Wayne Rash

When I first heard about the National Security Agency’s PRISM operation at a conference in Washington, D.C., it wasn’t clear just how significant that might be. I knew that the government was collecting information from emails, including the name and address of the recipients, the originator, the time and date of the message, and perhaps […]

In the smartphone marketing game these days, there’s no sport that’s better than hitting the leader while it’s stumbling. It’s even more fun if that leader has already taken a couple of body blows and is trying to remain standing. So it should be no surprise when I opened the July 3 issue of The […]

Late in the final week of June 2013, the long-running soap opera of the Sprint-SoftBank merger was finally over. Dish Networks finally caved and withdrew from its attempt to buy Clearwire out from under Sprint in a June 26 announcement. This Dish disclosure followed a previous move terminating Dish’s attempt to buy Sprint itself. In […]

The good news is that you can see the future of Windows 8 now. It’s available as a download from Microsoft and you can install it on your existing Windows 8 machine apparently without disturbing what’s already there. But there’s more good news. Windows 8.1 now allows you to boot directly into the Windows Desktop […]

By now you’ve probably heard plenty of stories about the excesses of patent trolls, or Patent Assertion Entities as they’re politely referred to in legal circles. There’s been a lot of talk about reining in those trolls in Washington, and there’s been some action that might at least make it harder for them to coerce […]

BlackBerry is bringing its family jewels in the form of Secure Work Space to the fast-paced world of personal devices as a way to give IT managers the stability they need to protect company information while giving users the flexibility they are demanding to use their favorite devices at work. In the process, the company […]

The announcement by the Federal Aviation Administration in January that the agency was convening a panel to study the feasibility of loosening regulations restricting the in-flight use of personal electronic devices was greeted with delight by many air travelers. It was also greeted with dismay by many others who wanted peace and quiet more than […]

Google has filed a motion in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requesting a declaratory judgment that would release it from the requirements in secret court orders that bar it from making any public mention of government demands for user information. In the motion, Google asserts that it has a First Amendment right to publish unclassified […]

Perhaps the most telling comment to come out of the hearings by the House Intelligence Committee regarding the surveillance of phone numbers, first revealed earlier in June, was about haystacks. “In order to find a needle in a haystack,” a witness commented, “first you need a haystack.” That haystack refers to the metadata from billions […]

When the revelations about surveillance by the National Security Agency and other services including the Federal Bureau of Investigation came to light early in June, the companies singled out denied that they’d been providing information. Initially, the companies said that they didn’t provide any data at all under PRISM. Then they said they only provided […]

The image on the screen shows a cyber-attack in progress, but it doesn’t look like the rows of reports that you usually expect to see as event data flows from intrusion prevention systems, next-generation firewalls and security reporting systems. Instead, it looks like a fantastic image from something in the world of science fiction. Streams […]

The video was chilling. Washington, D.C.’s NBC television affiliate, WRC, had been given access to a surveillance video of a crime that we hear about all too often. In the video, a woman is walking along a busy street in downtown Washington talking on her cell phone. Following her is a young man watching her […]