High-skill visa reform needs action by Congress, Obama says
President Obama's administration has been tweaking U.S. immigration policy and making little changes where it can to try to encourage the type of immigrant it wants.
But Obama on Tuesday said that real changes to high-skill immigration policy will require action from Congress.
"On the high-skill immigration area, that's not something that we can necessarily do on our own," Obama said at a meeting of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
"We can expedite some of the visas that are already in place and try to streamline that process to make it move faster," the president said, but "we may need some legislative help on that area." Read more...
Obama+world pays tribute to Steve Jobs
US President Barack Obama has joined the outpouring of tributes to former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who died last night.
"Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs," the statement from the White House read.
The statement went on to praise the Apple co-founder and billionaire effusively, saying he "exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity" by building a hugely successful company from his garage.
"Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it," the statement gushed.
"The world has lost a visionary." Read more...
Obama signs patent overhaul legislation
U.S. President Barack Obama has signed the America Invents Act, the first major overhaul of the U.S. patent system in about 50 years.
The America Invents Act, passed 89-9 by the U.S. Senate last week, would allow new challenges to patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. It allows third parties to file a challenge to a patent within nine months of it being awarded.
The new law also creates a new challenge for finance-related business-method patents by companies that have been sued or accused of infringing them. The new mechanism for challenging business-method patents will apply retroactively to those patents, and the law opens an eight-year window for the USPTO to review business-method patents. Read more...
Outgoing federal CIO warns of ‘an IT cartel’
In a wide-ranging discussion Friday with President Barack Obama's top science advisors, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra warned of the dangers of open data access and complained of "an IT cartel" of vendors.
He also believes the U.S. can operate with just a few data centers.
Kundra, who is leaving his job in mid-August, offered a kaleidoscopic view of his concerns about federal IT in an appearance before President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
In particular, Kundra is worried about the "mosaic effect," the unintended consequence of government data sharing, where data sets are combined and layered in ways that can strip away privacy and pose security threats. Read more...
Obama’s CIO quits
The first person ever appointed as the CIO of the federal government, Vivek Kundra, is resigning after two and a half years on the job, the White House said Thursday.
There was no hint in the announcement made by Jack Lew, director of the Office of Management and Budget, that Kundra's exit was prompted by a shift in the White House's view on IT.
Lew, who praised the CIO's work, said Kundra was leaving to take a fellowship at Harvard. Read more...
Obama: ‘We don’t have enough engineers’
President Barack Obama is making a push to train 10,000 new American engineers a year, primarily with the help of the private sector.
Obama is trying to address the nation's persistently high unemployment level by boosting the number of people with skills in areas where unemployment is relatively low. Engineering fits that bill.
The unemployment rate in 2010 for all engineers was 4.5%. For software engineers it was 4.6%, and for all computing professionals, 5.4%, according to U.S. Labor Department data analyzed by the IEEE-USA. Read more...
Obama’s CTO eyes cloud, mobile options
The federal government is "bullish" on prospects for using cloud and mobile technologies, although perhaps not at the expense of existing legacy infrastructure, federal CTO Aneesh Chopra said in an interview with InfoWorld last week.
During an appearance in Silicon Valley, Chopra, the nation's first-ever CTO, acknowledged the inevitable emergence of cloud and mobile as solutions for the federal government, but he sees them as supplementing rather than replacing legacy systems. He said, "I'm not so sure it's an either/or. I absolutely see the trend toward the combination of cloud and mobile as a very, very powerful asset to be mined for new capabilities that aren't yet online. It might very well be that legacy infrastructure will stay on its course, but new capabilities are introduced in a manner that takes advantage of cloud and mobile -- and we're very bullish on those prospects." Read more...
Obama Names McAfee, Microsoft, Twitter Execs to Advisory Committee
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo may get appointed to Obama's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.
President Obama has announced that he has appointed executives from Microsoft, McAfee, Twitter to his National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.
Dick Costolo, the chief executive of Twitter, joined Scott Charney, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group, and David DeWalt, the president of Intel's new McAfee division, as the new appointees.
Jamie Dos Santos, the current president and chief executive of Terremark Federal Group, and Lisa Hook, the president and chief executive of Neustar, were also named. Read more...
Anonymous targets Obama admin over censorship claims
Cyber activists associated with Anonymous have kicked off a digital campaign to protest U.S. legislation aimed at downing websites suspected of copyright infringement.
Dubbed the Protect IP Act, the rather draconian bill could allow the Federal government to force ISPs and search engines to censor websites under the guise of "copyright protection."
"Through domain seizures, ISP blockades, search engine censorship, and the restriction of funding to websites accused of infringement, this bill promises to take Internet censorship to the next level. Furthermore, it violates the citizens rights to due process, to free speech, to free expression and to legal representation at their hearing," Anonymous explained in a communiqué. Read more...
Obama signs on with Facebook, Twitter and MySpace
Whether an attempt to widen the scope of its influence through the digital medium or simply ‘get down wiv da kids’ (or both), the Obama administration has this week expanded the president’s penchant for technology by signing up with not one, not two, but three prominent online social communities.
According to an explanatory post on the official White House blog, the government’s sudden willingness to embrace social networking via accounts with Facebook, Twitter and MySpace is a prime example of what it likes to call “Whitehouse 2.0.” Read more...
Obama at Facebook: “We Want To Start Making Science Cool”
"One of the reasons that we had one of the first science fairs at the White House in a very long time [was] just because we want to start making science cool."
- President Obama
President Barack Obama and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down at Facebook headquarters this afternoon to have a townhall meeting that was streamed live to the Web.
Via Facebook Live and Livestream, Obama answered questions from Zuckerberg, the crowd and participants across the Web. Even though Obama was sitting on stage at the quintessential Web 2.0 corporation, not much of the conversation veered towards technology.
Questions included the national debt, the budget, the economic recovery, the Dream Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors), immigration, Medicare and Medicaid and education. For a while it sounded more like an "Obama For Re-Election in 2012" campaign stop than it did a conversation with one of the leaders of the Internet industry. Read more...