Friday, October 30, 2009 10:49 AM/EST
Click here to see the slide show
 When I heard the recent announcement about Wi-Fi Direct, a proposed method to make it possible for Wi-Fi devices to connect to each other seamlessly without the need of access points, I had a common reaction to a new technology: excitement, tinged with fear.
The part of me that's a tech enthusiast thought, this could be really cool. Letting Wi-Fi-enabled devices easily connect to each other will ease a lot of connection hassles, and probably kill Bluetooth along the way.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 10:33 PM/EST
The second half of day one at DEMOfall 2009 saw a weird mix of security products (for both business and consumers), products designed around either getting paid or paying someone, and a couple of products that didn't seem to fit any other category at DEMOfall.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009 12:15 PM/EST
Is the devil you know—and expect—better than the one you don't?
Consider this: You run into person No. 1—let's call her Melissa—on the street. Without warning, Melissa hits you in the face and then proceeds to beat you up as you lie on the ground.
Then, person No. 2, Michelangelo, walks up to you and calmly states that in two weeks time, at exactly 2 p.m., he will beat you up. Then he walks away.
Now, while neither is a pleasant scenario, I have a feeling that the majority of people would rather run into Michelangelo than Melissa.
Tuesday, March 03, 2009 5:48 PM/EST
The second day of Demo got off to a much better start than Day 1, with a couple of promising semantic Web applications starting off the vendor presentations.
Monday, February 23, 2009 4:38 PM/EST
Ahhh. It's just a few weeks until the start of spring. I can't wait for all of the changes this brings, especially the return of all the green and growing things.
Of course, other, less welcome things also seem to be returning with spring. Among these unwelcome things is the return of incredibly stupid, shortsighted and dangerous laws from representatives in Congress.
The latest doozy to be put forth by our legislative representatives is the Internet SAFETY Act, aka, the Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act. (Speaking of which, who comes up with these acronyms?).
Monday, February 09, 2009 3:40 PM/EST
Given the current "25 things you might not know about me" craze, there are a lot of people out there who have to tell you all kinds of things about themselves. This whole thing seems a bit nuts to me, after all, if there are things about me that people don't know, it's probably because I don't want them to know these things.
While I've tended to ignore these lists as they've ended up in my mail or Facebook updates, the one's I have read tended to be pretty positive and good natured. Again, this seems nuts to me. In my opinion, if you really want to know someone, you should find out the things that they hate, the things that really drive them nuts.
So to put my money where my mouth is, I've done just that. Without further ado, here is my list (in no particular order) of the Twenty Things about Technology that Drive Me Nuts.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009 3:13 PM/EST
I've never really thought of myself as much of a seer, prognosticator or predictor of the future, but based on a column I wrote back in 2005, I may just have a future in the prediction field.
In that column, "Security Getting Trampled in the Rush to RFID," I put forth a "hypothetical" situation where I could sit in a city square with nothing but a laptop and a small wireless device and--because of the ubiquity of unsecure RFID enabled gadgets--be able to do everything from read passports, identify employees and students, and even access credit card numbers and information.
When I wrote that column, I was roundly jeered by RFID proponents. They said what I envisioned was impossible, that to read those RFID tags I would need to be within inches of the person carrying them and would have to use a very large and expensive device.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008 11:28 AM/EST
 Hang on just a few more minutes. I know that you're waiting for me to write this article, but its taking me quite a bit of time to do the online research for it.
Why? Well, I'm taking the time to read the privacy policy on every Web site I visit. Don't you?
I'm pretty sure your answer to that question is no. (And, in all honesty, that's really my answer, too.) And why should you? Web site privacy policies give software EULAs a good run for their money when it comes to length and complexity.
In fact, according to a recent study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, it takes 10 minutes on average to read a Web site's privacy policy. In the report, the researchers estimated that it would take a total of 44.3 billion minutes per year if every Web user read the privacy policies for every site he or she visited.
And, of course, a privacy policy's length is only part of the problem. Even shorter privacy policies can be hard to understand for anyone without a law degree. With all the whereases and heretofors, I'm never quite sure what the site is claiming. It can seem as if some sites are reserving the right to anything I might do for the rest of my life.
Friday, October 10, 2008 1:19 PM/EST
 In the article "Technology in 2009", I look at some of the emerging technology trends that I think will be important and will get a lot of attention in 2009. But along with these technology trends, there are also going to be important technologies that should receive attention in 2009 that are likely to be ignored.
Anyone who casually watches the pharmaceutical industry can easily get confused about its priorities. It often seems as if there is a lot of effort going towards finding cures to sexual dysfunction, sleeping disorders and other similar problems, while much less effort is being put into curing the many deadly and widespread dis-eases.
But the technology sector isn't free from this same kind of out-of-whack priorities. Just look at everyone, from small startups to huge and established players, jumping on the social networking bandwagon, while important technology problems such as security get very little attention in comparison.
This can be a huge mistake. While sexy and heavily hyped technologies get a lot of attention, they often aren't addressing a serious problem, especially for enterprises. Given the current economic situation, vendors should really be looking at innovating in the areas that companies have to spend on instead of shiny new toy technologies that most businesses will decide they can easily live without.
This isn't to say that no one is working on innovating in these technology segments. As always, there are interesting startups trying to push the envelope. However, unlike Web 2.0, most of these technology markets aren't in an area where a small startup can make a big impact. What is needed to move these technologies forward is for the big players to innovate and not become comfort-able and stagnant.
So in counterpoint to my article on the emerging technologies that will be-come important in 2009, here are some technologies that should be seeing innovation and improvement, but will most likely stay static with little activity towards advancing them.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 12:57 PM/EST
I tend to have very little patience with people who don't take their computer security seriously. In my opinion, a large amount of the security problems on the Internet today would go away if most people simply avoided obviously dangerous attachments and Web sites, and followed basic security practices (such as keeping up with patching, anti-virus and application updating).
I've even gone so far as to call people who don't follow good security practices "security idiots."
So given that, one would think that the last thing I would tell someone to do when faced with a serious security problem is nothing. But sometimes a problem is so bad, so serious and so lacking in solutions that the only thing that people can do is hunker down and do their job.
For example, back when Microsoft's Internet Information Services Web server was plagued with constant and very serious security issues, including worms directed at its many holes, we (and by "we" I mean eWEEK Labs) recommended that companies ditch the server altogether. But for many heavy Microsoft shops, this wasn't an option. So they left IIS in place, essentially doing nothing as far as the Web server itself was concerned but trying to shore up security in other areas.
We may see this same kind of thing occur again, only this time on a much larger scale. My colleague Matt Hines, as well as many other security reporters and analysts, have been writing about a new threat called clickjacking.
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