• Engineers to quake-proof Cal stadium on free-floating blocks

    Engineers have solved one of the world’s great retrofit puzzles: how to keep UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium from crumbling into a pile of concrete rubble during a major earthquake

  • FSU joins coalition working to improve U.S. power grid

    Seminoles center joins the other sixty-nine member companies and organizations of the GridWise Alliance to push for modernizing the U.S. power grid

  • Briefly noted

    Smart cluster bomb hunts down targets… Anthrax-case documents reveal bizarre Ivins’s behavior… New FISMA bill receives committee OK… L-1 in $5.9 million Mississippi driver’s license contract…

  • Cyber Storm II drill shows ferocity of virtual attack

    In March governments from Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States ran the largest-ever cyber war games, Cyber Storm II; the drill tested critical infrastructure including dam walls, telecommunications, and government computer networks

  • India eases foreign borrowing rules to aid infrastructure

    The U.S. infrastructure is often described as “aging” or “crumbling”; in india they refer to the country’s “ramshackle infrastructure”; the Indian government, as part of a move to have $500 billion invested in improving the country’s infrastructure, eases borrowing rule, allowing Indian companies involved in infrastructure improvement to borrow more money abroad

  • GE, Google to collaborate on smart grid

    The two companies, saying that existing U.S. infrastructure has not kept pace with the digital economy and the hundreds of technology opportunities that are ready for market, will focus on improving power generation, transmission, and distribution of energy;

  • GAO: U.S. computer emergency readiness team is not ready

    Government Accounting Office criticizes US-CERT for lacking “a comprehensive baseline understanding of the nation’s critical information infrastructure operations” and for not exhibiting “aspects of the attributes essential to having a truly national capability,” among other things

  • CTO defends researcher's decision to reveal SCADA exploit

    Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) software controls critical U.S. infrastructure; in June, a researcher released attack code which takes advantage of a stack-based buffer overflow bug in SCADA software; security patches have been provided, but the community debates whether the researcher acted responsibly

  • DHS: Progress and priorities, II

    Since its creation more than five years ago, DHS has made significant progress — uneven progress — in protecting the United States from dangerous people and goods, protecting the U.S. critical infrastructure, strengthen emergency response, and unifying department operations

  • Botnets, not the Russian government, behind Georgian attacks

    Scrutiny of botnet activity indicates Russia’s attacks on Georgia were not state-sponsored

  • New Orleans coped well with Gustav

    The planning and execution of hurricane emergency measure was far superior to what happened during Katrina, even if the challenge was not as demanding; analysts worry that with Gustav failing to live up to expectations of devastation, we may witness “evacuation fatigue” next time

  • Yucca Mountain project clears another hurdle

    The Yucca Mountain nuclear storage project moves forward, as NRC says it would conduct an in-depth review of the government plans

  • BAE to participate in Encore II

    U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency’s Encore II is a $12 billion program to protect U.S. military communication; BAE was awarded part of the contract

  • Chertoff: Neglect threatens infrastructure

    DHS secretary Michael Chertoff says that lack of investment in U.S. infrastructure “[is] kind of like playing Russian roulette with our citizens’ safety”

  • Major flooding risk could span decades after Chinese earthquake

    Earthquake-induced landslides cause rocks and sediment to be dumped in the river valleys, and this material then moves downstream to settle on river beds; this means that river and lakes become shallower, pausing much greater risks of flooding for decades to come