Peter Coffee

After years of being infamously unfriendly to casual programmers, the Macintosh has suddenly become the machine of choice for out-of-the-box programmability—with tools that not only generate great-looking Macintosh applications but that also generate them in Java so you can take them anywhere. Apples Java team showed me their latest work at last months JavaOne conference, […]

Bits are a lie. The difference between the fiction of bits and the truth of actual hardware is a fundamental threat to secure computing. The software pretense of bits depends on an upstream hardware reality of voltages, currents, stray radio-frequency emissions and other artifacts that our abstract models omit—but that a determined attacker can study […]

The voice on the telephone sounded as if its owner couldnt decide between rage and exhaustion. “My machine re-booted while I was working, and now most of my e-mail in-box is gone. I thought you could only lose work that you hadnt saved!” I had to break the news that behind the scenes, his e-mail […]

When I wanted to read a web article on my handheld device, I knew enough to bring up the “printer-friendly” version before saving to my synchronized-files directory. I was sadly mistaken, though, in hoping to get device-independent HTML. When I could not read the resulting file with my Pocket PCs version of Internet Explorer, I […]

Developer issues will be the central concern of IT for the next several years. The platform choices, the tools, and the new ways of thinking about loosely coupled asynchronous interactions—Web services, for short—completely overshadow rising chip speeds, growing network bandwidth, pervasive wireless connections and other enabling technologies. Hence, the following notes from this years JavaOne. […]

Sometimes, I get what I deserve, but most of the time, thats not what I want. When last weeks eWeek featured my story about Javas proven security, based on more than six years of practical trial and theoretical refinement, I should have known that the same week would see a conspicuous new announcement of a […]

Welcome to “stupid customers,” the saga of IT vendors ongoing attempts to blame the victim. This week, we honor Jim Balsillie, chairman and CEO of Research In Motion, who commented earlier this month on the intrinsic insecurity of Internet traffic—and why its not his companys fault that people dont understand it. Balsillie was asked about […]

In a roundtable discussion moderated by eWEEK Technology Editor Peter Coffee, some of the industrys top security experts spoke candidly about the ability to secure e-business; the responsibility and culpability of the vendor, IT management and hacker communities; the security challenges inherent in Web services; and how enterprise IT can not only respond to but […]

As we head this week for San Francisco and the seventh annual JavaOne conference, I can tell you that one of the things most worth seeing will be M7 Web Foundry from M7 Corp. I got a thorough preview of the product, which makes its debut at the show, from M7 CEO Mansour Safai—whom Ive […]

“Information consumes attention,” as Nobel economist Herbert Simon famously observed. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” The Web, by this measure, makes all of us paupers: It offers so much data that we all wind up working harder to accomplish less, if our measure of achievement is whether we feel that were […]