William Jackson

A wrongheaded approach to cybersecurity and hostility toward federal workers make it likely that government cybersecurity—already a high-risk challenge—will get worse before it gets better.

Federal cybersecurity has been in the GAO’s list of high-risk programs for 20 years, and there is no sign of its getting off any time soon. The biggest hurdle? It’s probably the workforce.

NIST scientists are helping to redefine the standard units of measure that we use to make sense of our universe. The changes are expected to be adopted in November 2018 by the General Conference on Weights and Measures and would go into effect in 2019 on May 20 – World Metrology Day, the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of the Meter.

An anonymous social media app, Duby, is building an online community for tokers who want to share what they are thinking and doing. The technology behind it is innovative and could be valuable to advertisers.

2016 was enough to make anyone doubt his ability to make accurate predictions. But I’m confident that 2017 will be worse.

NIST has produced a guide to producing software with fewer vulnerabilities. This is a necessary step to improving cybersecurity, but it will be a long time before our software infrastructure is reliable.

Predicting things is easy. Predicting them accurately is more difficult. Here’s how I did on my predictions for this year.

Online consumers say they want more security on their accounts, but they have to be prodded to adopt two-factor authentication.

NIST has revised its guidance to help small businesses establish cybersecurity programs. It is based on the Cybersecurity Framework, which has proved to be a versatile valuable document since its publication in 2014.