Wayne Rash

Every day brings new reports of the threats posed by the Heartbleed bug. But the discovery of Heartbleed has also unearthed a scandal that’s plagued the open-source community for years. The scandal is that giant enterprises are doing nothing to contribute to the development, testing and validation of the free software on which they depend. […]

According to our report on the discovery of a significant vulnerability to the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption service as it’s implemented in some versions of Linux, an exploit could reveal up to 64 kilobytes of memory in the affected server. The good news is that the OpenSSL Project issued a fix almost immediately, and […]

Last time we checked, nearly 30 percent of Windows users were still running XP. This was despite the dire warnings from Microsoft that security updates would stop, leaving the affected computers vulnerable to attack by malware developers. Now that the time has come, some are suggesting that hoards of malware will descend on your computer, […]

The public break-up by BlackBerry against T-Mobile has left onlookers bewildered, because of its apparent suddenness and because it seems destined to hurt BlackBerry far more than anything that might happen to T-Mobile. If things go as they are now, BlackBerry is dumping T-Mobile as a carrier by the end of April. Although this looks […]

LAS VEGAS—I’m writing this at a table in the Media Room down the hall from the show floor of a rapidly diminishing Interop. Around me are marketing and public relations representatives discussing things like software-defined networks, virtualized network functions and virtualized servers. If I walk out into the noisy, crowded trade show floor, I find […]

LAS VEGAS—Ask pretty much anybody who is in the process of moving some business operations to the cloud exactly what they think the cloud is, and the chances are you’ll get a different answer from each one. This is, as you might expect, a problem when it comes to moving critical business functions to the […]

SARATOGA, Calif.—There’s a saying that’s been making its way around the IT business for a long time that asserts that “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” This saying was proven true at the NetEvents Cloud Innovation Summit in Saratoga, Calif., where a number of vendors presented what […]

Your days with Windows XP are numbered. They are so numbered that we warned you in these pages nearly four years ago that the time had come to move away from Microsoft’s then aging OS to Windows 7. But here it is, two weeks away from the XP support cutoff date, including security updates. So […]

The White House Communications Agency, a Pentagon unit responsible for the secure communications used by President Barack Obama and his staff, has begun testing Android phones from two manufacturers, Samsung and LG. The report, from the Wall Street Journal, says that the testing is in its earliest stages. A White House spokesperson declined to comment […]

When the latest leak by former National Security Agency contract employee Edward Snowden hit the news channels on March 18, it failed to make much of a stir. According to the story, the NSA has been able to record all of the telephone conversations in one (presumably unfriendly) country using MYSTIC, and, what’s more, can […]