Gross describes the IRS's information network as a "stovepipe" system--vertically aligned computers that do not communicate with one another.

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O. jointly created a regional information network a community-wide electronic-record system that shared office notes, test results, and hospital data for patients across the area.

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The privacy vigilantes now have in their sights an airline-passenger screening system and an interstate network to share law-enforcement and intelligence information.

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The NYPD also maintains a "Ring of Steel, " a network of 4, 000 sophisticated security cameras that feed information into a central monitoring system to detect questionable or unlawful activity.

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Its goal is to map the complex network of signalling reactions which cells use as an internal messaging system, and then feed this information into other computational models.

ECONOMIST: REPORTS: The heart of the matter | The

Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said such a move would give attackers "a toehold" in Twitter's internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company's system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users' passwords.

NPR: Twitter Says Hackers Compromise 250K Accounts

But if all the lenses on all the plates were linked in a collaborative network (which, given the layout of a brittlestar's nervous system, is possible), information from many directions could be added together to give an image of everything above the animal.

ECONOMIST: Brittlestar eyes