Navy will install Xylan ATM switches aboard four ship groups
In its continuing effort to modernize its shipboard communications systems, the Navy will outfit two carrier battle groups and two amphibious-ready groups with asynchronous transfer mode LANs in the next year. The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command this month negotiated an order with Electronic Data Systems Corp. under the company's PC LAN+ contract to provide ATM switches from Xylan Corp. of Calabasas, Calif., to serve as the communications backbones on the ships.
For your eyes only: These glasses would fit perfectly on James Bond
Move over, Mr. Bond. Sceptre Technologies Inc. of City of Industry, Calif., has invented a brand-new way to hide sensitive data in plain sight. The Invisible LCD Privacy Screen shows its secrets only to authorized users who wear special sunglasses. Everyone else just sees a white screen. Sceptre has manipulated the layers of glass and the film inside to display white noise to unauthorized viewers.
Treasury seeks smarter cards
The Treasury Department has completed a four-month Internet commerce pilot of smart cards and elliptic-curve cryptography in conjunction with the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) specification. "It worked very well," said Gary Grippo, program manager for electronic money at Treasury's Financial Management Service. "We learned that elliptic-curve cryptography was more than 73 percent more efficient than the RSA [Data Security Inc.] mechanism."
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
ASW 1.0 is obviously what you were using on the LT. ASW 1.0 was shipped with Dragon's NaturallySpeaking 1.0 and 2.0. As you saw, even though it told you "below average," recognition and performance were fine. The categories assigned to various ranges of speech-to-noise ratios in ASW 1.0 were arbitrary—and, as Dragon saw, readings that gave perfectly fine performance but were labeled "below average" caused a good deal of unnecessary concern and stress for users.
Center records hydrologic data for forecast offices
Will it rain tomorrow? The team at the Ohio River Forecast Center has the job of supplying that information to the National Weather Service's forecast offices, which in turn issue public watches and warnings. The 52-year-old center is the oldest of the nation's 13 river forecast centers. It monitors conditions for an area of about 200,000 square miles throughout the Ohio River basin, including the Allegheny River in western New York, the Monongahela River in West Virginia and
Statistics bureau will post no data before its time
The Bureau of Labor Statistics this month decided to suspend the posting of some economic data on its Web site until it can create new posting rules. Although security was the driving force behind the decision, it is not hackers BLS is concerned about. The problem is mistakes by the bureau's own employees.
Agencies face decision on year 2000: Fix or cut bait
Federal agencies have reached a fork in the road to year 2000 readiness. The choice: either replace unready PCs and servers or upgrade them. Some agencies are using broad-brush software tools to fix their PC LANs. Others are physically checking the BIOS and real-time clock on each machine and applying up-grades and code patches where necessary.
BRIEFING BOOK
Stop the presses. The Defense Logistics Agency has hired KPMG Peat Marwick of New York to review the Defense Automated Printing Service operations with an eye toward privatization. The fiscal 1999 Defense Authorization Act mandated the independent review. DOD must submit the findings to Congress by March 31. "The study is intended to be an objective assessment of DAPS' current structure and operations, so we can have a valid and reliable database from which to make decisions
IRS will test the use of PINs as electronic signatures in two pilots for 1998returns
The IRS will run two pilots this tax season in which it will accept personal identification numbers as electronic signatures. In the first pilot, more than 8,000 approved tax preparers can let taxpayers choose PINs and use them to sign their 1998 tax returns, said Robert Barr, the IRS' assistant commissioner for electronic tax administration.
GAO eases sole-source fears
A General Accounting Office report counters widespread suggestions that the government's increased use of multiple-award contracts has resulted in too many sole-source task orders. GAO said agencies varied in their efforts to promote competition within multiple-award contracts. "Two of the six organizations we reviewed consistently obtained competition for orders under multiple-award contracts, but the remaining four did not," the report said.
Push is on for data broadcasts
Push-pull technology made quite a splash last year and still has momentum for agencywide broadcasts. For example, it can be used to standardize every user on a particular version of software. Although some federal sites forbid subscribing to outside push channels that monopolize network bandwidth, push technology can effect change at thousands of desktop PCs better than broadcast e-mail attachments or simple pointers to an intranet site.
Feds' changing tastes mark '98 surveys
This year's GCN surveys resulted in power plays among some of government's big contractors. IBM Corp. drew the highest overall ratings for quality in two GCN Product Preference Survey hardware categories: notebook computers and PC Card modems. Corel Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. Corel's WordPerfect and Adobe FrameMaker tied for the top honors in desktop publishing software. Adobe Illustrator 7.0 and CorelDraw 7 were first and second, respectively, among six contenders in the graphics and illustration software
FAA pulls tracking app from two radar centers
The Federal Aviation Administration has hit some turbulence in getting aircraft-tracking software ready for 2000. At radar centers serving major airports in Chicago and Dallas, FAA in recent weeks reverted to an old version of the Automated Radar Terminal System—one that is not 2000-ready. Complaints from air traffic controllers at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport led FAA early this month to pull the plug on the latest ARTS version there. Last week, air traffic controllers at the Dallas-Fort
No question, Survey Select helps ease the circulation of surveys
Most agencies that circulate surveys have learned that answers are meaningful only if you ask the right questions. Survey Select takes much of the headache out of conceiving and formatting survey questions. It distributes surveys on the Web or by e-mail and analyzes the results. You can draft a survey from scratch or work from the package's templates, which give valuable guidance in designing questions to draw usable responses.
Videoconferencing tools
Some people love to travel, and there's no denying that a face-to-face meeting affords a depth and subtlety of communication unavailable by other means. But if you're getting on an airplane just to hold a half-hour meeting, chances are you can find more productive ways to spend your time and your agency's budget.
SPAWAR contracts go netwide
A document imaging system lets the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command post on its intranet 100,000 documents and 750,000 pages that represent 125 active contracts and $2 billion in Navy funds. The command's contract paperwork tripled in 1993 when four East Coast naval engineering activities consolidated, said Randy Bryant, an electrical engineer in SPAWAR's Advanced Technology Branch.
Controversial dissemination bill comes up short
A bill criticized for creating a new bureaucracy for publishing government information died as Congress adjourned last month. There were last-minute attempts to attach the Wendell H. Ford Government Publications Reform Act, S 2288, to the fiscal 1999 omnibus spending bill. The efforts failed after facing strong opposition from Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who said he was concerned the bill would negate provisions of the Information Technology Management Reform Act.
SNEAKER.NET
Q. I'm buying a digital camera to take photos for the newsletter circulated at my office. Which camera should I get? A. Any model with megapixel resolution will do. Megapixel means 1 million pixels or more. If a camera can capture a 1,024- by 768-pixel image, or 786,432 pixels, it's close to the megapixel range. If it can capture 1,280 by 1,024, you're getting 1.3 million pixels.
PC managers seek the real deal on real-time clocks
Year 2000 project teams have gotten conflicting advice about real-time clocks from two powerful partners in the PC industry: Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. The topic is more than academic for managers who worry that even brand-new PCs might not be fully year 2000-ready [GCN, Oct. 19, Page 1]. At issue is how far they must go in testing their PC hardware to guarantee it will work properly after Jan. 1, 2000. Some operating systems, including
NIST upgrades to faster, more accessible backbone
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is upgrading its campus network in Gaithersburg, Md., to do all things for all users. NIST will maintain its old Fiber Distributed Data Interface backbone while migrating to asynchronous transfer mode, installing Gigabit Ethernet between switches, and accommodating a growing number of requests for adding switched Ethernet and Fast Ethernet to desktop PCs.
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