Technology

For several years, the prevailing narrative across the country is that our nation’s Capital has gone from bad to impossible, with each side willing to cut off its nose to spite the other’s face. But after spending time recently with congressional leaders and the president, the tech sector sees reason for cautious optimism that progress is possible. In our discussions last week, there were encouraging signs that both parties recognize the magnitude of the challenges facing the country and are willing to take the first tentative steps toward solutions that advance our national interest.

It’s often said that success has a thousand parents, but that failure is an orphan. But in today’s strange political climate, it seems failure also has plenty of paternity.  
 
The political right wants to ape European-style fiscal austerity to cure our national debt – a policy that has been disastrous in Europe – while some on the very far left want to adopt the European Union’s (EU) policies on the broadband Internet.  And while both are wrong, the dangers of the EU broadband Internet approach are slightly less obvious.

During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, Intel founder and CEO Andrew Grove used to say that a green card should come stapled to every science Ph.D. awarded in the United States. Grove, an immigrant from Hungary, was hardly joking. At a time when companies were scrambling for talent, foreign-born scientists and engineers were a key to filling the gap and helping companies in America compete globally and create good U.S. jobs. Fifteen years later they still are.

The political and economic forces at work both in China and Iran help explain their motives for conducting offensive [and effective] hacking raids on public and private assets in the U.S.

Iran, despite sitting atop the 4th largest proven oil and 2nd largest proven natural gas reserves in the world, has devolved into a pariah nation with a cash-starved population and flailing political economy. According to January’s CRS Report for Congress, that nation saw its crude exports – which supply 70 percent of Iran’s shrinking government revenues - halve from 2011 to 2012.

Another peculiar consequence from ObamaCare: The Food and Drug Administration seems to think they have authority to tax app developers and smartphone and tablet manufactures.
 
House Energy & Commerce leaders sent a letter on Monday, March 4 to the Food & Drug Administration asking how the Obamacare medical device tax would be applied to smartphones, tablets, and apps. This is a legitimate question for clarifying tax authority, and a clear consequence of passing a monolithic bill without a thorough reading.

Despite the reforms passed by Congress two years ago, it's no secret that our software patent framework remains out-of-step with the realities of innovation in the modern technology sector.



Patents are too easy to acquire, particularly for vague, low-quality features that the Patent & Trademark Office’s founders – luminaries like Thomas Jefferson – would never have considered “inventions” at all. It is now a fact of life that companies have to spend their resources litigating - offensively and defensively - over patents instead of on research and development.



While dozens of U.S. banks are in the midst of reviewing their information security policies after falling victim to recent successful network intrusions resulting from cyber-attacks, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and even Twitter have joined the ranks of other high-value companies to have been targeted by hackers, most notably from China and Iran. It should come as no surprise to anyone following U.S. Internet vulnerabilities that China has been named as principal culprit behind a massive, sustained cyber-espionage campaign that threatens the nation’s economic competitiveness, according to a report released today by The National Intelligence Estimate.

For Brian Edwards and Tom Privitere of New Jersey, the photo was a beautiful reminder of the day they were engaged. Instead, the iconic photo of the two men kissing was stolen by an anti-gay group and used in a political mailer to attack a Colorado state Senate’s support for gay marriage. While there is no doubt that their likeness was misappropriated and the photographer’s work was stolen, really something more happened here: Brian and Tom were the victims of hate.
 
It’s a teenager’s worst nightmare: provocative photos are stolen and posted online by classmates who want to ruin your life. Or an ex-boyfriend lets the world see a sex-video that you thought was just for you and him. It’s called “slut-shaming,” and it’s the latest and most vicious form of cyber bullying.

After serving his country for nearly forty years, Senator Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) departed Capitol Hill earlier this month. It's now up to Congress to honor his legacy by continuing to support his most important legislative achievement.

The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program was passed twenty years ago. It established an international framework to safeguard and/or eliminate weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their delivery systems located in the newly independent states that resulted from collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ten years ago, the U.S. space program and the Nation suffered a tragedy that was a stark reminder of the challenges and risks involved in human spaceflight. On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas on its way home. Commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool, mission specialists Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and David Brown, payload commander Michael Anderson, and Ilan Ramon, Israel’s first astronaut, were all lost when part of Columbia’s heat-resistant surface failed to protect the Shuttle orbiter as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere.