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| Have you used the Suggestion Box? | Town of Franklin MA |
"THANKS TO THE ingenuity of a software developer on maternity leave, the state may be improving its public website for scheduling COVID-19 vaccines.
Olivia Adams, 28, developed her own website, which assembles vaccine appointment slots from multiple sources into a single, one-click spot where people 75 and over can sign up to get the shot.
“My mother-in-law was having trouble booking an appointment for her vaccine, and then had the same trouble when she was trying to get her father vaccinated,” wrote Adams on her website. “I kept hearing the same frustrations over and over – from family, from friends, and on the news. The sign-up process was too confusing, too disjointed.”
As an Athenahealth software developer on leave, she had the skills to try to resolve the issue, so she launched a free, user-friendly site on February 5."
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| Two MA vaccine scheduling alternatives to the State option |
"A 5-minute game that helps protect you against COVID-19 misinformation"Fun and insightful to play. Give it a try. How well do you do?
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Are you ready for a change? Would you like to learn something new? Here's a chance to explore new opportunities.
Check out these options AND remember, many courses also have a self-paced option that you can start anytime.
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| Lifelong Community Learning: Winter Online Learning |
"About two years ago, Todd Duval got a call from a New Bedford homeowner. The woman’s children were being attacked by relentlessly aggressive mosquitoes in her yard. The kids had sustained so many bites that the woman took them to the doctor to make sure they’d be OK.
Duval, an entomologist with the Bristol County Mosquito Control Project, visited the home. He found plastic toys scattered throughout the yard, corrugated downspout extensions on the home’s gutters and buckets for collecting rainwater that the woman used to water her tomatoes.
The containers were an ideal breeding ground for a species of mosquito that has been threatening to colonize Massachusetts for a few years: the Aedes albopictus, or Asian tiger mosquito.
The first Asian tiger mosquito in Massachusetts was found in New Bedford in 2009. Over the next few years, Duval and other mosquito trackers found the tiny day-biters buzzing around traps in increasing numbers, mostly in New Bedford, Fairhaven and, in some years, a neighborhood in Dartmouth."
"Every day, the state’s computer network is “probed” more than half a billion times by entities outside the United States looking for a weak spot in the state’s cyber protections that could allow bad actors to infiltrate the state’s information technology infrastructure.
The Executive Office of Technology Services and Security (EOTSS) and others maintain defenses against those probes, but some programs are expected to run out of funding in January when the Legislature’s last IT bond bill runs dry, EOTSS Secretary Curt Wood told lawmakers Thursday.
“We have major initiatives ongoing right now, if the money expires in January, which we anticipate, we will be stopped without any traction,” he said. “So the urgency from a funding perspective is critical.”
Wood, Administration and Finance Secretary Michael Heffernan and Public Safety Secretary Thomas Turco pressed the House Committee on Bonding, Capital Expenditures and State Assets to advance a $1.15 billion bill authorizing funds for information technology, public safety equipment and cybersecurity projects."
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"Places such as Baltimore and Atlanta have been hit with massive cyber-attacks in recent years, but it’s not just major cities that are at risk of losing data or having their systems hacked. Smaller municipalities are also targets.
According to a 2019 report from the International City Management Association, approximately one in three local governments do not know how frequently their information system is subject to attacks, incidents and breaches. Of those that do, 60 percent report they are subject to daily cyber-attacks, often hourly or more.
Tiffany Schoenike, chief operating officer for the National Cyber Security Alliance, warns smaller municipalities are just as likely as larger cities to be the target of an attack. This could include anything from sensitive data being lost or stolen to systems being locked with the only recourse paying the hacker to regain access.
“Sometimes funding levels make things worse,” Schoenike said. “This could be from not being able to afford the right kinds of technology, or not being able to hire the best people for the job.”
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| One of the keys to successful online processing is to ensure the site you are dealing with uses https |
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| Register O'Donnell Promotes Registry of Deeds Internet Research |
