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This article reports that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation chief information officer Zalmai Azmi signed a $425 million public contract with defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. to build a case file management and information sharing computer system called Sentinel to replace paper-based processes. Project management procedures were reorganized in response to criticisms. Sentinel will use a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to enable distributed information sharing with other federal agencies.

The article reports on the release of a computer software by EMC Corp. designed to help users manage unstructured files and comply with government regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the U.S. George Symons, chief technology officer of information management of the company, claims that the Windows-based Infoscape software discovers files using Microsoft Active Directory Access Protocol directories. Meanwhile, Joseph Tucci, company president and CEO, has revealed plans to build a tool that can classify unstructured data in a presentation to analysts.

This article presents an interview with Louis Gutierrez, chief information officer and director of the Massachusetts state government's Information Technology Division. He talks about the Enterprise Technical Reference Model and the Open Document Format (ODF) policy. The ODF project is designed to deliver records management benefits to the state government's executive department. Software giant Microsoft Corp. is not a supporter of ODF in its application software, and Gutierrez's team has been trying to communicate to Microsoft that ODF is not an anti-Microsoft policy.

This article describes one-way hash functions, which are a cryptographic construct used in many applications. They are used with public-key algorithms for both encryption and digital signatures, in integrity checking, and in authentication. They have all sorts of applications in different protocols. Much more than encryption algorithms, one-way hash functions are the workhorses of modern cryptography. These functions are supposed to have two properties. They are both one-way and collision-free.