Time is money in our business,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “… While we have been talking to regulators, we don’t know what their position is. We don’t know if they think it’s a good deal or poor deal.” How quickly things change.
It figures. Not only are the predictive data mining and behavioral surveillance efforts through which the government hopes to identify terrorists a threat to privacy, they don’t really work, either. In a 352-page report published last week, the National Research Council said data mining and behavior detection aren’t nearly as useful as their proponents claim.
The government’s $700 bailout of Wall Street, signed into law Friday after weeks of contentious debate, clearly isn’t the panacea for which tech investors, and investors in general, had hoped. Technology stocks stumbled at the opening bell Monday and then fell flat on their faces as investors succumbed once again to the market malaise.
No surprises here: The American Antitrust Institute won’t be endorsing Google’s proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo. In a white paper published Tuesday, the group decried the deal as one that “could end up as a black hole that swallows up Yahoo, despite Yahoo’s intentions to stay in the business.”
Riddle for you: What’s larger than the gross domestic product of Sri Lanka, Lebanon or Bulgaria, and when divided by 186,000, more than four times higher than the median U.S. household income in 2006? If you guessed the $39 billion in bonuses Wall Street’s five largest banks doled out in 2007, you’re right!
Saying it wants to “send a message to the industry that bad actors will end up being punished,” the Federal Communications Commission punished Comcast today for slowing some Internet traffic–with a precedent-setting reprimand.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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