Sebastian Rupley

Sea changes are going on in the market for storage devices large and very, very small. The past couple of months have brought several big advances in capacity and reductions in costs for tiny drives. Meanwhile, the hard drive industry is coming to grips with the physical limits on longitudinal (along the surface) recording and […]

Locate backup data on the moon? Now that sounds like a rock-solid business model. However strange the idea may sound, TransOrbital of La Jolla, California is taking it and other proposals for marrying high-tech and the Earths only natural satellite seriously. The company is getting ready to send a commercial mission to the moon and […]

California has adopted a tough new privacy law, with practical ramifications that extend far beyond state boundaries. As of July 1, California became the very first state in the US to require businesses and government offices to notify people if any database that lists personal information experiences a breach in security. On Thursday morning, Adam […]

Youre walking the floor at a trade show, too tired to lug around your laptop. You stop at a computing kiosk to check your corporate and personal e-mail and to browse financial Web sites for some information. Thats a problem. Depending on what youve accessed, youve left an electronic trail that might not be difficult […]

Apple Computer opened up its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday morning with a string of marquee-level product announcements. CEO Steve Jobs was on hand to show several of over 100 new features in a new version 10.3 of the Mac OS X operating system, dubbed Panther. Jobs also confirmed news which had […]

Sometimes a new technology standard gets stalled even when it holds substantial promise. Thats true for the next version of TCP/IP—or IPv6. Its a big improvement over the current Internet Protocol, but it faces adoption problems, primarily because of security issues. The current Internet Protocol, IP Version 4 (IPv4) has been the lingua franca of […]

In a tech arena increasingly flooded with consumer electronics gadgets, storage plays a significant role in how much various devices cost. So its no surprise that startup Cornice, Inc. is targeting mini, high-capacity storage as the centerpiece of its business. Its first product, the Cornice Storage Element (see the photo) is a half-cubic-inch, 1.5-GB drive […]

A whole lot of corporate PCs are getting dangerously old, according to John Thompson, a vice president and general manager in Hewlett-Packards Personal Systems Group. Speaking to the press at a San Francisco event on Wednesday, Thompson said that many companies “are putting themselves at risk by running older, less secure PCs in their IT […]

Judging from recent legal events and recent survey data, protecting your online anonymity could be getting a lot tougher. From identity theft to cyber-stalking to new rules for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) about disclosing the names of their users, staying anonymous in cyberspace is becoming a tricky business. “Identity theft is increasing,” says Parry Aftab, […]

In separate moves, Microsoft and AOL are taking aim at spam. Microsoft announced on Tuesday that new antispam technology will ship in Exchange Server 2003. Meanwhile, AOL filed five separate lawsuits against alleged spammers that the company says have blanketed AOL users with messages promoting everything from mortgages to pornography. The moves parallel junk e-mails […]

A new wireless LAN security solution for Windows XP is now a free download at Microsofts Web site. Based on the Wi-Fi Alliances new replacement for its Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) solution, Wireless Protected Access (WPA), this security offering is designed for both home and business users of Windows XP. There are no similar downloads […]

Two reports making the rounds—one from the Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) and one from Finnish security company F-Secure—claim that there have been a high volume of Web-site defacements since the US/Iraq war began. The targets are military, government, and business sites, according to the stories. The report from OSAC says, “The start of the […]