Rob Fixmer

Common sense tells us the FBI and other police and intelligence agencies need Internet surveillance tools to track the communications of terrorists and other criminals. But the effort to extend the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act to networks that Congress had no way of anticipating when it passed the law in 1994 is misguided. […]

One day a few weeks back, I found myself in a van circling the central New Jersey town of Bedminster. It was a trip to nowhere, and it was a trip to the future. At the click of a mouse, Alan Kuritsky, vice president of marketing for Flarion Technologies, produced a live streaming image on […]

“Were no longer the dot in dot-com,” a Sun Microsystems executive recently wisecracked. “Now were the O in Old Economy.” Beneath the sarcasm of that statement lies a sad truth: Sun, the indisputable engine of the World Wide Web, is fully engaged in one of the most remarkably ill-conceived retreats in the history of American […]

Americas next civil war will be fought on the Internet, and the fundamental values in question will be the right to privacy versus the need for national security. Right now, that assertion might seem far-fetched. This is a time of flag waving and patriotic fervor that ranges from genuine statesmanship to banal jingoism. And thats […]

In the introduction to Go To (Basic Books, October 2001), a compelling new history of software as seen through the eyes of the men and women who invented it, The New York Times Steve Lohr offers a single quote that encapsulates the relentless challenge of programming. It is a line from the memoir of Cambridge […]

It smells like a recovery in the making. Start with the Bush administrations economic stimulus package, coupled with huge investments in cleaning up and rebuilding lower Manhattan. Then add an expected surge in federal outlays for military and intelligence technologies in the war against terrorism – and perhaps even the private government Internet proposed last […]

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, “business as usual” often seems trivial, even petty. But life must go on. Here in New York City, where Ziff Davis Media has its headquarters, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani counseled that the best way to help heal the city was […]

As Attorney General John Ashcroft fielded reporters questions last Tuesday about the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, one journalist asked if a new computer worm, discovered only hours earlier, was in any way related to the terrorist strikes. It was not, Ashcroft assured the nation – or at least, there was […]

World War III wasnt supposed to work like this. For decades, we based survival strategies on high-tech assumptions about our foes and ourselves. We unleashed the atom and spent billions devising ever more sophisticated systems for delivering its destructive power. We rattled our high-tech sabers all the way to the moon. We unleashed the digital […]

Every industry has its share of falling stock prices and earnings warnings, but you can always smell blood in the computer and Internet markets when companies suddenly start shunning certain words or terms that have come to be associated with outright failure or simple fatigue. Over the years, “push,” “portal” and “intranet,” along with terms […]

Computer science lost an intellectual cornerstone this week with the death of Michael Dertouzos, the distinguished Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor whod led the schools Laboratory for Computer Science since 1974. Far more sadly, the world lost a vigorous advocate for the planets underdogs – a tireless humanitarian determined to repair what he saw as […]

As I escorted him to the elevator after an interview in 1998, Gordon Eubanks, then president and CEO of Symantec, made a casual observation that forever changed my perspective on open source software. At a time when the worlds No. 2 computer security company realized almost all its revenue by protecting machines running Microsoft and […]