Stories by: Stephen Bell

Early and extensive deployment of firewalls gave internet users "a false sense of security" and compromised the ideal end-to-end transparency of the internet, says former Internet Engineering Task Force head Brian Carpenter.

Reputation-measurement is one of the newer ways of blocking malware in a world where threats have grown more elaborate and cunning, and Web 2.0 has grown the audience for rich media.

The winner of the New Zealand Computer Society's (NZCS) annual Wellington-based honors student research contest has claimed his award by uncovering shortcomings in accessibility of government Web sites for disabled and other disadvantaged users.

Novell President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Ron Hovsepian sees the acquisition of the JBoss application server by Red Hat as having "further validated our early adoption of JBoss."

NCR will launch programs designed to process the enormous amounts of data associated with radio frequency identification (RFID).

Storage software company Veritas Software is conducting a beta trial of a web browser-based data recovery tool designed to help users recover lost files themselves from backup copies.

BMC Software claims the configuration management database (CMDB) is the next big thing, even the current big thing, in managing today's increasingly complex IT environment. And it's giving it away - in a manner of speaking. BMC's Atrium is available free of charge to users of the company's service level management and incident management (helpdesk) tools.

The air in any central business district nowadays is thick with wireless signals and "wardriving" expeditions prove that a discouraging proportion of them are still unencrypted, says Nick von Dadleszen of Security-Assessment.com.

Big-bang single-vendor IT outsourcing has been largely succeeded by a more selective attitude among businesses of outsourcing only those functions that can be more or less commoditised, with outsourcing to several vendors with specific expertise increasingly common. But a panel of users, vendors and analysts at the MediaConnect seminar in Australia's Hunter Valley last week has cast doubt on whether outsourcing has become truly "strategic".

Who's to blame for the hold that spam, spyware and viruses have on the Internet?

The classic graphical user interface was well suited to an early Macintosh with 128kB of RAM that ran a few applications and about 50 files, “but it doesn’t scale”, says usability design specialist Don Norman.