Europe cares about privacy, so you must too

02/07/12

In late January, the European Commission published a proposal "on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data."

We need a better definition of paperless

01/23/12

A literal reading of this survey question leads inevitably to a pair of correct answers: absolutely yes and absolutely not.

Trashing the boss online still a bad idea, but ...

12/19/11

Three congressional aides recently lost their jobs in part because they are worthless layabouts who drink on the job, but also because they are but the latest to forget that Twitter lives on the Internet and tweets - especially those badmouthing your boss -- are visible to one and all.

Don't expect Woz to bid on this Apple contract

12/05/11

News last week that Sotheby's will auction off "The Contract That Founded Apple" - a partnership signed April 1, 1976 by the late Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne -- no doubt caught the eye of techie collectors and even sparked speculation that Apple might buy the document.

Half of adults believe social media sites hurt youth?

11/21/11

If the results of a recent telephone survey are to be taken at face value - a reasonably big if, in my opinion - roughly half of American adults believe that Facebook, Twitter and their ilk are harmful to the social development of today's young people.

Stallman parody site catches Stallman's eye

11/07/11

A recent online posting of Richard Stallman's astonishingly long set of instructions for those who would hire him as an event speaker has spawned a parody website -- The Stallman Dialogues -- as well as some debate over the propriety of people constantly poking fun at the enigmatic and controversial founder of the Free Software Foundation.

Fun with naming Wi-Fi nets

10/24/11

According to a media report out of San Antonio, the man recently accused of planning to assassinate a Saudi diplomat in Washington, D.C., was not the sharpest tool in the box. However, if neighbor accounts are to be taken at face value, the same could be said of the FBI agents tasked with foiling his alleged plot.

3 small items from the week we lost a giant

10/10/11

Seemingly endless coverage of his passing last week offered the public an opportunity to learn everything it could ever want to know about Steve Jobs, Including what would appear to be his favorite photograph ... of himself.

Page's Google+ page proves problematic

09/26/11

Seemingly every day, the Google+ "suggestions" feature would implore me to "circle" (read: follow) the Google+ activities of Google CEO Larry Page, as more than 300,000 users had done already.

Shady search casts iCloud over Apple

09/12/11

Yes, the story of Apple's police-aided, ham-handed hunt for a second lost iPhone prototype has received a fair amount of attention. However, the Keystone Kops-like caper deserves a lot more, and probably would have gotten it right off the bat were it not for two facts: The story reached critical mass over the Labor Day weekend and more than a few journalists were at first convinced that it had to be a hoax or a marketing stunt, because, well, how in the name of Woz could this have happened twice ... to Apple?

If your neighbor built a fake Apple store

08/08/11

By now you've probably seen all the stories out of China about the fake Apple stores. They got me wondering: What if my neighbor, Bob, was to tell me that he did in our little town what those Apple imitators did in their Chinese city? What might that conversation go like?

Monkey business with a camera

07/18/11

Never mind the infinite monkey theorem reproducing Shakespeare, what we were asked to ponder last week is a lone black macaque commandeering a photographer's unattended camera to shoot a few amusing pictures ... and touch off a copyright debate in the process.

Apple endures a week of legal iTrouble

06/20/11

Maybe Apple is simply paying a price for trying to hog all the lowercase letter i's.

He's looked at clouds from both sides now

06/06/11

A colleague recently sent around this quote from a university CTO he interviewed for an upcoming article: "We're not building some generic Joni Mitchell cloud. The thing we're trying to do is build a cloud that is really infrastructure and services, not some vanilla, virtualized blah, blah, blah."

Everything's a scam ... or so it seems

05/23/11

An editor at Salon recently wrote an excruciatingly candid account of her having been snookered by an Internet scam.

IRS e-file system turns 25

04/18/11

Today is Tax Day and many a procrastinator is descending upon their Post Office branch in a mad dash to beat the deadline. However, their numbers are but a fraction of what they were a quarter-century ago, thanks to the remarkable success of what started in 1986 as a three-city IRS pilot program called e-file.

Games on company gear? Depends who you ask

04/04/11

Only about a third of more than a thousand respondents to a Network World online survey believe it's always wrong to use company equipment to host private video game sessions for groups of players.

If you bought 100 shares of MSFT 25 years ago …

03/21/11

It's March 13, 1986: Microsoft, founded more than a decade earlier and already a powerhouse in the world of personal computer software, executes an initial public stock offering that will raise $61 million for the company and leave 30-year-old co-founder Bill Gates unfathomably wealthy.

No e-wallet will ever replace a John Wayne

03/07/11

It seems I am not alone in doubting that e-wallets will eliminate the leather variety any time soon, as many of you have written in reply to an earlier column listing the contents of my wallet contents that even the smartest of mobile phones might find difficult to replicate.

A whale of a bad analogy for bandwidth hogs

02/21/11

Having written my fair share, I know that bad analogies can stick out like a sore flower pot.

Why an e-wallet won’t replace my leather one

02/07/11

Recent reports that Apple's iPhone 5 and iPad 2 will support Near Field Communications technology sparked yet another round of chatter about how so-called e-wallets soon will be the death knell for the leather variety.

This year's 25 Geekiest 25th anniversaries

01/24/11

Five years makes an official franchise, no? Either way, what follows is a truncated-for-print version of our fifth annual collection of the year's "25 Geekiest 25th anniversaries."

ThumbDrive maker finally wins trademark

12/20/10

You could have knocked me over with a memory stick when word arrived here recently that the government's Trademark Trial and Appeal Board has ruled that "thumb drive" is not a generic term and therefore ThumbDrive™ is worthy of trademark protection.

The single greatest career move in history

12/06/10

Chances are no one has heard Eric Schmidt muttering under his breath, "Dang, I could have worked at Attachmate."

No, Twitter users didn't fail 'Science Guy'

11/22/10

The gist of the story on the front page of Yahoo News last week was that Bill "The Science Guy" Nye passed out while speaking to several hundred University of Southern California students and those students callously ignored the stricken man's plight in favor of yammering about it on Twitter.