President Trump on Thursday signed a long-delayed executive order on cybersecurity that “makes clear that agency heads will be held accountable for protecting their networks, and calls on government and industry to reduce the threat from automated attacks on the internet, ” reports The Washington Post. From the report: Picking up on themes advanced by the Obama administration, Trump’s order also requires agency heads to use Commerce Department guidelines to manage risk to their systems. It commissions reports to assess the country’s ability to withstand an attack on the electric grid and to spell out the strategic options for deterring adversaries in cyberspace. [Thomas Bossert, Trump’s homeland security adviser] said the order was not, however, prompted by Russia’s targeting of electoral systems last year. In fact, the order is silent on addressing the security of electoral systems or cyber-enabled operations to influence elections, which became a significant area of concern during last year’s presidential campaign. The Department of Homeland Security in January declared election systems “critical infrastructure.” The executive order also does not address offensive cyber operations, which are generally classified. This is an area in which the Trump administration is expected to be more forward-leaning than its predecessor. Nor does it spell out what type of cyberattack would constitute an “act of war” or what response the attack would invite. “We’re not going to draw a red line, ” Bossert said, adding that the White House does not “want to telegraph our punches.” The order places the defense secretary and the head of the intelligence community in charge of protecting “national security” systems that operate classified and military networks. But the secretary of homeland security will continue to be at the center of the national plan for protecting critical infrastructure, such as the electric grid and financial sector. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Trump Signs Executive Order On Cybersecurity
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich met with President Donald Trump on Wednesday, where the company announced it will invest $7 billion in a factory employing up to 3, 000 people. From a report: The factory will be in Chandler, Arizona, the company said, and over 10, 000 people in the Arizona area will support the factory. Krzanich confirmed to CNBC that the investment over the next three to four years would be to complete a previous plant, Fab 42, that was started and then left vacant. The 7-nanometer chips will be produced there will be “the most powerful computer chips on the planet, ” Krzanich said in the Oval Office with the Trump administration. Most Intel manufacturing happens in the U.S., Krzanich said. “America has a unique combination of talent, a vibrant business environment and access to global markets, which has enabled U.S. companies like Intel to foster economic growth and innovation, ” Krzanich said in a statement. “Our factories support jobs — high-wage, high-tech manufacturing jobs that are the economic engines of the states where they are located.”Farhad Manjoo, columnist at The New York Times, tweeted; “As far as I can tell the decision had nothing to do with Trump, but they decided to announce with Trump. Why? There was no federal subsidy or any other credit. So it’s just a marketing decision to give Trump credit.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
China, the world’s second largest economy, is pouring 1.5 billion yuan ($168 million) into a program aimed at making it rain in its usually arid northwestern region. From a report: No stranger to using technologies like cloud seeding to influence and even control weather patterns, China’s top economic planners recently gave the go ahead for what will be one of the country’s largest weather-modification projects, reports the South China Morning Post. According to the Post, a feasibility study by the country’s meteorological agency concluded that the three-year program could see a rise in precipitation over an area of 960, 000 sq km, or as much as 10% of the country’s landmass. The multi-million dollar budget allocated by the National Development and Reform Commission will reportedly cover the cost for four new aircraft and updates to eight existing planes, nearly 900 rocket launch systems and over 1, 800 digital control devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
dcblogs quotes a report from Computerworld: After Disney IT workers were told in October 2014 of the plan to use offshore outsourcing firms, employees said the workplace changed. The number of South Asian workers in Disney technology buildings increased, and some workers had to train H-1B-visa-holding replacements. Approximately 250 IT workers were laid off in January 2015. Now 30 of these employees filed a lawsuit on Monday in U.S. District Court in Orlando, alleging discrimination on the basis of national origin and race. The Disney IT employees, said Sara Blackwell, a Florida labor attorney who is representing this group, “lost their jobs when their jobs were outsourced to contracting companies. And those companies brought in mostly, or virtually all, non-American national origin workers, ” she said. The lawsuit alleges that Disney terminated the employment of the plaintiffs “based solely on their national origin and race, replacing them with Indian nationals.” The people who were laid off were multiple races, but the people who came in were mostly one race, said Blackwell. The lawsuit alleges that Disney terminated the employment of the plaintiffs “based solely on their national origin and race, replacing them with Indian nationals.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Citing a report from SecureWorks, BuzzFeed is reporting that Russian hackers “used emails disguised to look as Gmail security updates to hack into the computers of the Democratic National Committee and members of Hillary Clinton’s top campaign staff”: The emails were sent to 108 members of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign and 20 people clicked on them, at least four people clicking more than once, Secureworks’ research found. The emails were sent to another 16 people from the DNC and four people clicked on them, the report said. Researchers found the emails by tracing the malicious URLs set up by [state-sponsored hacking group] Fancy Bear using Bitly, a link shortening service… “We were monitoring bit.ly and saw the accounts being created in real time, ” said Phil Burdette, a senior security researcher at SecureWorks, explaining how they stumbled upon the the URLs set up by Fancy Bear. The URL apparently resolved to accounts-google.com (rather than accounts.google.com), and Burdette says “They did a great job with capturing the look and feel of Google.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.