Commander surveys action from skies via high-speed antenna system
LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Va.—A high-speed antenna system aboard a modified Boeing C-135 aircraft gave a joint forces air component commander immediate command and control data as he flew from Langley to Duke Field in Florida. The commander, taking part in Expeditionary Force Experiment '98 last week, got data from both the rear operations support center at Langley and the forward air operations center at Duke Field while still in flight.
Answer the e-mail call
Aah, e-mail. Not so long ago, managers had trouble keeping up with all their phone calls. Then came ubiquitous faxes and overnight packages. Today, of course, we're bombarded with e-mail. Smart companies encourage e-mail communications from customers and have the means to handle e-mail. For example, many software vendors respond to technical support questions via e-mail. But federal agencies appear ill-equipped to provide answers to citizens' e-mailed questions.
DOD bites back at hackers preying on its Web servers
The Pentagon launched an attack applet of its own this month to thwart a denial-of-service attack against its DefenseLink Web site at http://www.defenselink.mil. DefenseLink was one of three sites targeted on Sept. 7 by a group that calls itself the Electronic Disturbance Theater. The group claimed to be acting in solidarity with Zapatista rebels in the Mexican state of Chiapas to protest Defense Department funding of the School of the Americas.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
My research shows a dramatic increase in these kinds of contracts and in contract bundling overall. With fewer feet on the street, small companies have a heck of a time competing with the large companies for tasks, particularly as the large companies dive deeper and deeper into the lake to feed. And the small companies are so busy pursuing business they have few resources available to plow new ground to test the legality of the
Technology in 1860 meant wires in trees
One hundred and thirty-five years ago, when the Defense Department was the War Department, the telegraph was the cutting edge of military networking, delivering timely information to soldiers. As a Civil War re-enactor, I took part in a recreation of an 1860s-era military telegraph system in operation in July at the 135th anniversary re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg. Two-and-a-half miles of wire were strung over the hills south of Gettysburg, linking eight operator's stations to
LapLink Tech utilities keep traveling support teams connected
Pros and cons: + Great collection of remote-access and remote-control tools + Flexible and easy to use – Needs better virus protection and network monitoring Real-life requirements: Win9x or NT, 16M of RAM and 9M free storage; sound card, speakers and microphone required for Voice Chat For years, technical support personnel have relied on Traveling Software's LapLink to copy files from PC to PC. It seems only fitting that tech support people should get
ReadIris stumbles with Spanish, technical translations
Pro and cons: + Scans many languages – Error rate varies with language – Can't handle multiple languages in a document; graphics and chart text handled poorly Real-life requirements: Win95, NT or Mac OS; scanner; CD-ROM drive for installation Que hablas espa'ol? Tildes and other non-English punctuation marks can confuse English-oriented optical character recognition packages.
GCN SPOTLIGHT
The price was astronomical. The months-long downtime could have cost some their jobs. In the end there was no way to fix the computerized medical equipment at the remote location in an Army field hospital in the Horn of Africa. Instead, thousands of dollars were spent on airfare, accommodations and life insurance to bring a civilian technician to war-ravaged Somalia during the United Nations intervention in 1993.
Postal Service expands tests of software for its electronic postage sales program
The Postal Service has approved market tests for a second company to provide electronic stamps under the service's PC postage project. The Postal Service last month said it will start testing StampMaster Internet Postage, a Web postage product from StampMaster Inc. of Westlake, Calif. E-Stamp Corp. of Palo Alto, Calif., in April was the first vendor to receive Postal Service approval to test its online E-Stamp software. The company is beta-testing its product in the Washington area.
Video makes the voyage to desktop PCs
If you think video won't become a mainstream office application in the next couple of years, remember how quickly charts and graphs have popped up in almost every document. Most of the factors that catapulted desktop graphics applications into the mainstream—faster computers, cheaper memory, bigger hard drives, larger monitors and low-cost scanners—also are driving PC video.
New desktop computing products
ADS Technologies has designed three USB Port products to connect Universal Serial Bus peripherals to PCs that have no USB ports. Microsoft Windows 98, Apple Computer Inc. Mac OS 8.5 and SunSoft Solaris 2.7 support USB peripherals such as modems, monitors, printers and scanners. Multiple items can be daisychained to one USB port on a computer.
Air Force wants to keep most IT staffs stateside
LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Va.—The Air Force last week kicked off Expeditionary Force Experiment '98 with the unveiling of a $1 million command and control operations center. The rear operations support center, run by the Air and Space Command and Control Agency at Langley, is part of the service's new distributed C2 concept. Packed with more than 150 computers and with a staff of 250, the ROSC is the electronic nerve center from which a joint
GCN test: Agencies vary in handling of online queries
The promise of a more consumer-friendly government hinges on an important factor: e-mail. The speed with which agencies responded to e-mail messages sent to their public information links on Web sites varied widely in an informal GCN test. GCN sent messages to 26 agencies seeking information on fiscal 1999 budget requests. A dozen agencies responded almost immediately, but 10 agencies had not responded after two weeks.
DOD seeks way to buy software enterprisewide
DOD's Marvin Langston says "there's got to be a smarter way of buying software" for users. "There's got to be a smarter way of buying software" for 2 million users, said Marvin Langston, deputy chief information officer and deputy assistant secretary of Defense for CIO policy and implementation.
Donahue: Air Force is damaging its own nets
MONTGOMERY, Ala.—Hackers might be cybertroublemakers, but the Air Force ought to look within to pinpoint the most persistent threat to its networks, Lt. Gen. William Donahue said last week. The damage done to Air Force networks by hackers and crackers is next to nothing compared with the internal destruction perpetrated by service personnel, the director of communications and information said at the Air Force Information Technology Conference.
Dell 400-MHz Pentium II has an edge
Pros: + Departmental power at workgroup price + Excellent expansion and management options + Improved chassis design for standalone or rack-mount use GCNdex32 scores: PowerEdge PowerEdge 2300 2100 400-MHz 200-MHz Pentium II Pentium Pro Floating-point math 12.05 6.16 Integer math 11.38 5.77 Video 29.68 16.43 Small-file access 11.86 5.74 Large-file access 12.81 6.61 CD-ROM access 46.98 27.66
Silicon Graphics bets future on Irix, NT
Belluzzo spent 22 years of his career at Hewlett-Packard Co. As executive vice president and general manager of its $35 billion computer organization, he was responsible for PCs, printers, plotters and scanners in addition to larger systems and consulting services. He will try to bring Silicon Graphics back to profitability as it embarks on a new line of business: desktop workstations built on Intel Corp. processors and running Microsoft Windows NT.
Lucent lets you order and buy phones online
Lucent Technologies Inc. of Murray Hills, N.J., is launching a test program that will let users design, order and finance a telephone system online. "We are trying it with about 700 government customers around the country," said Denise Gibson, director of government sales for Lucent Direct. The federal users represent a cross-section of agencies with offices that could use the small to midsized Partner Advanced Communications System, a telephone key system.
USPS will use a PKI to manage electronic postage
USPS loses about $100 million a year from meter tampering, officials said. The Postal Service moved a step closer to selling postage online after it established a public-key infrastructure last month. The service will use a PKI as part of the Information-Based Indicia Program, a program for selling postage over the Internet by letting users print bar codes on envelopes or labels from printers at their home offices or in small businesses.
Breaking News Daily
The National Institutes of Health recently chose an application to test the year 2000 readiness of some 20,000 desktop systems in 24 NIH agencies. NIH bought ClickNet Y2K from PinPoint Software Corp. of San Jose, Calif., said Sandra Bond, a computer specialist at NIH's Center for Information Technology. NIH paid $300,000.
Do Not Sell My Personal Information
When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences or your device, and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to and to provide a more personalized web experience. However, you can choose not to allow certain types of cookies, which may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings according to your preference. You cannot opt-out of our First Party Strictly Necessary Cookies as they are deployed in order to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting the cookie banner and remembering your settings, to log into your account, to redirect you when you log out, etc.). For more information about the First and Third Party Cookies used please follow this link.
Manage Consent Preferences
Strictly Necessary Cookies - Always Active
We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.
Sale of Personal Data, Targeting & Social Media Cookies
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information to third parties. These cookies collect information for analytics and to personalize your experience with targeted ads. You may exercise your right to opt out of the sale of personal information by using this toggle switch. If you opt out we will not be able to offer you personalised ads and will not hand over your personal information to any third parties. Additionally, you may contact our legal department for further clarification about your rights as a California consumer by using this Exercise My Rights link
If you have enabled privacy controls on your browser (such as a plugin), we have to take that as a valid request to opt-out. Therefore we would not be able to track your activity through the web. This may affect our ability to personalize ads according to your preferences.
Targeting cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.
Social media cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. They are capable of tracking your browser across other sites and building up a profile of your interests. This may impact the content and messages you see on other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools.
If you want to opt out of all of our lead reports and lists, please submit a privacy request at our Do Not Sell page.
Cookie List
A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. Those cookies are set by us and called first-party cookies. We also use third-party cookies – which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting – for our advertising and marketing efforts. More specifically, we use cookies and other tracking technologies for the following purposes:
Strictly Necessary Cookies
We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.
Functional Cookies
We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.
Performance Cookies
We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.
Sale of Personal Data
We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.
Social Media Cookies
We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.
Targeting Cookies
We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.