Wayne Rash

About

Wayne Rash is a content writer and editor with a 35-year history covering technology. He’s a frequent speaker on business, technology issues and enterprise computing. He is the author of five books, including his most recent, "Politics on the Nets." Rash is a former Executive Editor of eWEEK and a former analyst in the eWEEK Test Center. He was also an analyst in the InfoWorld Test Center and editor of InternetWeek. He's a retired naval officer, a former principal at American Management Systems and a long-time columnist for Byte Magazine.

U.S. Email, Phone Surveillance Details Come to Light in House Testimony

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 […]

Tech Companies Don’t Tell Whole Truth About Data They Send to Feds

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 […]

Graphical Tools Help Security Experts Track Cyber-Attacks in Real Time

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 […]

New iOS 7 Lockout Feature That May Save Lives Won’t Arrive Until Fall

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 […]

Apple’s iOS 7 Buys Time With Ideas Borrowed From Other Mobile Platforms

Several people have written about Apple’s new iOS 7 interface as being something like Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8, with the flat, simplified icons being similar to the tiles on Windows. But they’re not. The new iOS 7 screen looks more like the BlackBerry Z10. As with the new BlackBerry devices, the latest new version of […]

How the U.S. PRISM and Blarney Programs Mine Your Data for Intelligence

WASHINGTON, DC—The revelations by The Washington Post about two big data analysis operations named PRISM and Blarney dropped like a bombshell on the Washington intelligence and security communities. But I’d already heard about PRISM a day earlier and was trying to put it into context when the story broke. What’s surprising was that a few […]

Big Data Surveillance Is Real Purpose of Huge NSA Phone Record Sweep

The good news in the telephone records revelations that blew up on June 5 and 6 when the Guardian newspaper revealed that Verizon was handing over records of every call made by every customer to the National Security Agency is that they are just the basic call records. This means that the phone numbers on […]

Big Data Analysis Can Detect Cyber-Attacks Before It’s Too Late

WASHINGTON, D.C. —”Times have changed,” warned security consultant Mischel Kwon, former director of US-CERT. “We can’t afford to wait for an antivirus warning or to have malware trip a firewall.” Kwon was kicking off a high-level seminar of government cyber-security experts gathered by FedInsider, a management publication for federal government executives. The panel Kwon was […]

Apple Faces Uphill Fight in Ebook Price-Fixing Trial

Apple appears to be fighting an uphill battle against the U.S. Department of Justice in a price-fixing case stemming from the introduction of the iPad in competition with a variety of e-readers. The DOJ’s complaint against Apple and several book publishers alleges that Apple and the book publishers wanted higher profit and conspired to raise […]

Windows 8.1 Won’t Fix Problems Users Care About Most

The good news is that there’s finally a refresh of Windows 8 coming down the pike, as eWEEK’s Pedro Hernandez explains. The bad news is that the changes you almost certainly want won’t be there. Yes, Microsoft is bringing back the Start Button, but the Start Menu that lives behind it on all previous versions […]