powdermonkey

Healthcare.gov is a 4-Star Mess

 More of a mess in the Healthcare.gov website, Now with copyright violations!!!

Obama Administration Uses Pirated Code on Healthcare.gov 

per http://torrentfreak.com/ 

"The new Obamacare website Healthcare.gov has had its fair share of problems over the past weeks, and the trouble continues. As it turns out, the Government website uses the open source software DataTables, which is a plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library. While using open-source software is fine, the makers of Healthcare.gov decided to blatantly remove all references to its owners or the original copyright license." 

Why this matters: 

 What they have basically done is strip away the marking that lable this as someone’s work. Its akin to taking a friend’s homework and erasing their name at the top of the page.  

This (unfortunatly)  happens all the time wrt open source software.. 

I hope whoever owns the copyright lodges a complaint and maybe a lawsuit. 

It's only your tax dollars

This is a little something I've posted to the Whitehouse.gov site, if you agree please sign up and sign the petition, it is your tax dollars. 

Maximize the public benefit of federal technology by sharing government-developed software under an open source license

Top Three Reasons to Mandate Open Sourcing of Custom Federal Software:

Openness: Open Sourcing ensures basic fairness and transparency by making software and related artifacts available to the citizens who provided funding, consistent with the President’s 2009 declaration that “Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset.”

Economic Multiplier: Making Provides an economic stimulus by serving as the raw material that supports a competitive software development and services industry.

Supports the Federal “Shared First” Agenda: Maximizes value to the government by significantly increasing reuse and collaborative development between federal agencies and the private sector, consistent with the current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) “Shared First” initiative.

Link Here: Maximize the public benefit of federal technology by sharing government-developed software under an open source license.

 

where is Technology Transparency (t2)?

There has been allot of talk about government transparency, which is good, more data to citizens is better than less, etc.

What about technology transparency?

As a taxpayer I would like to be able to use some of the code my government pays for the creation of (unless classified). As a contractor to the military I would like to be able to examine source code for the multiple technologies that are being integrated together to provide the best capability possible for soldiers, sailors, marines and airman in the field and ensure it works, especially if that source code was paid for with taxpayer funding.

The DC CTO and the Sunlight Foundation have recently held contests about creating mashup applications for various data sets, the thing has has made these contests possible is that existing source code was available to change, modify and add to. Otherwise everyone would be creating applications from scratch greatly slowing the speed of innovation. Another great example is Mashable, which has snippets of source code available for use and reuse.

Technology transparency also enables individuals and organizations to learn how the source code functions and maybe ensure that nothing nefarious is going on behind the scenes.

So I hope in the whole transparency discussion going on Transparency of Technology is included in the discussion is included. 

Defense BarCamp, Aug 8-9

we're putting on a defense barcamp if you're interested Aug 8,9 in Crystal City, VA

wiki:
http://barcamp.org/BarCampMil (Please RSVP)
Google group:
http://groups/google.com/group/barcampmil

Ground rules:
- Demo tech that is focused around the Defense, IC, Gov and humanitarian domains, just needs to have a gov tie-in
- only show stuff you are happy with 'getting out' there
- in general the proclivity is toward open source software, but not a requirement

Chinese: Network-Centric Warfare a Weakness

whoever wrote this has a clue:

Chinese: Network-Centric Warfare a Weakness

" flexibility of open source code allowing, rapid iteration in exploring attack methods, allowing adaptive learning from rapid iteration, allowing evolving attack methods and strategies, while benefiting from global OSS innovations."

Jeff Jonas weblog

something for everyone:Jeff Jonas
- A collection of thoughts and resources on privacy and the information age, injected with a few personal stories.

Need Yahoo to iCal Sync

for the lazy web: I need a yahoo calender to Apple iCal sync, hopefully it's out there or someone will build it. We need more translators and sync tools, so that data really can become portable.

Phishing Attacks

One aspect of phishing attacks that no one (at least I haven't seen) has addressed is to respond back.

We all receive the emails, presumably a very small percentage of people respond back with corresponding numbers (DOB, paypal account, SS#, address, etc.) and then spend the next few years of their lives trying to claw their way out of debtors prison.

Instead, when you receive the email, respond back. It would seem to me (much like the way a denial of service attacks works) if as soon as people received the phishing email we all enmass responded back. Because while you could automate the entry of username/passwords into a site (if it doesn't use an image picture), automating the stealing of money from your paypal account wouldn't work.

But since most phishing scams target credit cards numbers, maybe at the end of the day a vendor who keeps receiving a number of false numbers via an individual would raise the alarms. At any rate I would think it would frustrate these people lives a little if they received a 1000-fold increase in their inbound traffic. We've made their job too easy by filtering for them.

So repond back? Of course with completely wrong information, might save the person who puts in their correct info.

Almost like the guy who bragged about his spamming company, until bloggers posted his address and signed him up for every catalog offer, etc. known to mankind.

Imagining an Open-Source World

loosing sales pitch to move from open source to proprietary software:
Imagining an Open-Source World
The other day, a major software vendor came in trying to pitch a revamp of our architecture.  Here was their proposition:
  >  We've got to pay a hefty fee for the initial software license
  >  Each year, we need to re-up and pay a maintenance fee

GoogleWorld

interesting breakdown about Google's analyst day slides:
"Lead in Search
As the market leader, we need to ensure search doesn't become a commodity. Our focus on search is nothing new. We built our brand on being the best search engine, with the best results, and as our competitors have caught up to us, it's become even more important for us to focus on:
1) Speed
Solve international speed issues and bring international users to US performance
2) Comprehensiveness and freshness
"All webpages included in the Google index and searched all the time" -- Teragoogle makes this possible
Expand to other sources of data
Become the leader in geo search (any search with a geographic component).
New forms of content -- video, audio, offline printed materials
3) Relevance
Leverage implicit and explicit user feedback to improve popular and nav queries
Introduce new personalization elements
4) User Interface
Experiment with several new UI features to make the user experience better"