eWEEK EDITORS

To shamelessly borrow from one of the classics of literature, for information technology it is both the best of times and the worst of times. First the bad news: Investment by corporations in capital equipment and software is declining. Indeed, in the fourth quarter of 2000, it dropped at a 4.7 percent rate — thats […]

Fingerprints: With a long history in law enforcement and government, fingerprints are the most widely researched and understood biometric. With relatively high accuracy, low price and minimal intrusiveness, they are also by far the most popular biometric for use in business and enterprise solutions. Individual fingerprint scanners typically cost between $100 and $150. Iris Recognition: […]

When I lived in Japan in 1993, I regularly begged my Mom to ship sourdough pretzels from home. I can only imagine what I would have bought if I had had access to todays Internet. The Web is a global channel. If you are a cybermerchant, sooner or later youre going to want to tap […]

Teen users and mobile devices are likely keys to early efforts by AOL Time Warner to make money directly from its instant messaging technology. Instant messaging (IM) has become a teen phenomenon — so much so that Internet backbone providers regularly experience traffic surges when schools let out until evening mealtime, according to Daryl Schoolar, […]

When Congress passed a sweeping reform of copyright law in 1998, Jonathan Potters fledgling lobbying group, the Digital Media Association, was 3 days old and represented only seven new media companies. So its not surprising that the new law, known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, has many provisions unfavorable to Internet media companies. Now, […]

Egan to Be Ambassador? It looks like Dick Egan has a touch of green in this very Irish of months. The founder and chairman emeritus of storage giant EMC reportedly is President Bushs choice for next U.S. ambassador to Ireland. A spokesman for the Hopkinton, Mass., company declined to comment on the reports, but political […]

The chips are down for Yahoo!, and the portal is hoping new corporate business can lift its badly sagging top and bottom lines. The company last week touted its business service as it stunned Wall Street with the joint announcements that Chief Executive Tim Koogle will step down and that company revenue will be $50 […]

Its a little like the United States building a working space-based missile defense and then being successfully invaded by Mexico. Such is the condition of microprocessor titan Intel. For some years, the chip maker has pursued a vast and complex strategy of investments, acquisitions and forays into new markets, all the while churning out a […]

Intel Corp., in what critics say is a bid to suppress growing support for a rivals technology, is leading an effort to develop a successor to the PCI bus, the crucial data transfer component inside PCs and servers. The current PCI bus architecture “is starting to run out of gas,” said Louis Burns, general manager […]

Hewlett-Packard says it hasnt closed its much-hyped Garage Program, it just found a new home for it. Following the fizzle of the dot-com boom, the company last week quietly folded the year-old incubator program into its New Ventures organization, a Hewlett-Packard venture arm. The Garage Program initially was strongly marketed with the nostalgic theme of […]

Bruce Sterling would no doubt hate the idea of being a hero of any kind — sung, unsung, whistled or hummed. But Sterling deserves recognition for his career as a journalist, futurist and malcontent. Its a career that has paralleled the Internet explosion. In 1992, he published his investigative book, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and […]

Fingerprint readers. Voice-print identifiers. Retina or iris scanners. Face-recognition systems. Those are the things that spy stories are made of. In most peoples minds, they are the very essence of high-tech security, and everyone knows that no supersecret headquarters worth its salt is without its share of such devices. But biometrics has extended its reach. […]