White House Cybersecurity report: Making the Internet safe will require time and patience

Melissa Hathaway, Acting Senior Director for Cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils, and leader of the team that produced the Obama administration's cybersecurity report, at the event today in which the report was unveiled. (Click to enlarge.) [Photo: Jeff Fox]

Bearing the title,"Cyberspace Poicy Review," and just 38 pages long (if you don't count the appendices), the long-awaited preview of how the federal government is going to secure cyberspace was finally released at the President's White House speech today. (I was actually handed a copy in the East Room 20 minutes before its official release time and then asked to return my copy until that time, 10:45 am EDT, arrived.)

While I haven't had time to read through the report in its entirety, here are some key points from it that the President stressed in his speech:

• The status quo is no longer acceptable. The US must signal to the world that it is serious about addressing the challenge of cyber security.
• "Ad hoc responses will not do." (That's a direct quote from Obama's speech). The President said the country cannot continue to react to cyber crime on a piecemeal, incident-by-incident basis; it must become proactive, organized, and partner with other nations.
• There will be accountability. The President promised that milestones and "performance" metrics will be used to ensure that goals are met.
• Although public/private partnerships will be pursued, there will be no monitoring of private sector networks or Internet traffic. There will be a strong commitment to privacy and civil liberties.

Obama cybersecurity speech: A serious commitment to change

President Obama speaking on America's cyber infrastructure. Photo: Jeff Fox

In launching his cybersecurity initiative at the White House today, President Obama promised determination, cooperation, accountability, and a return in the 21st century to the can-do spirit that made America great in the 20th century.

As expected, Obama did announce the creation of a “cyber security coordinator” position in the White House, but didn’t announce who will fill it. But, in the wake of rampant speculation that such a cyber-czar would have a hard time effectively coordinating the federal agencies that routinely engage in turf battles over internet security, the President was very clear that whoever is chosen will have the power of the presidency behind him or her. Obama promised that whoever fills the position “will have my full support and regular access to me.”

I’ll be posting more analysis of the speech shortly on this blog. —Jeff Fox

Obama cites Consumer Reports survey figure on cost of cybercrime

In a speech on cybersecurity this morning, President Obama used a figure from a Consumer Reports survey to document the financial impact of cyber crime on U.S. households.

“According to one survey,” the President said in his remarks, delivered to an audience of reporters and cybersecurity experts at the White House, “in the past two years alone cybercrime has cost Americans more than $8 billion.”

While the President did not attribute the figure to Consumer Reports, it’s identical in amount and scope to that found in our unique State of the Net 2009  survey conducted  by the Consumer Reports National Research Center. The figure includes the estimated impact of viruses and phishing over a two-year period, along with that of spyware in the six months prior to the survey, which involved a nationally representative sample of Internet-using households.

In the speech, Obama also summarized his administrations’ planned strategy to tackle cybercrime, and outlined the responsibilities of a new “cyber-czar” who will lead those efforts. Technology Editor Jeff Fox was in attendance at the event, and will be reporting in more detail on the Obama speech later today.
– Paul Reynolds

Palm Pre will work with iTunes, may have AT&T and Verizon availability

The hotly anticipated Palm Pre smart phone will be an even-more formidable alternative to Apple's iPhone, if some new reports prove true.

Where the iPhone is available from AT&T, it appears the Pre won't long be shackled only to Sprint, its exclusive carrier when the phone launches on June 6—and the lowest-scoring carrier in our Ratings of cellphone service, available to subscribers. Word has it that both Verizon and AT&T may offer the Pre in a matter of months.

Also, Palm announced the Pre will also work fairly seamlessly with iTunes, one of the apps that make the iPhone so successful as a multimedia phone. This is an unusual development, given Apple’s traditional reluctance to make its software compatible with that of others. At a demo this week, Fortune reports, the Pre was shown successfully syncing with iTunes. —Mike Gikas

Superzooms slim down or bulk up

The Canon PowerShot SX10 IS, an example of a bulky superzoom. (Click to enlarge.)"

Some of the new superzoom cameras I reported on earlier this year, which were shown at CES and PMA, are just starting to show up in stores. All have 20x or more optical zoom, which is a good thing, but they're pretty chunky for point-and-shoots. Still, if maximum zoom is your priority, they're the way to go.

On the other hand, if you wouldn't mind sacrificing a little zoom power for smaller size, you might be interested in some slimmer models that are hitting the market now.

We're testing both types so you can see how they compare and decide which you'd prefer:

Chunky: These superzooms can have as much as 26x optical zoom, but they're hefty. They have many buttons and controls, and have some options that few point-and-shoots have, such as a hot-shoe for attaching an external flash. They also generally have viewfinders, which can be helpful in bright-light situations when the LCD gets washed out. They can also be among the priciest point-and-shoots.

On Twitter: Follow Consumer Reports live at the White House

Technology editor Jeff Fox is tweeting live from the White House East Room, where President Obama is expected to announce the creation of a high-level “cyber czar” position. The speech is scheduled for 10:55 this morning.

(You don’t need a Twitter account to follow his updates.)

ConsumerReports will be retweeting some of Jeff’s posts, as well as continuing our regular Twitter feed.

Obama cybersecurity speech: More than just a new cyber-czar

When President Obama speaks on cybersecurity Friday morning at 10:55 (Eastern time), he’ll be doing a lot more than just announcing who will be the new “cybersecurity czar” and where they will fit into the White House hierarchy. (He may not actually announce who the czar is for a few days, according to the Wall Street Journal.)

He’ll be setting the stage for a new era in America’s cyber-defense, which has been woefully inadequate for many years. According to my White House contact, simultaneous with the speech, the White House will release electronically the report and plan that resulted from the Obama administration’s 60-day audit of US cybersecurity.

That report should provide the strategy, if not all the details, about how the cyber-czar, and the federal government itself, intend to meet the challenge.

For example, it should provide more information about how the government plans to partner with private industry in securing the nation’s infrastructure, an alliance essential to any effort to thwart hostile foreign governments, terrorists, and cybercriminals. The report may, or may not, also address the consumer privacy concerns raised by such a public-private alliance.

Those concerns are sure to be a hot topic most of next week, at this year’s biggest privacy and security conference, CFP2009, which will be covered on this blog by my colleague, Senior Editor Donna Tapellini. Are you concerned about online privacy? Let us know and  be sure to follow her coverage here next week.

New Laptop Ratings: Your shopping questions answered

Apple Macbook Air (Click to enlarge.) [Image: Apple]

How does Dell’s new ultra-thin Adamo laptop stack up against Apple’s MacBook Air? (Results were mixed.) Wondering if you can find a full-featured laptop for about the price of a netbook? (You can.)

Learn more about these and other shopping questions in our latest batch of laptop Ratings (available to subscribers). We’ve added 14 new models, and we’ve got three recommendations for 13-inch laptops, three for 17-inch desktop replacements, and eight for 14- to 16-inch models.

More manufacturers are offering laptops with 16-inch screens. These give you a wider screen for better displaying video. You’ll also notice a lot of laptops with multitouch technology, which lets you do things like scroll up and down Web pages or zoom in on photos by using hand gestures on the touchpad.

If you’re worried about buying a Vista laptop with the release of Windows 7 imminent (it’s due out at the end of the year), plans for dealing with upgrades of new laptops from Vista to Windows 7 are still being negotiated, according to a manufacturer we spoke to. It’s possible that there will be a free upgrade plan for recent buyers, but no plans have been finalized yet.

If you’ve already got a laptop and want to switch to Windows 7, Microsoft has made available an upgrade advisor.  —Donna Tapellini

New Ratings: Front projectors offer a front-row seat at the big show

An Epson front projector (Click to enlarge.)

Nothing can bring home the excitement of watching a movie in a big-screen theater like a front projector paired with a very large screen—100 inches or more—and a surround-sound entertainment system. Until recently, though, you had to earn like a movie star to afford that kind of set-up.

Not anymore. For the past three years, prices for front projectors have fallen steadily, making a front-projection system an option for more of us. In our just-completed Ratings of new projectors (available to subscribers), you’ll see that some of the best 1080p models now cost about the same as a highly rated, big-screen LCD or plasma TV. For example, the two top-rated front projectors in our Ratings—an Epson and a Mitsubishi—each cost just $3,000. Other models, rated Very Good in overall picture quality, start at $1,800.

In general, we’ve seen the quality of front projectors rise even as costs have dropped. In our latest test, almost all the projectors we tested were able to project reasonably bright, detailed high-definition images, creating an engaging, theater-like experience. But the ability of the projectors to produce deep black levels, high contrast, and accurate colors varied, as did price. (For our tests, we used a 110-inch Da-Lite screen with a matte finish.) Models from most of the major brands, including Epson, InFocus, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Sanyo, and Sony, were included. Most of the projectors in our latest Ratings are LCD models. The two exceptions were an InFocus projector that uses a single-chip DLP design, and a Sony SXRD model that’s based on LCoS technology.

Cable users confused about DTV transition

[Image: Sigurd Decroos]

Some cable subscribers are under the impression that they need to buy a digital TV converter box or they'll lose certain channels they now get in analog—all because of the DTV transition.

That's not the case, but an incident related by our friends at the Consumerist shows there's a lot of confusion here. Folks worried about losing analog cable channels need a digital cable TV box, not a DTV converter box, and the reason they need one is because their cable company has decided to drop some analog channels for business reasons—not because the government told them to do that. (Lest every cable subscriber reading this blog panic, let me reassure you that most cable users don't have to do anything to keep getting the stations they now get.)

The changes in a cable company's channel lineup have nothing to do with the DTV transition, though some cable TV companies' ads might seem to suggest that. A DTV converter box works only with an antenna to pull in free over-the-air TV programming, the major networks and a few other channels. You need a converter for any TV (or VCR) that doesn't have a built-in digital ATSC tuner. You have to buy one from a store such as Radio Shack or an online retailer.