Dan Verton

IT pros in the U.S have a message for a group of high-tech CEOs who recently released a report calling on Congress to avoid protectionist trade measures: Stop sending our jobs overseas.

The task force responsible for investigating the cause of the Aug. 14 blackout that crippled most of the Northeast corridor of the U.S. and parts of Canada concluded that a software failure at FirstEnergy Corp. "may have contributed significantly" to the outage.

The U.S. Senate this week passed a bill that's poised to significantly alter the way federal agencies procure IT services.

The Bush administration is rewriting the document that signaled the beginning of the federal government's efforts to deal with critical-infrastructure protection and cybersecurity to take into account post-Sept. 11 homeland security requirements.

Rep. Adam Putnam this week shied away from introducing legislation that would have required companies to conduct independent security audits and detail the results in their annual reports. The retreat was a result of pressure from industry groups representing large hardware and software vendors.

Despite the federal government's advances in electronic access to its records and services, private citizens may still have a hard time commenting on proposed federal rules and regulations, according to a new government study requested by lawmakers.

A computer virus yesterday disabled a portion of the State Department's domestic enterprise network, forcing the agency to halt overseas screenings of visa applicants for criminal histories and links to terrorism, a department official confirmed Wednesday.

Amid tight security and the pall of Manhattan's 9/11 remembrance ceremonies, 13 countries from the United Nations gathered here Thursday along with hundreds of U.S. high-tech executives in an effort to foster greater co-operation on the global information security war front.