Author: Lucy

Mobile security guidelines released by White House

| May 29, 2013

This announcement was made in line with the one year anniversary of the Digital Government Strategy.

Officials from the White House have just announced a number of new initiatives and resources that it is making available, including guidelines for mobile security, which are meant to help to boost the vision of the administration to allow access to government information, in a secure manner, on any device and at any time.

Digital Government Strategy U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel made the announcement regarding these brand new initiatives.

He said that they are meant to help to maintain the building that is occurring on the foundation of accomplishments that have already been achieved over the last year by the Digital Government Strategy. Within a joint statement, federal CTO Todd Park, and VanRoekel announced that a government wide set of mobile security guidelines have been published by the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The guidelines also offer a baseline of standard mobile security requirements for federal agencies.

White House - Mobile Security GuidelinesFurthermore, beyond those requirements for computing, it also includes a federal agency mobile computing decision framework, and a reference architecture for mobile security. These new documents are meaningful not only because they provide a standard for government agencies and industry for the development of products that can be used more safely on government networks, but also because of the active roles in development that were played by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security.

VanRoekel explained that “This work … really sets the foundation in place for the next phase of federal computing.” He also went on to add that “The future for us is one where mobile is the default computing platform.”

This announcement was made closely on the heels of an approval that the government gave to iPhones and other iOS based devices based on their ability to pass the mobile security requirements throughout a lengthy and exhaustive testing process. The federal government has also released a new catalog for developers that is made up of more than four hundred machine readable government data sets.

Augmented reality game app being used to teach Jewish cultural history

| May 27, 2013

The application is designed to use technology to share this fascinating part of NYC’s past.

A new augmented reality mobile app has been released to combine the use of smartphones and tablets with the history of New York City in order to teach young people about the rich cultural history of Jewish immigration and other highly interesting topics from the start of the 20th century.

Other subjects covered by this application include the labor and women’s movements in New York City.

The purpose of this augmented reality game is to reveal the “secret history” that is held by many different buildings, neighborhoods, and other parts of NYC, at times when the device user is actually in the relevant location. The app is called Jewish Time Jump: New York. It works with AR technology and was created by ConverJent, which is a Jewish learning games nonprofit organization.

The augmented reality app was created with a grant provided by the Jewish education group, the Covenant Foundation.

Augmented Reality - Jewish cultural history game appThis augmented reality app is a 2013 Games for Change Awards finalist in the category of being “Most Innovative”. The game is a new, high tech twist on the concept of a scavenger hunt. The players of the game must locate the required clues by heading to the various locations both inside and across from Washington Square Park. This is adjacent to the building that was once the home of the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and that is today a part of New York University.

As the players of the augmented reality game move from one location to the next, they receive information about events, archival photos, and even characters on their mobile device screens. The content presented is triggered by the GPS signal of the device. Players are also able to use their mobile devices to view historical documents as they play. These can include flyers and old Yiddish newspaper pages (which have been translated).

The game is set around an important New York City labor history event. It provides an augmented reality experience surrounding the 1909 shirtwaist strike, which is also referred to as the Uprising of the 20,000.