A Reader writes "If you were hoping for a government shutdown today, you are going to be disappointed. In a last-hour cliffhanger, Democrats and Republicans managed to agree with each other enough to keep the government funded for the rest ...

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld: "Laptop computers and other digital devices carried into the US may be seized from travelers without a warrant and sent to a secondary site for forensic inspection, the US Court of Appeals for the ...

dcblogs writes "If the federal government is shutdown midnight Friday, the feds plan to stop updating government Web sites that aren't delivering essential services. 'Most Web sites will not continue, only those Web sites that are part of these accepted ...

An anonymous reader writes "FCC.gov just launched a public beta which aims to take the agency into the future. The $1.35 million site follows the WhiteHouse.gov lead to Drupal. Agency director Steven Van Roekel spoke with O'Reilly about the agency's ...

ktetch-pirate writes "Operation In Our Sites, a US Government-led domain seizure action to deal with piracy, is pretty much a failure. TorrentFreak has examined a significant number of sites that have gone on pretty much unhindered, despite the seizures. Already ...

SEWilco writes "US government sites which promote open government are going to shut down soon due to not enough funding being directed at them." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Originally posted ...

Layzej writes "On March 15, Professor Bill Cronon posted his first blog. The subject was the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council in influencing recent legislation in Wisconsin and across the country. Less than two days later, his university ...

oddjob1244 writes "After enduring two weeks of public fury, Utah lawmakers voted Friday to repeal a bill that would have restricted public access to government records. While Senate President Michael Waddoups accused the media of lobbying on the issue and ...

Foldarn writes "Recently on Slashdot, Utah's Governor was honored with the Blackhole Award. Governor Herbert has now released a statement and a meeting with a concrete date to repeal the opaque law from the books in an effort to stay ...

jfruhlinger writes "The days when citizens could only learn about a distant war from the government or the institutional press are long over. A Dutch ex-military geek exemplifies the new way information comes out, tracking attack flights on Libya, and ...

Uh, is that a dude with tits? Microsoft, working with the federal gubment, successfully raided a number of web-hosts around the country, bringing down a bot-network of compromised computers they believe are responsible for as much as 40% of all spam ...

garymortimer writes with word that "footage taken from an RQ-4 Global Hawk drone was passed on to the Japanese government with permission for public release from the US Air Force. US military sources said that the decision to release the ...

mage7 writes "While the world's attention seems to be focused on the events unfolding in Japan and the Middle-east, Indian headlines are being dominated by the latest WikiLeaks' revelations. The newly leaked cable (dated 17 July 2008) suggests that India's ...

chrb writes "The Guardian and The Telegraph are reporting that US based Ntrepid Corporation has been awarded a $2.76 million contract to develop software aimed at manipulating social media. The project aims to enable military personnel to control multiple 'sock ...

DJRumpy writes "The US military has blocked access to a range of popular commercial websites in order to free up bandwidth for use in Japan recovery efforts, according to an e-mail obtained by CNN and confirmed by a spokesman for ...

The national Society of Professional Journalists plans to 'honor' Utah's Gov. Gary Herbert with the first-ever Black Hole award for a restrictive new open records law. From the article: "David Cuillier, SPJ's Freedom of Information Committee chief and a journalism ...

coondoggie writes "Better algorithms to spot patterns and trends within the mass of information the Department of Homeland Security sees everyday are key to national security. That was but one of the talking points DHS chief Janet Napolitano focused on ...

jfruhlinger writes "'Johnny Northside,' a Minneapolis blogger with less than 500 readers a day, revealed that a University of Minnesota researcher studying mortgage fraud had been involved in a fraudulent mortgage himself; the blog post was at least partially responsible ...

dstates writes "The good news is that the Internet has become a central enough part of global life that politicians are starting to pay attention to the details of Internet management. The bad news is that the politicians are paying ...

SonicSpike writes "In a case against a New York website owner, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is claiming that merely linking to copyrighted material is a crime. DHS, along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), seized Brian McCarthy's domain, ...

CWmike writes "As the deadly tsunami generated by Friday's massive earthquake off the coast of Japan headed toward the United States, scientists at NOAA's Center for Tsunami Research tracked its progress in real-time. Dozens of deep-ocean tsunami-monitoring sensors more than ...

inkscapee writes "The US Senate is congratulating itself for passing a 'landmark' piece of patent reform legislation. Some key elements are 'first to file' instead of first to invent, and ending fee diversion, which means fees paid to the Patent ...

0ryan0 writes "Utah lawmakers passed a bill today to force public school teachers to teach that the USA is a republic, not a democracy, because a "Democracy" would have "Democrat" in it." The good news must be that all issues ...

Udo Schmitz writes "Heise's UK site has the English translation of an article from the latest issue of their magazine c't about Anonymous's HBGary hack. It shows that there was much more involved than just social engineering to get passwords, ...

Anonymous Coward writes "A report in p2pnet.net says a 'declaration for a temporary council in the Republic of Libya' has been published. The story quotes Alive in Libya, which says Mustafa Abdul Jaleel is the president, and Abdul Hafid Abdul ...

CWmike writes "Documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) suggest that the US Department of Homeland Security has signed contracts for the development of mobile and static systems that can be used scan pedestrians and people at rail ...

hapworth writes "The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) has submitted a report on the top 40 countries guilty of piracy to The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), which is preparing for its annual 'Special 301' report. This ...

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Ted Samson raises several challenging questions in the wake of HBGary, first and foremost being, should the cyber vigilante acts of 'hacktivists' such as Anonymous be embraced? No doubt the alleged HBGary plot is troubling, Samson writes, ...

jfruhlinger writes "Details of the conditions that the Department of Justice required to approve Comcast's purchase of NBC have emerged today. Blogger Kevin Fogarty looks at the details — Comcast is forbidden from blocking Netflix over its pipes, and must ...

An anonymous reader writes "The H reports on an interesting development in the United Kingdom's procurement policy. From the article: 'New procurement guidance from the UK government has defined open standards as having "intellectual property made irrevocably available on a ...

jfruhlinger writes "Slashdot previously covered the National Broadband Map, designed by the US Federal government to illustrate where the 'digital divide' between those with access to high-speed Internet and those who without. But, as blogger Ryan Faas points out, you ...

Velcroman1 writes "Last week, [the CIA] launched a revamped website with links to YouTube and Flickr containing Agency historical videos and picture galleries. 'The idea behind these improvements is to make more information about the agency available to more people, ...

AuMatar writes "According to the Seattle Times, the King Conservation District is going to allow online voting to combat chronic low turnouts. You can already view the voting portal. As a citizen of WA seriously concerned with politics, anything that ...

This is a robotic hummingbird designed by DARPA to fly around and capture audio/video on reconnaissance missions (not to be confused with renaissance missions, which usually involve slaying dragons and saving a princess). AOL News reports it's just a research project ...

Anonymous Coward writes "In England it has been proposed that the clocks move forward by 2 hours this summer to give us more daylight time in the day, and hopefully in turn stimulate the economy. My question is what impact ...