Baseline articles from April 2004

Baseline archives from April 2004

HIPAA Insecurity.
April 1, 2004... If Chris DeVoney hustles, he can stay one step ahead of the hackers he fears are going to steal patient records. But he doesn't dare rest. He is the computing director at the clinical research center of the University of Washington Medical...

Offshore Opt-Out.
April 1, 2004... When online lender E-Loan Inc. said it would use processing agents in both India and the United States, it may have signaled a need to disclose how its work is managed. Pleasanton, Calif.-based E-Loan last month launched a pilot program...

The Whoops! Files.
April 1, 2004... Although the federal government's information-system miscues get a lot of attention, there are plenty of local- and regional-level snafus. Here's a sampling of a few recent projects that have run aground. Bexar's Bear of a Project San...

Managing Exodus.
April 1, 2004... Wil Berrios expects to lose 75% of his experienced information-technology workers during the next three years. And another 10% in the two years after that. But he's okay with that. For Berrios, chief information officer for the U.S....

Bottom Line Per.... W. Val Oveson.
April 1, 2004... W. Val Oveson, Utah's chief information officer since January 2003, is responsible for carrying out the state's e-government initiatives. A Certified Public Accountant, he previously was PricewaterhouseCoopers' director of knowledge management...

What Sin City Can Teach Tom Ridge.
April 4, 2004... For decades, no city has attracted more dubious characters into its buildings than Las Vegas. The lure of quick scores has made Sin City the most vigilant and diligent user of advanced surveillance, identification, background-checking and...

NORA and ANNA.
April 4, 2004... "Non-obvious relationship awareness" (NORA) software probes databases in any language, searching for obscure matches between relevant information. Anonymized data (ANNA) software uses the same technology to investigate data that has been...

Base Case: Las Vegas Casino.
April 4, 2004... Headquarters: The Strip, Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, NV Financials: $131 million net income on revenue of $2.9 billion in 2003. Mission: Prevent and deter acts of crime and terror in and around casinos and hotels. Respond to...

Dept. of Homeland Security.
April 4, 2004... Headquarters: 3801 Nebraska Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20528 Financials: $40 billion operating budget proposed for fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2005. Mission: Prevent and deter terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Respond to all threats...

The Las Vegas Roster.
April 4, 2004... Jeff Jonas Founder and chief scientist, Systems Research and Development After declaring bankruptcy when his startup went belly up in the early 1980s, Jonas started anew in 1983 with SRD. The company develops software used by casinos to ferret...

Viisage Technology: Face Invaders.
April 4, 2004... Viisage Technology is a company both James Bond and Donald Trump could love: Its systems help government agencies and casinos finger a wide assortment of scoundrels--everyone from card cheats to suspected terrorists. Customers using Viisage's...

Soldiering On.
April 4, 2004... They were the worst of projects. They became the best of projects. Spanning almost two decades, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) pumped almost half a billion dollars into a pair of nearly still-born efforts: one to improve the...

Call for Help.
April 4, 2004... On the average Chicago day, as the hulking Sears Tower stands watch and Lake Michigan glints blue in the sun, 44 people call the city to report streetlights out, 54 complain about rats and 135 ask that abandoned vehicles be towed. They're...

Half-Speed.
April 4, 2004... To Marine Corps Sgt. Marco Garcia, the Navy Marine Corps Intranet sounds like a great project, in theory. "They sold me on it," he says, when he attended training in December on the new network. "The transition itself, though, seems to be a...

Past-Forward: FBI: More Delays and a Jail Sentence.
April 4, 2004... The Federal Bureau of Investigation's technology woes keep coming. The overhaul of the agency's Trilogy project is running behind schedule again ("FBI: Under the Gun," Case 088, September 2003). In December, both Computer Sciences Corp....

Putting Our Minds to Remaking America.
April 4, 2004... You know that awful feeling in your gut when champions of a particular cause--such as, say, the need to undergird the industrial base of this country--don't quite get their own message? Devotion--yo! blind obedience--to the deity of low...

Taking the Measure of Real Hot Spots.
April 4, 2004... Twenty-five years ago last month, I was at Three Mile Island. I was 21 years old and it was three days after the partial meltdown of the reactor core. I was a nuclear engineer at a nearby company, an expert in measuring radiation. I'd done...

A Question of National Security.
April 4, 2004... Many of the nation's key defense and security agencies are running their operations on software from companies based outside the U.S. The Department of Homeland Security uses R/3 resource-planning software from SAP. The German developer...

Keeping Out the Digital Swarm.
April 4, 2004... Shortly after midnight on Aug. 20, 2003, railroad company CSX was forced to delay several trains because its computer networks were flooded by the Nachi worm, a self-propagating piece of code that exploited a Windows XP security hole. The...

Voice of Experience: Singled Out.
April 4, 2004... Joseph Gurga Peoples Energy Corporate Security Manager Chicago, Ill. www.pecorp.com Manager's Profile: Gurga leads information-security planning and operations for the Chicago-area natural-gas service provider, which had $2.2 billion in revenue...

Symantec: Alert, but Cautious.
April 4, 2004... Symantec is praised for comprehensive virus-snuffing products that provide good management capabilities. Some customers, however, think it needs to ship out antivirus updates faster. Mark Van Holsbeck is one of them. As director of enterprise...

Network Associates: Driving the Field.
April 4, 2004... Network Associates, offering what some customers say is the best management tool on the market, has racked up its share of touchdowns against antivirus archrival Symantec. Miami-Dade County Public Schools has installed McAfee antivirus...

Trend Micro: One-Track Minds.
April 4, 2004... Trend Micro isn't a household name, especially compared with heftier rivals like Symantec. But the Tokyo-based company has a following among security pros looking for a vendor that eats, sleeps and breathes nothing but computer viruses. ...

Block Spam! Save Millions! Feel Better!
April 5, 2004... If ever a problem seemed designed to showcase the value of electronic security to an organization, that problem is spam. Unsolicited e-mail saps productivity and bandwidth, carries viruses, and can offend workers by its often-salacious nature....

Primer: Business Process Execution Language.
April 5, 2004... *What is it? A language designed to help programmers automate processes that will involve more than one company. Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is designed for Web-services applications, which can mean any function...

The Governing Concepts of Governance.
April 5, 2004... After three years of tight reins, tighter budgets and gimlet-eyed interrogation over every expense, the last thing many technology managers want is more corporate oversight. But they’d be fools not to, according to those who view...

Calculating Costs of a Data-Mining System.
April 6, 2004... Your data warehouse runneth over. But are you getting all you can from your wealth of 1s and 0s? Your competitors are, especially when it comes to mining their data to predict and prevent credit-card fraud. As a major player in...

Gotcha! Recognizing Faces, Automatically.
April 12, 2004... Casinos have had some success using software and video cameras to recognize card and slot-machine cheats. Picking the right equipment and putting it where it will work best is often the difference between catching thieves-or terrorists-or...

Roadblock: The Information Hoarder.
April 12, 2004... THE OBSTACLE: THE INFORMATION HOARDER Following the 9/11 attacks, government agencies-particularly the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency-were lambasted for their inability to exchange...