Government

Telecom takes

2008-07-17T14:54:00Z

By: IT News Blog

For opinions on the latest in Canadian telecommunications happenings, check out Mark Goldberg's blog, where among other things, he discusses which ILEC might be the first to make a major investment in fibre to the home.

For a look at all things legal as they pertain to the Internet and the telecom landscape, check out Dr. Michael Geist's blog. He is the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa.

Blogging ITIL

2008-06-29T15:06:25Z

By: IT News Blog

ITIL version 3 has been released, and here are a few blogs giving a view from the ground:

The Real World ITIL blog is written by "battle-hardened ITers blogging about the joys & sorrows of doing ITIL-based governance and process improvements in the real corporate world."

There are no shortage of training sites yakking about the new release, and that group includesITpreneurs, whose latest entry looks at the international impact that version 3 might have.

Finally, check out The Art of Service, with a host of resources around ITIL and an extensiveblog.

Barack Obama: A Web site or a movement?

2008-06-26T20:06:05Z

By: Sandford Borins Barack Obama's Web site still has the same participatory grass-roots philosophy that it had in the primaries, except that there is much more of it. It has become much richer and deeper. Right now the focus is on money, in particular Obama's controversial decision to forego $85 million in public funding from September to November and to avoid support from lobby groups' political action committees. He intends to finance the rest of his campaign entirely through individual donations. Obama has pioneered the strategy of asking for repeated small donations, and is hoping to expand his donor base by calling on former Clinton supporters. Here are some of the features of Obama's site that I found most impressive. Under the people heading on the top bar, there are pages for 18 groups, including African-Americans, labour, Latinos, generation Obama, and people of faith. The groups' pages include videos, events, and blog posts, and show considerable diversity. If you'll recall, McCain had but three groups: veterans, women, and lawyers. Next to the people heading comes the states, and it is clear that Obama's state-by-state campaigns are much better organized than McCain's. In both the groups and the states, the pages show lots of bottom-up initiative. Obama's home page links to 16 different social networking sites. His Facebook site now has over 1 million supporters and his YouTube site 1120 videos, with his speech on race and politics being viewed 4,500,000 times. A new feature on the Obama Web site is the organizing fellows program, which is training thousands of people - not all college students - with a six-week course in campaigning and political organizing, and deploying them throughout the country. The finances of this program - what is volunteerism and what is being paid for - aren't apparent, but the effort is impressive. Finally, the Obama campaign has of necessity gone defensive, developing a separate website, www.fightthesmears.com, to respond to the host of rumours that have been circulated about him and his wife. The contrast with John McCain's Web site is obvious. McCain's is just a Web site, and in an hour of navigating through it, I had just about read all there was to read and watched all there was to watch. The Obama site speaks for a movement, and it has so many links and contributions that, after an hour, I had only scratched the surface. Of course, the election is ultimately about winning votes, and Web sites are one means to that end. The election will also be won and lost by television advertising, the debates in the fall, and unforeseeable events. Many voters, particularly older ones, never visit candidate Web sites. Still, Obama's effectiveness online has enabled his charisma to reach beyond the town hall meetings in which he excels, and helped him win the Democratic nomination. It is extremely unlikely that any Canadian political party or politician will be able to come anywhere near matching Obama's online presence. But that doesn't mean Canadian politicians should ignore it. There may be lots of things to learn from its components, for example how to encourage repeated small donations. I'll conclude with some news on the personal front. I am taking the summer off from posting. I've been at it for 15 months, including intensively following the Ontario election last summer, and now I want to recharge. When I come back in September, I will be posting on my own Web site. InterGovWorld.com will carry a link to each new post on my site. I will be expanding the blog's content. In addition to my ongoing observations of online politics and digital life, I will be posting about a new project I'm working on about narrative and management. Have a great summer, and I look forward to returning soon.

John McCain's Web of contradictions

2008-06-20T20:06:00Z

By: Sandford Borins Now that the Democratic and Republican presumptive candidates (to use the New York Times' label) have been determined, this week and next I will take a close look at their Web sites. John McCain has recently revamped his home page with lots of bold blue and a header that shows three Old Glories with their silver stars, blue backgrounds, and gold tassel fringes as well as the candidate with his silver hair. As I started to drill down, I found that the site is full of contradictions. The upper left corner has the expected link for small donations to support the Straight Talk Express, McCain's bus tour. But MCain's schedule this week and next has him jetting to a series of "finance events," luncheons and dinners where the basic ticket price is $1000. For the maximum permitted donation of $2300 you get a bit more, such as a gold lapel pin, photo op, or even a private reception before the meal. The toniest event, which was posted yesterday but gone today, is an invitation-only private finance dinner on June 26 in London at $25,000 per person, hosted by McCain supporter Henry Kissinger, and with dress code what the Brits call a lounge suit. By the way, his speech in Ottawa on Friday June 20 isn't listed. A second contradiction involves Web 2.0-style engagement with voters. There is a right-hand sidebar with the heading "Get Involved." When I went into it, all it involves is adding family or friends to McCain's email list and suggested talking points McCain supporters could use for posting comments on major political blogs. Under the "Action" heading on the top bar, there are links to only three groups: Veterans, Women, and Lawyers (!) for McCain. The state contact information link describes the campaign as "beginning to develop our efforts in all 50 states." The third big contradiction involves policy. On the one hand, McCain is trying to distance himself from Bush's most unpopular policies. The new TV ad about global warming on the centre of the homepage begins by telling us that McCain "stood up to the President on global warming five years ago." There is a video entitled "It's Time for Action," showing McCain telling black folk in New Orleans that "never again will a disaster of this nature [Hurricane Katrina] be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way that it was handled." But all the rest of the policies on the site are standard conservative Republicanism. The centre-piece of the economic plan is tax cuts. Hang tough in Iraq and spend more on the military. Pay for it all by cutting waste and earmarked spending. Supreme Court appointments should be believers in judicial restraint like Roberts and Alito. Outlaw abortion and prohibit gay or *** marriage. Finally, have a look at his stance on the second amendment, i.e. the right to bear arms (which reminds me of a bumper sticker I once saw defending the right to arm bears). McCain opposes any limitations on assault weapons, high capacity magazines, and ammunition, as well as the imposition of purchase waiting periods. Conclusion: this isn't even old wine in a new bottle, it's ancient vinegar in an amphora.

Web 2.0

2008-06-15T15:06:42Z

By: IT News Blog

CNet features a regularly-updated blog about the happenings in the Web 2.0 world, including customer implementation news and what kinds of technologies vendors are trotting out to facilitate social networking in the enterprise environment.

Meanwhile, the.Next.Net offers insights into Web 2.0 from the perspective of business 2.0 editor at large Erick Schonfeld.

Apple ports Safari to Windows

2008-06-13T15:06:41Z

By: IT News Blog

ComputerWorld's Gregg Keizer reported that at the conclusion of the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote Tuesday, Apple Inc.'s CEO Steve Jobs announced the company is releasing a beta of its Safari browser that will run on the Windows operating system. Jobs said Safari 3 is more than twice as fast as Internet Explorer on Windows XP, and 1.6 times faster than Firefox.

Larry Dignan offers up the good and the bad on Safari 3. Ryan Naraine smells blood in the air because he's already heard of a vulnerability. And, Steve Mermelstein thinks Apple's move is designed to help developers test Web sites and Web 2.0 applications in Safari.

JFK through Ted Sorensen's eyes

2008-06-11T20:06:00Z

By: Sandford Borins Barack Obama, as presidential candidate, has been frequently compared to John F. Kennedy: young, articulate, and charismatic. It is therefore appropriate that an authoritative inside account of Kennedy's candidacy and presidency has recently appeared. Ted Sorensen, best known as JFK's speechwriter and chief of staff from 1952 to 1963, has just published his autobiography, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History. Sorensen cites four major accomplishments of the Kennedy Administration: peacefully resolving the Cuban Missile and signing the first treaty with the Soviet Union limiting nuclear testing, invigorating the U.S. space program by setting the goal of a lunar landing within a decade, supporting the civil rights movement by confronting segregationist politicians in the southern states, and creating the Peace Corps. Looking back 40 years, it is clear that each of these has had a continuing impact: ongoing nuclear arms reduction by the major powers, the international space program, the struggles first for civil rights and then against racism, and the wave of volunteerism, particularly by young adults. For an administration led by a young legislator with little managerial experience and cut short after two years and 10 months in office, the record is extraordinary. Sorensen writes that in 1960 Kennedy was perceived by Democratic Party consultants, leaders, and major donors as an unlikely choice. But Kennedy confounded the insiders by taking his campaign outside Washington to grass roots delegates and voters. The parallels with Barack Obama are obvious: another low-probability candidate who found a way to appeal beyond the party establishment to the grass roots, using a mixture of old approaches (the town hall meeting) and new (a participatory online campaign). Sorensen pays considerable attention to the Cuban Missile Crisis and his role in resolving it. He was a member of the Excomm, the group of senior officials JFK continuously consulted through the crisis. The Soviets sent two telegrams the same day with proposals to end the crisis, the first hopeful and the second belligerent. Kennedy decided to respond to the first and ignore the second, and chose his brother Attorney-General Robert Kennedy and Sorensen to draft the reply. Sorensen devoted the book's prologue to that incident, describing the immense pressure he was under preparing the draft, the nature of deal proposed, and the elation he felt when the Soviets agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba. That day, when he was just 34 years old, turned out to be the high point of his career, the afternoon when he penned the words that - literally - saved the world from nuclear war. It is rare for someone who, like many of us, makes a living by working with words to identify one episode, indeed one afternoon, which was the high point of a career. The analogies that come to mind are athletic: Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series, Joe Carter's home run that won the 1993 World Series for the Blue Jays, or Paul Henderson's winning goal in the 1972 Summit Series against the Soviet Union. After Kennedy's assassination, Sorensen went on to a long and successful career practicing law - the calling for which he had been trained - specializing in international law and negotiation. He suffered a major stroke in 2001 and writing this book became the center-piece of his recuperation. In Sorensen's telling the Kennedy Administration emerges as one of the best in recent memory. We can all hope that, after the failures of the current administration, the next will learn from Sorensen's accumulated wisdom. While we wait, read his book.

Microsoft and Google are at it again

2008-06-11T15:06:49Z

By: IT News Blog Microsoft and Google have long been fierce rivals, and analyst Joe Wilcox has the latest. It seems Google has complained to the U.S. Department of Justice, raising competition issues with the search indexing feature in Windows Vista. Namely, that it can't be turned off, so a user choosing to run Google's Desktop Search would have two indexers running, which Google contends impairs performance.

That's now all, however. It seems it was against the rules for the name of the company that filed the complaint back in November (Google) to be revealed, so that's an issue too.

Predictably, the blogs are all over it. David Hunter says, ironically, that a quick Google search will tell you how to turn off the indexer. Todd has the word from Microsoft, while it's all just a little bit of history repeating for Paul Roberts.

Novell, check...Xandros, check

2008-06-06T15:06:00Z

By: IT News Blog At Microsoft Corp.'s TechEd 2007 Conference in Orlando, the software gianthas announced ithas signeda patent licensing and collaboration dealwith Xandros Inc., which offers desktop and server versions of Linux. Steven J. Vaughan Nichols has a lot of questions on his mind, and thinks Microsoft is not serious about suing anyone. Linux users provides their perspective on Slashdot. Payton Byrd believes there's more to come.

Stephen Harper: Just how economical with the truth?

2008-06-04T20:06:19Z

By: Sandford Borins Robert Armstrong, a British cabinet secretary during the Thatcher years, once described his approach to answering questions at Parliamentary committees as being economical with the truth. My question is how economical with the truth Prime Minister Stephen Harper was when he answered questions in the House of Commons regarding Naftagate. Last week Toronto Star columnist James Traversreported that several of his sources said that the Naftagate memo was leaked by someone in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). The recipient of the leak was identified as Frank Sensenbrenner, a Republican lobbyist with close links to the federal Conservatives. I'm not surprised at Travers' conclusion: the PMO had the motive to leak - substantiating PMO Chief of Staff Ian Brodie's claims about the Democrats' position on NATFA - and the leak came soon after the memo reached the PMO. Assuming Travers is right, there are some interesting implications regarding Ian Brodie's and Prime Minister Harper's roles in the story. Brodie would not have leaked the memo himself, but he could have asked an underling to do it or an underling might have taken the initiative. To maintain plausible deniability, it is unlikely Harper would have explicitly asked what had happened, nor would he have been told. When the pressure was on Harper early last March to establish some sort of inquiry to investigate the leak, he chose Cabinet Secretary Kevin Lynch. If Harper had good reason to believe the source of the leak was the PMO, asking a public servant who reports to him to investigate was intended to make it unlikely the source of the leak would be found. The PMO consists of political appointees reporting directly to Harper and Lynch would have found it extremely awkward to finger someone there. A better alternative for finding out what really happened would have been to appoint a judge, who would be independent and not beholden to Harper. The report on the Naftagate inquiry does say that nine PMO officials were interviewed, including Chief of Staff Ian Brodie. It says that its interviews produced no evidence of irregularities or improper conduct by ministerial staff. But if the source of the leak was the PMO, the inquiry almost certainly interviewed the person who was responsible for the leak, and that person lied. A judicial inquiry, with testimony given under oath, might have yielded a different result. When answering questions in the House of Commons about Naftagate, Prime Minister Harper's consistent position was that "the government is trying to identify who was responsible for leaking the information to the public; it was not my chief of staff" (March 4, 2008). The following day, Harper said "What we are talking about here is a report that somebody in the consulate wrote to their superior. There are literally thousands of documents like this written around the world by Canadian officials. It is ridiculous to think that the Prime Minister's Office even ever sees these documents." In general this is true, but in this case the Naftagate inquiry report told us that the document was in the PMO's hands by February 27, almost a week before Harper gave this answer. Harper's answer suggests to me he had at least an inkling of what had happened, but was being economical with the truth.

Security issues raised around Google

2008-06-04T15:06:55Z

By: IT News Blog As Robert McMillan reports in ComputerWorld, just a day after a security researcher demonstrated how Google's Firefox toolbar is vulnerable to attack, a similar vulnerability was discovered in Google Desktop.

Blogger and Web security consultant Robert Hansen, who found the Google Desktop vulnerability, says Google Desktop has a checkered security past. Elsewhere, Dan Goodin counts four security issues in seven days for the search giant while Nitesh Dhanjani raises some early concerns with Google Gears.

CIO perspectives

2008-06-01T15:06:13Z

By: IT News Blog

Peter Birley is a seasoned technology executive for UK firm Browne Jacobson LLP. As Director of Information Technology, he's living the life of someone charged with charting his company's overall tech focus and future. Check out his blog for his insights and tips on how to overcome today's biggest challenges, including an ongoing list of Top Things to Address in Managing an IT Department, and his most recent post, a take on the "greening" of IT.

For an in-depth look at the issues facing a health care IT CIO, check out the postings of Will Weider, CIO of Ministry Health Care and Affinity Health System in northern Wisconsin. The system features 14 hospitals and 400 employed physicians. There are discussions on everything from hiring qualified people to using PowerPoint.

Are the national carriers afraid of competition?

2008-05-30T15:05:20Z

By: IT News Blog Mark Goldberg writes today that telco Eastlink, based out of the Atlantic region of Canada, wants access to the carrier spectrum to be accessible for new entrants to the national carrier market. He also writes about how the Telus/Bell/Rogers group has argued about how creating a new national carrier is "unnecessary." I guess the best slogan to describe a situation like this from the Big Three telcos perspective is a paraphrased version of William Lyon Mackenzie King's legendary statement: "free market if necessary, but not necessarily the free market."

Why hide from Wi-FI?

2008-05-28T15:05:27Z

By: IT News Blog

It began with an investigativereport on the BBC's Panorama program a week ago that warned of alleged health risks associated with the ongoing wireless revolution, as offices, homes and classrooms move to Wi-Fi. The investigation found that radio frequency radiation levels in some schools are up to three times the level found in the main beam of intensity from mobile phone masts, and noted children's skulls are thinner and still forming and tests have shown they absorb more radiation than adults.

The reaction continues on the blogs, with Glenn Fleishman noting there's absolutely no science to back-up the BBC report and Ben Goldacre also takes issue with BBC's methodology. Also, Nick Farrell outs one of the BBC's experts as the 2004 "Misleader of the Year."

Responding for the BBC, Paul Kenyon addressed the criticism, calling much of it unfair and the report well sourced and well founded.

The Naftagate inquiry: A failure to connect the dots

2008-05-27T20:05:28Z

By: Sandford Borins In case you missed it - which was the government's intent - the report of the Naftagate inquiry was released late last Friday afternoon. And it was posted, not on the Canada portal or Prime Minister Harper's Web site, but on the low-profile Privy Council Office (PCO) Web site. The 14-page report makes fascinating reading. In my previous blog I wrote that a serious investigation was needed. The research underlying this inquiry was certainly extensive, but ultimately it fails to connect the dots. Consider the chronology. On February 8, Canadian consul general in Chicago George Rioux met with Obama adviser Austan Goolsbee. Foreign service officer Joseph de Mora, the note-taker, completed his notes of the conversation on February 13 and sent them to a list of 232 e-mail addresses compiled by the Canadian embassy in Washington. The list was created for reporting on the U.S. presidential election and included 212 addresses at Foreign Affairs, eight at the PCO, seven at other departments and agencies, and five external addresses of people already on the list. An old Foreign Affairs hand tells me that the department has long had a tradition of wide circulation of reporting telegrams. An e-mail list is the electronic equivalent. Two things stand out in this part of the story. The list did not include anyone in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). Second, despite the length of the circulation list, there were no leaks of de Mora's report for almost two weeks. Had there been any, the sensitivity of the topic - an Obama adviser undercutting Obama's position on Nafta - would have led to immediate stories. On February 25, the saga took a political turn. PMO Chief of Staff Ian Brodie was at the Canadian Embassy in Washington where he heard in an informal discussion that there had been contact between Canadian diplomats and a presidential campaign, and he assumed it was Hillary Clinton's. The next day - February 26 - at the budget lock-up, Brodie mentioned this to a CTV reporter, and CTV reporters in both Ottawa and Washington started digging. That evening, the CTV reporter was a guest at a Carleton University journalism class, and told the students, some of whom were politically connected, about the conversation with Brodie. The word was out. On February 27, two significant things happened. PCO staff for the first time sent the PMO de Mora's report on the meeting with Goolsbee. Second, CTV phoned Canadian ambassador Michael Wilson. Wilson's side of the call is fully reported in the inquiry; he confirmed that Canadian diplomats in the U.S. had been in contact with the Clinton, Obama, and McCain campaigns, but without revealing the de Mora report. On February 28, a U.S. online writer e-mailed the Canadian embassy to ask about a meeting between the Canadian consul in Chicago and Obama adviser Austan Goolsbee, so that writer certainly knew about the de Mora report, and possibly had it. Both CTV and ABC News also began digging to find the report. On Sunday, March 2, three days later, the Associated Press contacted the Canadian embassy in Washington for confirmation of a faxed copy it had received of the de Mora report. When the Embassy confirmed its authenticity, AP broke the story and released the report the next day. The Naftagate inquiry could not determine who leaked the report because there are no e-mail or fax records that any of the 232 original recipients or any subsequent recipients e-mailed or faxed it from a government e-mail address or office. Surprise, surprise. The person who leaked the document made sure to leave no trail, and faxed it from a private location. And, as is appropriate, the media didn't reveal their sources. The Naftagate inquiry failed to explain - or even comment on - two critical inferences. The report was not leaked when it was circulating throughout the bureaucracy, but was leaked shortly after it entered the political sphere. The most likely motive for leaking the de Mora report would be to corroborate Brodie's "not to worry, it's just rhetoric" message about opposition to Nafta by Clinton and Obama. And if that is the case, the most likely source for the leak would have been at the political level. What are the implications of this story? First, Ian Brodie is the person who set the ball rolling by his comments at the budget lock up, the proverbial loose lips that sink ships. One even wonders why he spoke about Nafta at a budget lockup. He was intending to leave PMO and, by announcing his departure as the inquiry was released, he was in a limited way, taking responsibility. Second, the inquiry concludes that Foreign Affairs circulated the de Mora report too widely and recommends tighter protocols to protect sensitive information. This is the wrong solution. Foreign Affairs was simply using online technology to share information about an important issue. If I'm right that the leak came from the political rather than the bureaucratic level, then tighter protocols at the bureaucratic level won't solve the problem. They will simply make it harder for the public service to do its work. In my previous blog about this I urged Cabinet secretary Kevin Lynch to stand up for Canada's public service. To date, he hasn't.