Spotlight Features

Toyota's recent fiascoes with runaway acceleration illuminate the sorry lack of software standards to establish minimum quality levels for technologies crucial to the operation of transportation systems.

Everyone seems to be getting into the mobile app game -- but is anyone actually making any money doing it? The consensus is yes -- but there is more than one way to make money. Alexander Bartfeld took a hard look at the market before launching his software development company six months ago. Everyon...

I had planned on using Hayden Hamilton, founder of the Portland, Oregon-based ProgressiveRx.com, as my source for updates on how things were going in Washington with healthcare reform -- especially regarding any technology-driven solutions to spiraling healthcare costs. After all, Progressive is an ...

People who use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are not known for their reticence -- many put just about any personal information imaginable out there. The risks to such openness are clear -- from inviting tailored phishing attacks to appalling potential employers with one's late...

Everything's going digital. Why not handwriting? A new generation of digital pens and smartpens is bridging the divide between handwriting on paper and writing on the computer. With digital pens, you have the best of both worlds: You can sit in a meeting and take notes by hand, and then you can uplo...

What are we calling the 10 years that just flew past? "The Naughts?" "The Naughties?" "The 'Aughts?" "The Digital Decade?" I nominate the "Coolness Decade," but it's going to require a little less irony and cynicism than what is normally exhibited in our culture to fully embrace that title. That wil...

So far, most home networking deployments are one-off or are limited to a certain function, such as entertainment. Home networking becomes truly interesting when it is applied to all of a house's systems and its energy supply, said Raoul Wijgergangs, chairman of the Z-Wave Alliance. "There are soluti...

By now many of us -- even some of us who once couldn't program the clock in the VCR -- have installed a WiFi router somewhere in our homes to use a laptop on the front porch or in the back den. If you fall in this group, congratulations. Whether you know it or not, you have joined the home network r...

Thanks to Twitter's open API, applications that enhance the tweeting experience have proliferated. From TweetDeck to Tweetie, there's an app for everyone and for every purpose. This diverse world of Twitter apps, however, remains a mystery to some of the site's users. "When you go and buy a car, n...

PC Gamers: A Dying Breed?

Gamers are often devided into two categories: those who play on consoles and those who play on PCs. A console gamer will drop few hundred dollars for Sony's PS3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, or Nintendo's Wii, but a PC gamer who wants to purchase a desktop or laptop optimized for gaming could pay thousand...

Not so long ago, Motorola was hailed as the bane of criminals. "You might outrun the cop, but you'll never outrun Motorola," went the saying. The Motorola two-way radio was one of the first technologies to tip the scales in favor of law enforcement. However, it was by no means the last. "Today, it's...

It wasn't all that long ago that the talk about cellphones and driving was all talk. That is, consumers, driving-safety advocates, and lawmakers debated whether using a hands-free device was enough to make talking on a cellphone safe, or whether talking on the newly ubiquitous devices while behind t...

Last year, the buzz surrounding social networking concerned "data portability" -- giving Facebook and MySpace users, for example, an easy way to connect to one another without the need to create new profiles. That once-deafening buzz has now fallen silent, and the social networks are back working to...

If you want to reach Jim Walden by email, you'll have to ping him at work. Three months ago, he ditched his personal email account because he was concerned about the security implications. Unlike some professionals, Walden never emailed confidential documents to his home account. His concern was tha...

Where Are the Cybercops?

The month of June saw a host of Web-based attacks compromising legitimate Web sites. One, dubbed "Nine Ball," compromised more than 40,000 Web sites. Another attack injected a malicious script into large numbers of legitimate sites. Victims who access such tainted Web sites are infected with malwar...

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