Pepco, a large utility that serves Washington DC and the surrounding area, is in the political bullseye. Its customers include many members of Congress so a security breach that hurts service would get noticed.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs has begun installing millions of sensors on just about anything that costs more than $US50.

Two monolithic buildings in lower Manhattan that serve as major network hubs for the U.S. are operating on generator power, thanks to Hurricane Sandy.

The House intelligence report issued Monday will bring more scrutiny to joint efforts and agreements by U.S. and China technology companies at least, but trade problems can't be ruled out either.

A U.S. House Intelligence Committee report warning that two Chinese networking companies are posing security risks to the country also includes allegations of job bias and visa fraud at one of the firms, Huawei Technologies.

The United States has been shipping application development work offshore for years, but cloud computing may help make the U.S. a provider of data center services to enterprises in other countries.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory complex in New Mexico was closed Monday as an advancing wildfire threatened the U.S. Department of Energy research facility.

Amazon.com has promised to provide a "detailed post-mortem" on the root causes of the prolonged outage of its cloud services in recent days. Users of the Amazon services, meanwhile, may also have to explain how they got caught up in the outage.

The Think Tank Cafe in the Smart Villages hi-tech park in Cairo. (Image: Smart Villages) WASHINGTON -- Egypt has been aggressively attracting tech companies to its wired office parks to help create jobs for its young, educated and often English-speaking workforce. But by cutting off Internet access last week in the wake of civil unrest, Egypt's government demonstrated just how quickly it can unwind its hi-tech goals.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- The ability of the Stuxnet worm to damage Iran's nuclear complex demonstrated, in a very public way, the capabilities of cyber weapons. That was not lost on the program team of the Black Hat conference, or its founder, Jeff Moss.

Sun Microsystems Inc. CEO Jonathan Schwartz called it "one of the toughest e-mails I've ever had to write" when he told Sun's employees that Oracle was buying the company.

A US House subcommittee is charging that a US$500 million IT project intended to "connect the dots" on terrorists and help prevent another 9/11 is a failure; it can't even handle basic Boolean search terms, such as "and, or and not."

Jim Stallings is two months into his job as general manager of IBM's mainframe System z division. In an interview this week with Computerworld's Patrick Thibodeau, Stallings mapped out some of his plans, including security, the training of 20,000 mainframe workers by 2010 and the prospect of new specialty processors.

Steve Cooper, who as CIO at the US Department of Homeland Security must untangle the mess of disparate networks and data standards of the 22 federal agencies that merged to form the DHS.