Wayne Rash

The U.S. Supreme Court summed up their thoughts on searches of cell phones by police in one short comment. “Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in the Court’s opinion covering warrantless searches of […]

The long-awaited and much-demanded cell phone “kill switch” is finally coming. It’ll show up in drips and drabs and in fits and starts. It won’t be universal. But it’ll be here, sort of. For reasons that remain open to speculation, mobile phone makers besides Apple have been reluctant to provide their customers with a means […]

The U.S. Supreme Court’s long-anticipated decision on an important software patent case turned out to be something less than many hoped, but it is still important. The Supreme Court decided on June 19 that the patent for computer software designed to implement a settlement risk protection method was not patentable. As such, the case didn’t […]

Chances are you probably hate your cable provider. You hate them for their arrogance, their broken promises and their many customer service failures. But don’t hate them for giving you slow Internet, because an exhaustive series of tests by the Federal Communications Commission show that if anything, your broadband provider probably over-delivers. But that’s not […]

The good news for companies that accept credit cards is that most banks will be issuing credit cards with EMV chips well before the coming liability shift in October 2015. The bad news is that merchants that don’t accept EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) chips will have to absorb the cost of fraudulent transactions due […]

The planned merger between communications giant AT&T and satellite television provider DirecTV appears to be moving ahead with little opposition. On June 12, the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Greg Walden (R-Ore.) told The Hill newspaper in Washington that he has no plans to hold hearings on the merger. While House Judiciary Committee […]

Microsoft has just made public its court filings objecting to demands by the U.S. government that the company turn over email files that are located on servers outside the U.S. Microsoft has declined to provide the emails saying that a search warrant isn’t valid outside the territory of the United States. In response, the U.S. […]

When Michelle Maisto reviewed the BlackBerry Z30 in November 2013, the phone was only available from Verizon as a CDMA device and it came with a subsidy and a mobile service contract. Since then a great deal has changed. The phone is now available in a GSM version, meaning it can be used worldwide, and […]

Big BlackBerry Z30 GSM Smartphone Delivers Eye-Catching Features By Wayne Rash This Is a Big BlackBerry The BlackBerry Z30 shown here next to the Z10 is a very big phone. The 5-inch screen can display an additional row of icons, and because it’s larger, it’s easier to type on than smaller devices. BlackBerry’s excellent predictive […]

A decision on June 5 by the European Courts of Justice that the act of browsing an Internet site does not constitute a copyright violation may sound obvious. But this concept isn’t necessarily clear cut in the field of copyright law, even in the United States. In this particular case, a group of newspaper publishers […]

The blog entry by Google’s Stephan Somogyi announcing Google’s new End-to-End encryption tool gives some reason for hope that useful encryption may be within reach of nontechnical emailers. But assertions that End-to-End will somehow protect you from the National Security Agency snooping are overblown. In fairness, Somogyi doesn’t actually claim that his tool will exclude […]

During the June 2 keynote at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple Vice President Greg Joswick uttered the word rarely heard in public by an Apple executive: “enterprise.” Joswick wasn’t talking about the nuclear aircraft carrier or the starship of television fame, but rather he was talking about large businesses. Apple, […]