The United States needs the help of both the private sector and individual Americans to tackle cybersecurity, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said at the RSA Conference 2010 in San Francisco on Wednesday. “We need to have an ongoing two-way conversation and effort between the private and public sectors, and we need to have an ongoing multifaceted effort with the public at large,” she said. The department is working on various technological projects to improve U.S. cybersecurity while respecting civil liberties and privacy.

Gaming companies like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft ask a lot of their customers. Every few years, they are encouraged by the companies to spend a few hundred bucks to upgrade to a fancy new console. But as far as I can recall, only Sony has ever asked its fans to not play those consoles. It happened Monday, thanks to a bug that kept those with older PlayStation 3s from accessing the PlayStation Network. An item on a company blog described the glitch as a problem with the console’s internal clock, which apparently thought it was a leap year.

The European Union has requested that Google make some changes to its Street View service. It wants Google to delete the images that it captures after six months, according to a letter sent to Google from the head of the EU Article 29 Data Protection Group, which is comprised of data protection officials from EU countries.
It also wants Google to alert residents when its Google Street View cars will be in their area. Google takes the photos for this service using cars that drive up and down streets and roads.

Austin, Texas, is the home of the annual South by Southwest Festival, which in 23 years has grown from a music-only celebration featuring a few Sixth Street bars, a handful of bands and lots of Shiner Bock beer, into a two-week, multi-media extravaganza featuring hundreds of Next New Thing musicians, filmmakers and technology movers/shakers — and lots of Shiner Bock beer. I was living and working in Austin in 1988, the festival’s second year, and remember having a great time sweating up a storm while dancing to some great live music at Antone’s.

After years of keeping everyone in the dark about its solid oxide fuel cell technology, Bloom Energy officially brought its first product out into the sunlight Wednesday with a media event launching its Bloom Energy Server, a cleantech refrigerator-sized power plant for homes and businesses. Bloom used the San Jose, Calif., headquarters of one of its first customers, eBay, as the backdrop for announcing the availability of what it’s calling a greener and cheaper way to wean consumers and businesses off power grids and fossil fuels.

Clearly, exponentially growing technologies are set to change social communications, bringing up a number of touchy privacy and control questions. This year’s TED conference showcased a wide variety of gadgets and ideas, one of the most interesting being Microsoft’s new “augmented reality” mapping technology. Demonstrating the ability not only to see photo representations of streets but also to go inside a building, see three-dimensional graphics all around, Microsoft’s Bing maps architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas wowed the crowd.

On top of all the other demographic categories that segment the United States, the FCC on Tuesday introduced some new ones that its chairman says serve as reasons for adopting a new national broadband strategy, which the agency will present to the public March 17. “Near converts,” “digital hopefuls,” “digitally uncomfortable” and “digitally distant” all describe the various high-speed Web access non-adoption levels found in an FCC phone survey of 5,000 Americans conducted in October-November 2009.

On top of all the other demographic categories that segment the United States, the FCC on Tuesday introduced some new ones that its chairman says serve as reasons for adopting a new national broadband strategy, which the agency will present to the public March 17. “Near converts,” “digital hopefuls,” “digitally uncomfortable” and “digitally distant” all describe the various high-speed Web access non-adoption levels found in an FCC phone survey of 5,000 Americans conducted in October-November 2009.

Bloom Energy, a clean energy startup based in Sunnyvale, Calif., officially launches its core product this week. However, the company really had its coming-out party on Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” with executives giving CBS’ Lesley Stahl a first look at a $700,000 wireless power-plant-in-a-box called, appropriately enough, a “Bloom Box.” Those executives claim Bloom Boxes will bring cheaper, cleaner and greener energy to American homes and businesses. Images from the “60 Minutes” story show Bloom Boxes being ferried around the company’s manufacturing facilities.

Well it’s been a quiet few days on the Linux blogs, as geeks the world over hunkered down and waited for the Month of Love to come to a close at last. Out with the pink and red, we say! The blogosphere was not entirely without its diversions, of course — it never is. There was the news, for instance, of MeeGo, the joint project between Intel and Nokia that represents the merging of Maemo and Moblin. “Who named these platforms, a Lord of the Rings fan with a speech impediment?” Slashdot blogger goldaryn couldn’t help wondering.

A Pennsylvania couple has filed a lawsuit against their local school district for allegedly using the webcam in a school-issued laptop to spy on their son at home. The suit — which was filed last week in U.S. District Court by Michael Robbins and Holly Robbins on behalf of their son, Blake Robbins — alleges that the Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa., invaded students’ privacy and stole private information, violating numerous laws. The family seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages as well as class action status for the suit.

I had planned on using Hayden Hamilton, founder of the Portland, Oregon-based ProgressiveRx.com, as my source for updates on how things were going in Washington with healthcare reform — especially regarding any technology-driven solutions to spiraling healthcare costs. After all, Progressive is an online pharmacy resource that helps consumers buy discounted drugs from overseas outlets, one of many that have sprouted on the Internet and seen their traffic soar along with the cost of buying medications.

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