Tag Archive for: house

In rare unanimous move, House passes bill to protect email and cloud privacy

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The U.S. House of Representatives, in a rare unanimous vote, has approved a bill to strengthen privacy protections for email and other data stored in the cloud.

The Email Privacy Act would require law enforcement agencies to get court-ordered warrants to search email and other data stored with third parties for longer than six months. The House on Wednesday voted 419-0 to pass the legislation and send it to the Senate.

The bill, with 314 cosponsors in the House, would update a 30-year-old law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Some privacy advocates and tech companies have been pushing Congress to update ECPA since 2011.

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Network World Security

White House IT overhaul an antique roadshow

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The New York Times yesterday had an account of an ongoing effort to modernize the IT infrastructure and end-user equipment relied upon by those whose workplace address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In a sense, the story was rather alarming, as it turns out the White House was in sore need of just about new everything.

There were a couple of networking nuggets worth noting in the story.

First was the matter of old cabling … lots and lots of the stuff.

One of his first tasks was trying to map the miles of Ethernet cables and phone wires inside the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The team of technicians eventually discovered and removed 13,000 pounds of abandoned cables that no longer served any purpose.

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Network World Paul McNamara

Hacking Slack to keep your house in order

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Earlier this month, a Swedish developer named Peter Fjallstrom wrote a blog post explaining how he used a few scripts to turn Slack, everybody’s favorite new collaboration app, into a tool that helps keep track of his kids, calendar, and even improves the grocery shopping process.

Fjallstrom explained that he was inspired to apply Slack to his personal life after seeing the impact it had on his team at work. So he used the free tier of Slack – available for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows and allows you to browse through the most recent 10,000 messages posted – and added a little ingenuity to help organize the logistics of a family of four.

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Network World Colin Neagle

White House hopes for ‘common ground’ in Silicon Valley meeting

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The White House hopes a Friday summit between senior government officials and Silicon Valley tech leaders will find common ground on ways to work together to combat extremism and radicalization.

Government officials will seek to convince tech executives that they need to heed President Barack Obama’s call to action and step up to help the U.S. in its fight against militants. But some tech executives are still wary of assisting the government after former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about U.S. spying back in 2013.

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Network World Security