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Pundits on parade: What’s next in tech You’ve heard of Christmas in July, that classic advertising gimmick designed to lure shoppers into stores despite the oppressive heat and humidity. We’ll, we’ve got New Year’s in August, which invites you to stay indoors and read “The next big things in IT” -- 15 predictions about the future of technology. NSA spying program argued at court hearing A U.S. appeals court agreed on Wednesday to weigh a government motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging the National Security Agency (NSA) monitored phone lines and e-mails without a warrant, but judges asked a government lawyer tough questions over the issue. August 16, 4:57 a.m. PDT Health experts: E-health records privacy rules needed The U.S. needs new medical privacy rules as the country moves toward greater use of IT to store health records, a group of health-care experts said Wednesday. July 18, 9:01 a.m. PDT EU, US sign passenger data sharing deal Critics of last week's agreement allowing European passengers' personal data to be shared with U.S. authorities have just under a month to reshape the accord before it comes into force, said Stavros Lambrinidis, vice president of the European Parliament's civil liberties committee Monday. July 3, 5:31 a.m. PDT RIP, electronic medical records? And so the story of the largest, most visible attempt to digitize health care delivery in the U.S. has finally been told on page one of the Wall Street Journal. And it ain’t pretty.  April 26, 3:00 a.m. PDT More IT war stories Off the Record, the real-world slice of life that graces the last page of InfoWorld, is one of our most popular columns. I know this from reader surveys and from all the e-mail I receive about it. As reader Roland Sickenberger put it recently, “It’s my favorite part of the magazine, kind of like a ‘Dilbert come to life’ thing.” March 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Congressman calls out tech firms on China ethics U.S. Congressman Chris Smith said that top American technology companies are failing to prevent censorship and other human rights abuses in China, writing Saturday in a letter to The Wall Street Journal. February 12, 4:52 a.m. PST Women in technology: A call to action A quick scan of almost any IT department -- from the trenches to the corner office -- confirms it: Women who embrace technology as a lifelong career remain a rare breed. To be sure, opportunity for women in technology has advanced in the past few decades, as have education initiatives aimed at leveling the playing field, but for every woman rising to prominence or embarking on a profession in IT, there seems to be another opting out of her career in technology. January 29, 3:03 a.m. PST Back to school: Getting girls into IT Despite the success of various education initiatives in the past several years, there’s little doubt that the shortage of women in technology begins on the playground. As such, many industry leaders and experts believe the long-term solution to the gender imbalance in IT lies in women technologists going back to school -- way back, to high schools and even elementary schools to mentor young girls, who too often give up on math and science at an early age. January 29, 3:02 a.m. PST Activism provides competitive advantage for IT Encountering another woman working in technology was a rare event for me when I started out in IT many years ago. In the years since, women have made significant strides, sometimes against great odds, proving their mettle as both tech execs and engineers. January 29, 3:01 a.m. PST Gender crisis in IT You don’t need a degree in statistics to recognize that IT is a men’s club. Just walk the floor of any tech conference or, in all likelihood, your own office — XY chromosomes everywhere you look. January 29, 3:00 a.m. PST Investigator pleads guilty in HP case Private investigator Bryan Wagner pleaded guilty Friday to two charges in federal court in San Jose, California, and agreed to cooperate with federal officials investigating the Hewlett-Packard spying scandal. January 12, 12:03 p.m. PST Florida court rejects attempt to see e-voting code A Florida judge has rejected a U.S. Congress candidate's request to examine the source code of electronic voting machines alleged to have miscounted votes in November's election. January 2, 9:36 a.m. PST Technology of the Gods January is named after Janus, the two-faced Roman deity of beginnings and endings, who reportedly was able to look both forward and back. So for our Jan. 1 issue, we pay homage to the mythological immortal with our seventh annual Technology of the Year Awards, an analysis of where IT has been and where it’s going in 2007. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Review of reviews It’s coming up on closing time for 2006. All around us, everyone is going into holiday mode. Not to be curmudgeonly contrarians, InfoWorld will be following suit, taking a one-week break before returning on Jan. 1 with our first print issue of the year. (It’s really only a semi-hiatus; InfoWorld.com will continue to perk over the holidays with a slightly reduced slate of stories.) December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST The biggest rubes, boobs, and noobs of 2006 It’s that time again in Cringeville when we present The MOONies, honoring the most Morally Obtuse, Offensive, and Noxious behavior in high tech. This year’s MOONie winners will receive a handsome statuette of Steve Ballmer bending over and dropping his trousers, affectionately known around Redmond as The Google Salute. Along the way I offer a few tips of the Cringely fedora to deserving folks who made the tech world a better place. So without further ado… December 15, 3:00 a.m. PST New litigation rules put IT on the front lines of data access On Dec. 1, when the latest version of the FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) goes into effect, CIOs and their IT departments will find themselves on the firing line in most major business litigation. [Read about the cases that started it all.] November 17, 3:00 a.m. PST Push intensifies for personal data rules change Calls for a change to international rules on data transfers intensified Monday when two leading trade associations called on U.S. and European Union decision-makers to take action. October 23, 8:21 a.m. PDT IT by the book Can something that’s been kicking around for more than 15 years qualify as an overnight success? It certainly feels that way with ITIL, a collection of nine books that lays out a blueprint for IT service management. In the United States, at least, ITIL has recently catapulted itself from a respected, if somewhat obscure, treatise for governance geeks to a mainstream discipline. October 23, 3:00 a.m. PDT EU gears up for fight over passenger data European Union parliamentarians are gearing up for a fight over data privacy, after justice ministers from the 25 countries in the E.U., together with the European Commission, signed a new temporary agreement to pass over airline passenger data to American authorities last week. October 12, 6:12 a.m. PDT HP's Dunn, Fiorina blame Perkins for downfall Former Hewlett-Packard chairmen Patricia Dunn and Carly Fiorina each cited board member Thomas Perkins as an instigator behind their ousters from the technology company, according to interviews the two gave on a U.S. TV news program Sunday night. 4:17 a.m. PDT Lessons learned from HP scandal No sense pointing the finger at Hewlett-Packard anymore; we have Congress and the FBI to do that. But I did want to discuss the “I didn’t know what my employees/vendors/executive staff were doing” defense -- which was, of course, made famous by Enron , so you have to know it just won’t do. Instead of looking backward, I spoke with a couple of experts on governance, privacy, risk, and compliance assessment about how companies can do the right thing in the future. October 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Dunn, Hunsaker face HP charges in court Former Hewlett-Packard Co. chairwoman Patricia Dunn made a brief court appearance Thursday in Santa Clara County, California, to face four state felony charges in the HP boardroom scandal. Superior Court Judge Alfonso Fernandez scheduled her arraignment for Nov. 17, at which she will enter a plea to charges in the case. October 5, 4:07 p.m. PDT Update: HP's Dunn, three others to surrender Ousted Hewlett-Packard Chairman Patricia Dunn is expected to surrender on Thursday after she, a former company lawyer, and three outside investigators were charged Wednesday in California on felony charges related to the conduct of an investigation to track down news leaks from the HP board that allegedly broke state law. October 5, 2:42 p.m. PDT Corporate leak probes walk a fine line In one telling moment during the recent Congressional hearings on the Hewlett-Packard Co. board scandal, ousted chairman Patricia Dunn offered the "everybody does it" defense. October 2, 2:13 p.m. PDT Congress adjourns with tech bills unfinished When the U.S. Congress adjourned in the early morning hours Saturday, it left a number of technology-related bills unfinished, including two bills addressing fraudulent access to personal telephone records. October 2, 9:54 a.m. PDT European airlines in legal limbo as data talks collapse An agreement sheltering airlines from European privacy laws, allowing them to hand over passenger data required by U.S. authorities, expired Saturday, leaving most European airlines in legal limbo. October 2, 5:05 a.m. PDT IBM to open up patent filings IBM will publish its patent applications online to share their details with the world and, perhaps, reduce the flood of patent infringement lawsuits. September 26, 5:23 p.m. PDT HP's Dunn to testify before House on spying scandal Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairman Patricia Dunn will answer questions on the spying scandal that has embroiled her company during a House committee hearing on Capitol Hill next week. September 19, 4:54 p.m. PDT NSA takes the blame, Google protects its name When a flaming Dell Inspiron turned his Ford pickup into a Pop-Tart, Thomas Forqueran became an unlikely media celebrity. The 62-year-old was interviewed by MSNBC and The New York Times, among others -- but you read about him here first. He says Dell offered to reimburse him for a truck rental and give him a new laptop. He replied, “Yes and no, thanks,” respectively. I wonder if a fire extinguisher was part of the package. August 25, 3:00 a.m. PDT Venture capitalist names his terms I had lunch last week with Drew Clark, the lead strategy guy at IBM’s Venture Capital Group based in Silicon Valley. Amid a lively discussion of VC trends around the globe (most startups seem commoditized from birth, Web 2.0 is becoming Enterprise 2.0, the flow of VC dollars continues unabated and is increasingly funneled to Asia), he coined a couple of phrases that I kind of liked. August 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Are you significant? You know how political polls always mention a “margin of error” of so many percentage points? So Candidate X may be 3 percent up in the polls, but that’s actually “a statistical dead heat.” Well, the technology research world needs some discipline like this, because too many research firms have gotten lazy and are playing it fast and loose with small sample sizes. June 2, 3:00 a.m. PDT Are your software services compliant? In case you haven’t noticed, just about every part of the IT infrastructure must comply with some regulation or other. April 25, 3:00 a.m. PDT Budgeting for security breaches It appears, according to a reliable source, that a national retailer has lost the debit card information from thousands of its customers, but as we go to press, it has still refused to fess up. April 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT The hidden challenges of federated identity For years, companies have kept stores of identity information about employees, customers, and partners. These databases and directories are critical components of a company’s identity infrastructure. But as businesses push to create new products and increase productivity, they have discovered that they often must cooperate to provide the services their customers and employees demand. March 24, 3:00 a.m. PST Scaling a federated identity infrastructure Different kinds of organizations approach the problem of scaling a federated identity implementation in different ways. When you’re federating with one or two partners, hammering out the legal arrangements and assigning risk and liability is done one partner at a time. Even if technology standards provide universal system interoperability, the lawyers are likely to approach each agreement as a one-off task. Let’s call this model “peer-to-peer federation.” March 24, 3:00 a.m. PST User-centric identity brings federation close to home Federation doesn’t have to be a behind-the-scenes interaction between big companies. Lately, an idea called “user-centric identity” has gained traction. It revolves around a few core principles, most notably the idea that users should be allowed to choose which identity credentials to present in response to an authentication or attribute request. March 24, 3:00 a.m. PST Sidestepping the analog hole On an episode of “The West Wing,” deputy national security adviser Kate Harper (Mary McCormack) reprimands presidential assistant Debbie Fiderer (Lily Tomlin) for displaying the president’s schedule on her computer screen. As Harper correctly points out, anybody could walk into the office and find out something they shouldn’t know. March 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Opening up iTunes U Criticizing free services is always dicey. So when I dinged Stanford University and Apple for the nonaccessibility of the lectures at itunes.stanford.edu, I knew I risked seeming churlish. But there are some things about this deal that rub me the wrong way. February 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Senate panel warns Internet porn vendors The U.S. Congress will pass new regulations to keep sexually explicit content on the Internet away from minors if the adult industry doesn't do more to police itself, several senators warned Thursday. January 19, 2:51 p.m. PST Inventor group questions patent reform push As several technology trade groups call for patent reform from the U.S. Congress this year, some individual inventors say changes to patent law will hurt them while helping huge companies. January 4, 3:50 p.m. PST Wikipedia, competition, and the future By the time you read this column, Wikipedia will be celebrating its fifth anniversary. It’s been a wilder ride than anybody could have imagined, and it’s gotten even more so lately. In a widely cited incident, John Seigenthaler, Sr., a prominent journalist, publisher, and political figure, reacted with justifiable horror when he learned that his bio entry in Wikipedia falsely implicated him in the assassination of Robert Kennedy. January 4, 3:00 a.m. PST Top technologies of the year Welcome to our first issue of the year. For those of you who took a break, re-entry into the heady universe of work may be a bit discombobulating. Fortunately, last Saturday, the world’s ever-considerate timekeepers saw fit to give us an extra sliver of time -- a leap second-- to prep for the new year. And now, with the pop of the cork (or was that the buzz of a pager?), we’re ready to herald 2006, a potential banner year for the enterprise. January 2, 3:00 a.m. PST More tech losers, Dell support snoozes I really thought it was going to be my year. But then Time named Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono its men/woman of 2005. Sure, they’ve done plenty to fight Third World poverty and disease, but have they contributed anything to the world of geek gossip? And I don’t know about that Bono guy. He was never really the same after Cher left him. December 30, 3:00 a.m. PST New regulations loom large in 2006 Compliance deadlines touched almost every business sector and division in 2005. Think the worst is over? Think again: It looks like ’06 and ’07 will see even more activity, demanding a whole new level of monitoring and record-keeping technology. December 29, 3:00 a.m. PST Document management systems go to court Two proposed amendments to the federal Rules of Civil Procedure, if passed by Congress, will have a major impact on corporations and their IT departments. One expert I spoke with called the situation a legal Chernobyl. December 27, 3:00 a.m. PST Data breach bills unlikely to pass before 2006 After a series of data breaches earlier this year, members of the U.S. Congress raged about the irresponsibility of breached companies and introduced a flurry of bills requiring companies to notify affected customers when data is lost. November 11, 11:45 a.m. PST Are CIOs headed for extinction? Is the CIO a dinosaur? Will it be an extinct position in a few short years? Merial, a large animal health care enterprise co-owned by Merck and sanofi-aventis, believes so; in fact, it's already buried the title. I spoke with Steve Lerner, IS director at Merial, about what led to its decision to eliminate the CIO position. The answer, in short, is Sarbanes-Oxley. October 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Identity management in action Think you’re ready to deploy IDM (identity management) in your organization? John Aisien, vice president of marketing at IDM vendor Thor Technologies, won’t kid you about the realities. October 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Can business and ethics coexist? The Los Angeles Times reported last month that Disney President Robert Iger was in Beijing renewing his bid to bring the Disney Channel to the 340 million homes in China with cable TV, representing a potential market larger than the entire population of the United States. September 27, 4:00 a.m. PDT Digital health care and privacy issues Technology and the profit motive combine to offer us tremendous benefits -- often life-saving ones. But this combination also challenges our right to privacy. Take, for example, the amazing new health care devices unveiled at the recent Intel Developer Forum (IDF) conference held in San Francisco. September 6, 4:00 a.m. PDT IT's seven dirty words Remember the George Carlin routine “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television”? (No, I’m not going to print them here; if you’re really curious, Google ’em.) I got to thinking the other day that IT has its own set of dirty words. Try saying any one of these in polite IT company, and someone will hand you a bar of soap to wash your mouth out. My filthy seven: August 15, 5:00 a.m. PDT Open source directory With more and more companies investigating capabilities such as identity management, SSO (single sign-on), and automated provisioning, directory services are fast becoming a vital component of network infrastructures. So far, however, no open source project has gained as much traction in this area as Apache enjoys in the Web server market. August 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT Farewell, CTO Connection If you haven’t checked out this week’s columns yet, let me be the one to break the bad news: Chad Dickerson is hanging up his InfoWorld CTO spurs and heading off to Yahoo, where he’ll be toiling away in the brave new world of search. August 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT Lessons learned from the MasterCard/Visa heist How could MasterCard and Visa allow 40 million customer credit card numbers to be sucked out of their systems and into the hands of criminals? Last week I called them both to find out. June 28, 5:00 a.m. PDT IT and physical security joining hands IT departments and physical security departments at corporations must learn to work together and coordinate their efforts, because computer security and conventional security are getting increasingly and irreversibly intertwined, speakers at a security conference said this week. June 17, 2:40 p.m. PDT HIPAA compliance: Time's up The deadline for compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's Final Security Rule was April 20, 2005. Health-care CSOs across the country scrambled to make sure their organizations were in line with the federal law, which covers a broad range of security aspects, including health-records access, network data transmission and physical security. June 10, 10:52 a.m. PDT IBM unveils privacy software Claiming a technology breakthrough in privacy and security, IBM on Tuesday introduced software that allows corporate users to share information with each other and government agencies without having to reveal private personal details. May 24, 11:36 a.m. PDT Fear and loathing at Interop “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” may be the rule for gamblers and dance club denizens, but I hope you’ll forgive my passing along a few newsworthy items from the Interop show in that dusty desert outpost. May 9, 5:00 a.m. PDT Bloggers and the law In a recent column, I called on companies to follow the lead of Sun Microsystems and liberalize their corporate blogging policies. This week I spoke with no fewer than two law firms and three attorneys to get the skinny on where your life as an employee stops and your life as a private citizen starts, according to the law. May 3, 5:00 a.m. PDT Mercury looks to lighten compliance load Promising to lighten IT’s heavy and ongoing burden to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations, Mercury Interactive on Monday issued IT Governance Center 6.0, which automates the process of managing IT changes driven by compliance mandates. May 2, 5:00 a.m. PDT In media we trust? Car dealers, politicians, journalists. What do these professions have in common? People don’t trust them. April 4, 6:00 a.m. PDT Enterprise collaboration with blogs and wikis This article has been modified from its original version. Certain quoted material has been removed because its veracity could not be confirmed. March 28, 6:00 a.m. PST Anatomy of an IT disaster: How the FBI blew it Some FBI agents ruefully refer to the trilogy project, a massive initiative to modernize the FBI's aging technology infrastructure, as the "Tragedy" project. It certainly has all the earmarks of tragedy: the best intentions, catastrophic miscommunication, staggering waste. March 21, 6:00 a.m. PST UK to launch Parliamentary inquiry into future e-voting The U.K. government will launch a Parliamentary inquiry next year into the practicalities of electronic voting. December 9, 4:04 a.m. PST The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid We all like to think we learn from mistakes, whether our own or others’. So in theory, the more serious bloopers you know about, the less likely you are to be under the bright light of interrogation, explaining how you managed to screw up big-time. That’s why we put out an all-points bulletin to IT managers and vendors everywhere: For the good of humanity, tell us about the gotchas that have gotten you, so others can avoid them. November 19, 3:00 p.m. PST Petco settles charge it left customer data exposed The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has reached a settlement with pet food retailer Petco Animal Supplies of charges that the company's Web site violated federal law by making deceptive security claims. November 17, 4:01 p.m. PST Seeking spyware remedies We’ve all been hearing a lot lately about spyware, those nasty little apps that secret themselves onto your computer, hog resources, change your default settings, and maybe even steal personal information and send it to third parties. Despite all the talk, spyware still isn’t getting the attention it deserves in the enterprise. October 1, 3:00 p.m. PDT Utah judge halts antispyware law A district court judge in Utah ruled in favor of a New York company that makes advertising software, sometimes referred to as "spyware," that tracks Web surfers' activities, blocking the nation's first-ever law targeting spyware. June 23, 9:40 a.m. PDT Privacy advocates: RFID technical review needed WASHINGTON -- Privacy advocates called for the U.S. Federal Trade Commission or other government agencies to initiative a comprehensive assessment of the potential effects of RFID (radio frequency identification) technology, during an FTC workshop on RFID Monday. June 22, 5:02 a.m. PDT Companies team to reel in 'phishing' A new consortium of companies from across different industries has formed to tackle the problem of online identity fraud, better known as "phishing," the group said on Wednesday. June 16, 8:05 a.m. PDT Survey: Antispam law still not making a difference The number of spam campaigns continues to rise, despite a new U.S. antispam law that went into effect in January, according to a survey released Thursday by antispam vendor Commtouch Software. April 1, 1:18 p.m. PST Web services, ID theft create new markets for RSA HANOVER, GERMANY -- RSA Security Inc. is looking into new technologies to secure Web services and protect consumers from identity theft, according to company president and chief executive officer (CEO) Arthur W. Coviello. March 19, 5:09 a.m. PST > Business |
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