eWEEK EDITORS

wonk (n): one who is well-versed in policy arcana Scott Harshbarger President, Common Cause Age: 60 Previous job: Two-term Massachusetts attorney general, from 1991 to 1999 Favorite hobby: Big Elvis Presley fan — hes even donned the white suit on occasion. Law professor: Has taught at Boston University Law School, Harvard Law School — his […]

Im on the Internet most of the day. My primary mode of communication with co-workers, friends and even family is e-mail and instant messaging. Whenever I need to fact check something, I go to Google. I have two browsers and three streaming media players on my laptop so I can get to all sorts of […]

Chinas plan to dominate chip manufacturing may be overly ambitious, but the awakening Asian giant has defied the odds before in its drive to become a hardware superpower. Industry analysts are puzzled about why China would want to attempt such a monumental engineering task. But at least one chip manufacturer isnt just perplexed – its […]

The technology exists today to deploy a single sign-on Web services marketplace, even as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems duel to build competing identification systems. Security Assertion Markup Language is an almost completed standard by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, a nonprofit consortium for the creation of interoperable industry standards. Based on […]

Barry Bonds hit another home run. Alan Greenspan discussed how to pull the economy out of the ruins of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Madonna did something outrageous for the cameras — again. And the CEO of your company gave a speech this morning from corporate headquarters on the other coast that will affect the […]

Want all nonessential traffic to go through a cheap pipe during off-peak hours? Want to stay within budget on your bandwidth bill? Want high performance on mission-critical applications? A growing number of companies — netVmg, RouteScience Technologies and Sockeye Networks — are offering stand-alone boxes that essentially automate the task of shifting traffic between different […]

Multiprotocol Label Switching-powered virtual private networks are no longer the plaything of giant network providers. Ardent Communications, formerly CAIS Internet, today will launch an MPLS VPN service for customers that need high-speed remote connectivity over a secure connection. The first recipients of the service are six doctors in the radiology department at Washington D.C. VA […]

A federal judge has refused to delay or narrow the 3-year-old antitrust case against Microsoft, ordering the company and the government to instead launch into immediate round-the-clock settlement talks. “This case should be settled, and this is an optimal time to do so,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered last week in her first hearing on the […]

Multichannel Multipoint Distribution is at a critical juncture. Industry leaders Sprint and WorldCom have found that using first-generation Multichannel Multipoint Distribution System (MMDS) gear to deliver high-speed Internet access doesnt deliver wide enough profit margins. So theyre pushing vendors for second-generation near- and non-line-of-sight technology. But its not a sure bet that even this cutting-edge […]

I-managers in health care industries are worried about upcoming security standards for the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA), with one privacy officer calling the proposed rules “a logistics nightmare.” Passed by Congress in 1996, HIPAA mandates sweeping changes in how health care providers manage their information. The law — which will be phased […]

Call it the perfect storm for cybercoverage. The insurance industry has been rocked by gargantuan losses from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the destructive Code Red and Nimda worms, low returns on investments and several large IT-related losses. Together, these factors will likely mean dramatically higher premiums for I-managers trying to insure their operations against […]

No Can Go While the airlines might be suffering staggering losses in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the same cant be said for videoconferencing developers and streaming media services. Sonexis, a voice and data conferencing developer, sent out a news release last week in which Chairman David Friend noted, “Companies that have […]