Sebastian Rupley

Phishing—e-mail and Web-based efforts by online scammers to hijack personal information from unsuspecting users—hit home at PC Magazine this week. A number of magazine staffers, who are a members at eBay, received highly official looking e-mails, purportedly from eBays accounts management department, asking for credit card information, a social security number, and more. The magazine […]

Comdex—the annual trade show soiree that brings the digerati to Las Vegas—takes place next week, and this years event promises to be significantly different from those seen previously. The trade show has suffered tough times recently, with attendance dropping; some major vendors pulling out; and a change of ownership (the show is now run by […]

Apple Computer held its annual financial analysts meeting on Wednesday of this week, and the conference included several glimpses of the Cupertino, California companys future direction. A multipart QuickTime Webcast of the event is on the Web. The Webcast includes a Q&A in which Apple CEO Steve Jobs answers several questions about Apples future plans, […]

Microsoft is preparing a substantial overhaul to its popular Hotmail e-mail service. While company officials arent explicitly saying that many of the new features are geared toward removing spam annoyances, that looks to be the case. The update includes many new interface enhancements, including a new start page.

Amazon has some ambitious new plans for book browsers. The site has added a capability called Search Inside the Book, which allows full-text searching and online viewing of every page in 120,000 books. The new offering, a result of deals struck with nearly 200 publishers, is based on proprietary search technology. During a demonstration for […]

Theft of source code is back in the spotlight. Alibre, a software company based in Richardson, Texas, alleged this week that a former employee—after being terminated—has begun illegally distributing a product called “RaceCAD,” which Alibre says is actually its product, Alibre Design. Alibres claim comes on the heels of the theft of source code for […]

Critical-infrastructure security was the main topic at the recent annual meeting of the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, known as (ISC)². The consortium is a nonprofit agency dedicated to training and certifying security professionals. At this years meeting, Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., chairman of the House subcommittee on technology, delivered a keynote speech on […]

Among the technology industrys historic monuments sits Xerox PARC, the almost-legendary R&D facility nestled in the heart of Silicon Valley. Xerox also has a big research center in New York, and researchers from that facility and from PARC recently held a soiree in San Francisco to show some of the companys key research efforts. Credited […]

Researchers at Xeroxs thinktank this week gave a peek at a number of technologies, including one automated document design and creation that uses so-called genetic algorithms to pick the right look and feel. So who needs a graphic designer? Thats not exactly the question posed by a new breed of software being developed by Xerox, […]

Verisign, which some critics charge has a monopolistic position as the caretaker of Web domains, was hit with a lawsuit late this week charging that its controversial new SiteFinder service unfairly redirects requests for wrongly named Web addresses. The suit was filed in federal court in Florida by Popular Enterprises LLC, which owns search engine […]

In an arena where media servers, personal servers, and appliances for sharing and backing up digital media are proliferating, Ispiri, a startup company based in Mountain View, California, has unveiled a new personal server targeted at consumers and SOHO professionals. The device, Mirra (www.mirra.com), incorporates software for saving, sending, synchronizing, and remotely accessing photos, e-mail, […]

August woke people to some new antics from virus writers. As the Blaster and SoBig worms spread to millions of PCs, concerns were raised—particularly by SoBig—about follow-on attacks that would coincide with September 11. Some analysts are worried that new strains of SoBig or features of the original variants could be slated to strike this […]