September 2011

The Government Printing Office and the National Archives’s Office of the Federal Register are introducing another technology initiative to increase public access to and transparency of regulatory information.

The offices announced the addition of an Application Programming Interface for FederalRegister.gov, which enables information technology developers to create new applications with information published on the site. The new tool will make government information more transparent and easily available for the American public, the offices said.

(Aug 17)

Hewlett-Packard’s decision to surrender in smartphones and tablet computers and possibly get rid of its personal computer business underscores how Apple has transformed consumer electronics in just four years.

HP’s new CEO Leo Apotheker is now trying to turn the Silicon Valley stalwart into a twin of East Coast archrival IBM. In doing so, he is acknowledging that his company has failed to balance the demands of both the consumer and corporate markets. As a result, it needs to exit most of its consumer businesses, just as IBM did six years ago. Apple is the hottest consumer electronics company on the planet. The iPhone’s debut in 2007 brought ease of use and an intuitive design unmatched by predecessors, including smartphone pioneer Palm, which HP bought last year in hopes of getting a foothold in mobile devices. Apple followed in 2010 with the iPad tablet computer and managed to persuade people to buy a product they never knew they needed. Rather than remain locked in a futile fight with a company that seems to have found the magic touch on making hit consumer products, HP is whittling its competition to the other business technology specialists — namely, IBM, Oracle Corp. and Cisco.

HP’s overhaul has three parts:

1. HP will stop making tablet computers and smartphones by October.
2. It will try to spin off or sell its PC business, the world’s largest. By the end of next year, HP computers could be sold under another company’s name.
3. The company plans to buy business software maker Autonomy Corp. for about $10 billion in one of the biggest takeovers in HP’s 72-year history. That would expand HP’s software and services offerings, where IBM is strong.

(Aug 18)

Until recently, medical files belonging to nearly 300,000 Californians sat unsecured on the Internet for the entire world to see. There were insurance forms, Social Security numbers and doctors' notes.

Among the files were summaries that spelled out, in painstaking detail, a trucker's crushed fingers, a maintenance worker's broken ribs and one man's bout with sexual dysfunction. At a time of mounting computer hacking threats, the incident offers an alarming glimpse at privacy risks as the nation moves steadily into an era in which every American's sensitive medical information will be digitized. Electronic records can lower costs, cut bureaucracy and ultimately save lives. The government is offering bonuses to early adopters and threatening penalties and cuts in payments to medical providers who refuse to change. But there are not-so-hidden costs with modernization. "When things go wrong, they can really go wrong," says Beth Givens, director of the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, which tracks data breaches. "Even the most well-designed systems are not safe. … This case is a good example of how the human element is the weakest link."

(Aug 22)

House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) praised the Federal Communications Commission for scrubbing the Fairness Doctrine and other regulations from the federal rulebook, but said that was not enough and they would continue to push for FCC process reforms.

"The Fairness Doctrine is a relic of an earlier era when government officials thought they knew best what news and information the American people wanted and needed," said Upton and Walden in a joint statement. "The rules are outdated and needlessly endanger our sacred freedoms of speech and the press. The FCC has finally done what it should have done 20 years ago: It has scrapped the Fairness Doctrine once and for all."

As to the other 82 regulations the FCC is pruning -- many for reasons of duplication or, in at least one case, because a court struck it down in the mid-1990s -- the legislators said they were pleased, and were also pleased that the FCC was planning to submit a plan for reviewing other regulations in response to a request by the President. But they were not ready to let the FCC off the deregulatory hook.

"[R]eal regulatory reform requires more. Regulators should propose rules before adopting them, give the public adequate time to review those rules, and only adopt rules if the benefits outweigh the costs," they said. "The FCC has not always followed these best practices, and that's why we are moving forward on FCC process reform. Good government practices -- transparent government practices -- are a necessary ingredient for eliminating the regulatory overhang that deters the investment and job creation our economy so desperately needs." They did not cite the FCC's network neutrality rulemaking, but that has been one of their examples of rules that they believe did not fit the above criteria for adequate review and cost-benefit analysis.

(Aug 23)