eWEEK EDITORS

It can begin with a friendly lunch conversation with your boss. “Hey, did you hear Egghead and Travelocity got hacked?” you begin. “Yeah, with credit card numbers lifted and everything,” says the boss. “Dont worry, Boss, our security is solid.” “How can you be sure? Have we ever tested it?” Suddenly, youre faced with the […]

Hawking Internet Security Products and services is a bit like selling insurance policies — vendors need to instill a sense of paranoia in their prospective customers to close the sale. Intelytics, a 5-month-old security firm in Pittsburgh, Pa., has ably demonstrated the subtleties of this strategy in launching its first services. The company is attacking […]

Internet security company VeriSign has acknowledged issuing two Microsoft digital certificates to an imposter, raising doubts in many quarters about the consistency of Internet identification practices. With VeriSign and Microsoft struggling to retract the mistake, security experts are worried that the breach will have serious implications. A digital certificate is issued to verify that a […]

Newark Electronics in Chicago has 60 customers, each of which wants an individualized monthly electronic catalog of Newark products. With plans to expand to 100 customers and catalogs by years end, the company may soon be as much in the publishing business as in electronics. A growing number of suppliers now publish dozens of customized […]

Jamcracker, a two-year-old application service provider, is facing its own logjam in building its partner program. Facing market pressures, the company, which offers hosted applications and business services, has laid off 18 employees and has dropped its Pioneer Program, one of the pillars of its move last July to use resellers to boost sales. Meanwhile, […]

Nearly five months after U.S. companies began signing up for an agreement aimed at averting disruptions in the flow of personal data from Europe to the U.S., some U.S. interests are calling for clarifications to the deal. So far, only 35 U.S. companies have signed up for the “safe harbor” agreement, negotiated between the U.S. […]

The popularity of rewritable CDs has grown rapidly over the last two years, with more than 60 percent of all PCs sold at retail now featuring CD-RW drives. But hot on their heels is new DVD technology that promises more than 13 times greater storage capacity. At the CeBIT technology show here last week, Panasonic […]

Getting Way Too Personal I didnt mind that Bill Gates called Microsoft one of the pioneers of the graphical user interface and said it brought GUIs to the attention of the computing masses (thought Apple Computer did that). I had no trouble with him saying Microsoft is working to support open industry standards as part […]

Reporters didnt cause the Internet bubble to burst, so why wont anyone talk to me these days? A year ago, my phone wouldnt stop ringing with pitches from newly minted Internet start-ups looking to conquer the world. Now, even Internet icons like Amazon.com, BlueLight.com, eBay and Walmart.com reject me like Im an incurable plague. Its […]

Name Game Whats in the name? Millions of dollars worth of branding, if UUnet is the name in question. And yet, the international brand will apparently be flushed down the toilet as WorldCom finishes reorganization and merges key UUnet units with their equivalents within the WorldCom operation. The Ear hears the UUnet brand will still […]

Thomas Harrer didnt get much sleep his first four months on the job. When Harrer became director of systems at iWon.com in December 1999, the Web portal was woefully underpowered. The site, which had launched two months earlier, was originally designed to handle 10 million hits per day — but it was receiving demand well […]

AT&Ts consumer division, and its new CEO Betsy Bernard, want to move past the shrinking long-distance market, into more profitable arenas. The strategy took shape when AT&T purchased the assets of DSL carrier NorthPoint Communications through a bankruptcy auction for $135 million, setting the stage for broadband battles across the industry. The sale marks AT&Ts […]