Spotlight Features

WEEKEND FEATURE

NASA’s Foam Quandary, Part 2: No Easy Solutions

Before the space shuttle Columbia's disastrous mission in 2003, NASA did not fully recognize the safety risk posed by the shuttle's protective foam. Following that tragedy, however, NASA buckled down and set to work, trying to come up with solutions. "As soon as NASA saw the foam as a safety problem...

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

FireEye CEO Ashar Aziz: Battling the Zombie Hordes

Computer security company FireEye announced on Monday a new strategy for fighting the worsening threat to consumers and businesses posed by botnets. The company announced its new Botwall appliance, linked to a worldwide intelligence network coupled to local botnet analysis designed to thwart attacks...

WEEKEND FEATURE

NASA’s Foam Quandary, Part 1: Anatomy of a Disaster

As the world watched the progress of the space shuttle Endeavour's mission to the international space station and back last month, it was hard not to suffer from flashbacks to past space disasters. The presence of Mission Specialist Barbara Morgan, for one, evoked memories of the 1986 space shuttle ...

Mayors and city governments around the U.S. bought into citywide WiFi project plans, which often included unsupportable performance claims and grossly inflated forecasts for the numbers of users they would attract. Those decisions have come back to haunt them and have led to some abrupt reversals of...

In their eagerness to bring the benefits of wireless internetworking to their cities, mayors in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and other U.S. cities have bought into untested, inflated claims. Now, they are revising their plans to roll out municipal WiFi networks. Last month, Chicago began backing ...

WEEKEND FEATURE

10 Great SEO Tips, Part 2

Search engines have taken on the role of parents doling out rewards as well as punishment to companies building Web sites. The punishment comes from two sources. The search engines are flawed, often unable to work with various types of information. "At one time, search engines could not make sense o...

Cruising the Web on a smartphone is about like cruising for a date on a tricycle -- the basic concept is there, but the delivery is laughable. If you are using an iPhone, then it's more like cruising in a Volkswagen Beetle -- better, but still short of the Lamborghini speeds we're used to on the ope...

WEEKEND FEATURE

10 Great SEO Tips, Part 1

As evidenced by the phenomenal success of Google, search has evolved from an interesting sideline into a primary function for many, if not most, Internet users. Consequently, more and more companies are putting content up on their Web sites to attract the attention of search engines. "You can have r...

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Electronic Arts’ Chip Lange: The Rise of Casual Gaming

Electronic Arts -- the largest video game publisher, by sales, in the world -- made a statement in June when it announced it was forming a casual gaming division. Last month, the Redwood, Calif., company punctuated that statement with an exclamation mark by cutting a licensing deal with Hasbro, whos...

Making use of distributed computing, such as service-oriented architecture and integrated Web application services, means greater complexity and security design challenges for organizations and IT managers. Open standards play a big role in developing and making better use of efficient and effective...

Software designers and developers are being challenged to build efficient security measures into their project work as computing is increasingly distributed via Web application services and service-oriented architecture. Research recently conducted by the Ponemon Institute and CipherOptics found tha...

The State of the Desktop

The laptop computer has been gaining on traditional desktop PCs for some time. Replacing one's desktop completely with a portable computer that has enough power to handle any common task is now a feasible option for consumers, and more are heading that direction. Laptops are siphoning off sales of d...

Pimply faced pranksters and lone profiteers who poison computer systems have been replaced by organized criminals of a different breed. "These guys are professional organizations. They are fully funded and they're writing specifically for profit," David Frazer, director of technology services at F-S...

WiFi has became pervasive. Not just laptops, but an arsenal of palmed-sized devices including smartphones, PDAs and mobile media players, now connect to the Internet using Wireless Fidelity technology. However, many users are clueless about security and connect to password-protected accounts and fin...

WiFi is not just for laptops anymore. All sorts of devices now connect to the Internet via Wireless Fidelity technology. Smartphones -- think Apple's iPhone, among others -- mobile media players and even gaming machines often come with WiFi features to enhance usability. At the same time, more and m...

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