Cade Metz

Recently, the Computer Event Marketing Association (CEMA) took an informal poll of its 600 members–event management and marketing professionals who frequent IT industry trade shows. The CEMA poll asked whether, in light of the September 11 terrorist attacks, people would be attending fewer shows than normal over the coming months. 50 percent of the respondents […]

During the typical holiday season, with high school and college students on vacation and when people generally have more time on their hands, far more viruses are let loose on the Internet. But this holiday season may have been different. According to Bill Wall, chief security engineer with Harris Corp., which provides online security for […]

When I first covered Riya, the face-recognizing photo organizer and sharer from Ojos, it was available to less than 30 hand-picked testers. Since then, the free service has graduated from alpha to beta status, and the difference is like night and day. The face-recognition tools are far from perfect, but theyre much improved, and in […]

At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, a California startup is set to announce on Thursday a new Web browser based on open-source Mozilla technologies, the software at the core of the popular Firefox browser. Dubbed Flock, the new browser is designed to improve the handling of bookmarks, surfing history, Weblogs and RSS feeds. […]

At A Glance The new Google Talk Beta doesnt do much, but what it does, it does well. Googles long-awaited communication client offers instant messaging and Voice over IP—nothing more. You wont find video conferencing, file-transfer utilities, games, search boxes, stock tickers, or any of the myriad other tools available with its three primary competitors: […]

This past Monday, 321 Studios shut its doors. Maker of the once popular DVD copying applications, DVD X Copy and DVD Copy Plus, the St. Charles, Missouri company has brought an end to nearly two years of legal battles with the leading Hollywood Studios, which felt the software was in violation of federal law. In […]

In the past, viruses needed help. They couldnt infect your machine unless you opened an e-mail-attachment or another malicious file. Nowadays, viruses can attack on their own. Like the MS Blaster worm or the more recent Sasser, they can burrow onto your machine through a vulnerability, or hole, in your operating system or another piece […]

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Courts now famous Betamax decision. On January 17, 1984, the Court ruled that Sonys Betamax VCR was perfectly legal. The majority opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, said that although you could, in theory, use the device to record copyrighted television shows and movies and […]

Keith Dunlap had never even heard of Cool-search.net. But one day last December, as he opened the browser on his home PC, the site filled his display. The browsers Internet Options window showed his home page had been changed to the arcane address t.rack.cc/hp.php. Dunlap, a researcher at the Wood Science & Technology Institute in […]

Last year was not a good year for e-mail. In spring 2003, the steady flow of unsolicited and unwanted messages reached a tipping point. According to Postini, a California company whose e-mail– filtering service processes 150 to 200 million messages a day, spam finally accounted for more than half of all e-mail traffic. Then, in […]