U.S. Cyber Command is now fully operational, the Defense Department announced Nov. 3.

The new command, co-located with the National Security Agency in Ft. Mede, Md., is tasked with defending more than 7 million networked computers operating in 15,000 networks with 21 satellite gateways and 20,000 commercial circuits, according to figures quoted earlier this year by its commander, Army Gen. Keith Alexander, who is also head of the NSA. The command brings under one roof previously separated offensive and defensive military cyber capabilities.

Even as the command achieves full operational capability--a Pentagon term for when a system is deployed to a unit and the organization has the ability to employ and maintain it--questions still remain about the extent to which it would respond to an attack on domestic critical infrastructure.

The Defense and Homeland Security departments signed an agreement in September setting an agenda of cooperation over national security, but an actual cyber attack made by a foreign power intending to cause physical damage on American soil is still a just a hypothetical, as far as is publically known.

For more:
- see the DoD announcement of cyber command FOC

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The Army has selected a set of technical standards that collectively form what the service has dubbed a common operating environment architecture for information technologies that warfighters utilize from training through deployment.

Army Chief Information Officer/G6  Jeffrey Sorenson and Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Malcolm O'Neill approved an architecture guidance (.pdf) document in a memo (.pdf) dated Oct. 20.

The Army says it hopes to increase interoperability and decrease cost, creating the possibility for applications to operate across a widely-standardized environment. The common operating environment does not currently apply to embedded, real-time of critical vetronics or avionics systems, the guidance states. However, the Army intends to extend the COE across enterprise and tactical servers, vehicles and aircraft, sensors, mobile end user devices and desktops.

Among the principals behind the COE is that applications should be built for a server environment, "thus making applications easier to update, to operate and to maintain," the guidance states.

Future testing of software interoperability will change from a direct test of the application against every other system it might interact with to an interface-based approach  that verifies an application's functionality in a test bed, the guidance adds. If the application exchanges relevant data in the correct format with the right standard in the test bed then it will earn an interoperability certification. A detailed test plan is set for release in December, according to the guidance.

The COE is part of a broader initiative called Army Software Transformation, which seeks to standardize computing environments and software development toolkits, streamline the process for software development and create an "Army Application marketplace."

For more:
- download the Sorenson-O'Neill Oct. 20 memo (.pdf)
- download the COE architecture guidance (.pdf)
- go to an Army webpage with additional COE context and links

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Facebook fandom is a 74 percent to 82 percent accurate barometer of federal election outcomes, the social media site says in a post-election analysis of the mid-terms.

In the case of House races, 74 percent of the 98 hotly contested races tracked by the Facebook analysis ended up going to the candidate with the most fans. Of those races, five are still too close to call.

In the Senate election, about 82 percent of 34 decided races (the outcome in Alaska remains unknown) also went to the candidate with the most Facebook fans.

Some of the races where the Facebook fandom was an incorrect measure of the outcome were among the most high profile of the midterms, however. For example, Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell, Republican candidates for the Senate in Nevada and Delaware, respectively, both vastly outnumber their Democratic opponents in Facebook fandom--and both lost.

-->READ THE FULL ARTICLE

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A time-consuming Federal Aviation Administration certification process for new aircraft equipment continues to threaten the roll out of avionics capable of taking full advantage of NextGen, the FAA's effort to modernize air traffic control.

That's what industry stakeholders told auditors from the Government Accountability Office for a report dated Oct. 7 that the GAO released publically Oct. 29.

NextGen is a $40 billion collection of programs meant to revamp air traffic control. As part of it, the FAA mandated earlier this year that airplanes carry by 2020 transponders to receive and relay Global Positioning System signals for air traffic control use, a technology known as Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. The FAA also hopes that the airplane operators will equip cockpits with displays capable of receiving aircraft positional data back from the ground, so that pilots would have a real-time digital picture of their location relative to other aircraft.

As NextGen progresses, airplane operators will need to install extra equipment--but getting the FAA to approve new equipment for can be a long and frustrating experience, private sector officials told the GAO.

The FAA is working to ensure that NextGen equipment receives the attention of dedicated personnel and prioritized attention, the report states.

But, "it is too early to tell whether [the changes] will increase the efficiency of FAA's certification and approval process and reduce unanticipated delays and cost for the industry," the report states.

For more:
- download the report, GAO-11-14 (.pdf)

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The Environmental Protection Agency began an effort in 2006 to reorganize its library network. Now, more than two years past the initially-scheduled completion date, a Government Accountability Office report to Congress finds the EPA lacks a complete strategy for meeting users' needs and has no specific goals, timelines, or plan for acquiring, deploying and managing funding.

In 1971, the EPA created a library network which provided public access to environmental data, but materials and services were in varying formats and scattered geographically. Although EPA has made gains in digitizing library documents and consolidating libraries, it has not inventoried the network's holdings, says the report.

-->READ THE FULL ARTICLE

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