Editor’s note: Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez represents the Fourth District of Illinois in the U.S. Congress and is the Chairman of the Immigration Task Force of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Vivek, I was sorry to read in your most recent post that you were “disappointed” with my response to your article on immigration and Silicon Valley, but I am not surprised. You and I both support a… → Read More
Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Innovation and Research at Singularity University, Fellow at Stanford Law School, and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University.
Thank you for responding to my TechCrunch post in which I asked you to release your hold on Silicon Valley. I agree with everything you wrote and… → Read More
If there is one prominent U.S. politician who has consistently staked his reputation to the digital revolution, it’s Gavin Newsom, the two-time San Francisco mayor, now Lieutenant Governor of California. This week he is launching a new book Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government, a FarmVille-inspired riff which lays out his agenda for transforming American… → Read More
Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Innovation and Research at Singularity University, Fellow at Stanford Law School, and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University.
During this week’s hearing at the House Judiciary Committee on immigration, at which I was asked to testify, you made some revealing remarks. You… → Read More
Today, Google.org’s VP, Matthew Stepka, announced that the non-profit arm of Google is going to be giving a large sum money to Sunlight Foundation and mySociety to promote civic innovation through technology. Specifically, its Civic Information API will help fuel new applications and services for places worldwide. Big and small. Here’s what Stepka had to say about the initiative… → Read More
The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency is looking for a few good contractors to help it kick up its mobile information gathering capabilities, according to a new request for information. The request has the government organization soliciting information sources for technology aimed at exploiting digital media and hardware, with a special request for exploitation of mobile devices with methods not… → Read More
Google released an update to its Transparency Report today, detailing how government requests both for information about users and also for content removal from Google services. The numbers indicate a startling trend: in both cases, requests are on the rise, according to the latest data added to the report, which covers January to June 2012. Content takedown requests especially saw a significant… → Read More
Don’t mess with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia when it comes to Internet freedom, because he will use harsh words to lash out at you. Today, according to the BBC, Wales had some choice words for the British government and their snooping practices on citizens. Basically, he called them “technologically incompetent.” Yikes.
A quick bit of background here, the British government has been working on a… → Read More
Google scored an important win over Microsoft a few weeks ago when it won a $35 million U.S. government contract to bring its cloud-based office solution to the Department of the Interior. Microsoft’s legacy solutions, of course, remain a staple in government offices, but as more and more agencies want to move their productivity and collaboration services to the cloud, Microsoft is running the… → Read More
This afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) by a vote of 248 to 168. Unlike SOPA, which focused on copyright violations, CISPA wants to give Internet companies and the U.S. government the tools to protect and defend themselves against cyber attacks by sharing information with each other. Critics, however, argued… → Read More
I’ve been harping for a while here on TechCrunch about the benefits of open source software. I often quote Canonical’s Technical Architect Allison Randal, who said “Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software.” Free and open source software enabled much of the innovation we write about here at TechCrunch, but it’s been slow to move into established enterprises, let… → Read More
The US Department of Defense Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit is look for a few good coders to help build apps and an entire app store for bomb technicians and soldiers involved in ordnance handling. This is when sliding to unlock could mean the difference between life or death.
The request for proposals is as dull as dirt (you can read it hear) but the requirements are clear: they’re looking… → Read More
Today, regulators will announce a $500 million settlement with Google over charges related to advertisements for illegal online pharmacies. The pharmacies appearing in Google ads were operating outside the law, leading to a Department of Justice investigation into Google’s advertising practices – an investigation which decreased Google’s profits by 22%, reports the The New York Times. → Read More
Some infrastructure news for your Monday afternoon. Pretend this is Civlization V. TomTom has a new traffic database called TomTom Traffic Stats that makes it easier for BIG GOVERNMENT for study traffic patterns and the like. A sort of, “Hmm, maybe we should add a traffic light there, there seems to be a lot of slowing down and confusion as people approach the intersection.” → Read More
Nat Goldhaber of Claremont Creek Ventures thinks that 2011 will be the year of the cleantech IPO…finally. So does that mean that America hasn’t totally lost the cleantech race after all?
The most optimistic case is that we’re in a clump of countries leading the pack. The glass-half-empty version: Politics, boneheaded legislation and our lousy capital markets will saddle America’s culture of… → Read More
Secretary of Energy and Nobel laureate, Steven Chu, dropped by the Googleplex on Friday for a fireside chat on renewable energy and the state of America’s green tech industry.
Speaking to Urs Hölzle, Google’s SVP of Operations, Chu told a room full of Googlers that although he was largely optimistic about America’s green future, he was frustrated by how much the US had fallen behind and how “we… → Read More
The government is coming after you! Run for the hills! Oh, wait, the government owns the hills! Shrill, yes, but there’s a point. A recent article in Time magazine paints a fairly scary picture of the potential for the government to use GPS (originally a military creation, remember) to track your every move. Will this happen? Eh, pretty hard to see that happening—but it could happen. → Read More
Don’t you just love security product announcements? They’re full of acronyms you’ve seen but can never remember the meaning of, like FIPS and DPA and HMG. The news in the press release below is that a new encrypted USB stick has been formally approved for British government use by the British government. The M600 from MXI Security has a “dedicated hardware security processor … designed to… → Read More
The federal government wants to take control of the Internet in the event of an “imminent cyber threat,” as declared by the president. What constitutes an “imminent cyber threat”? You’d need two things: a known, pretty darn big flaw in the network and knowledge that someone was planning on exploiting that flaw. So, if you received a tip that, say, hackers working for the government of Rival… → Read More
You know how you read stories that say the U.S. loses X-amount of jobs per year due to piracy, or that this or that industry loses zillions of dollars per year because of piracy? The Government Accountability Office just released a new report that says that all of those reports are flawed and are completely worthless. In other words, the next time you hear the MPAA say “Downloading that DVD rip… → Read More
Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaks at TED2010 about the value of open data. → Read More
Okay, so I intentionally used a salacious headline to get your attention. It’s Thursday. The NSA didn’t really help make Windows 7. Rather, using their “unique expertise and operational knowledge of system threats and vulnerabilities” the National Security Agency helped shape “Microsoft’s operating system security guide”, according to Richard Sharffer, Information Assurance Director at the NSA. → Read More
There’s an interesting article in the current New York Review of books (predictably, a book review) detailing the history of the National Security Agency, that shadowy power-behind-the-power to which we surrender much of our privacy. That in itself is interesting, but I found the introduction a bit shocking: the NSA is constructing a datacenter in the Utah desert that they project will be… → Read More
[UK] This is a guest post by communications specialist Antony Mayfield (twitter: amayfield) about C&binet Forum, the trendily named three day conference this week featuring the great and the good from the UK’s political, media and ‘creative’ industries. This ‘creative business conference’ was run by the Department for Culture Media and Sport, as a result of their joint publication (with the… → Read More
This California TV regulation thing isn’t going to happen without a fight, no sir. Even though a bunch of LCD makers have said that they wouldn’t have too much of a problem complying with whatever the California commission comes up with, the LCD TV Association has just applied the brakes, saying that any such regulation will ultimately result in “TVs that have fewer features.” → Read More
Apparently it’s not okay to send West Virginia’s governor five free laptops. What a world! Governor Joe Manchin’s office got a nice four-pack of Compaq laptops earlier this month, followed a week later by a fifth machine from HP. The only problem was that nobody in his office ordered them or paid for them. → Read More
There’s two ways to look at the story that many of the country’s biggest ISPs have refused government stimulus money for broadband infrastructure investment. One, the ISPs patently don’t need the money, and are more than capable of delivering broadband to as many Americans as possible with their own capital. Two, the ISPs could use the money, but they’d prefer not to accept it lest they be… → Read More
Fact: cash is very hard to get for Italian startups. This has been the major problem of the Italian innovation ecosystem since the dawn of time, there simply isn’t money. Investors prefer to rely on non-risky businesses such as constructions, pharmaceutical and clothing. Web startups are facing a real hard time, but there might be hope. We already reported Google’s Italy country… → Read More
A bunch of granola chewing hippies freedom loving technologists sent a letter to President Obama, encouraging him to consider open source software. Signed by representatives from Novell, Red Hat, Unisys, and a bunch of other open source solutions companies, the letter is well-written piece of advocacy. Of course, not everyone supports the initiative. → Read More
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