Stories by Paul McNamara

The radio ad caught my attention: Microsoft is opening one of its new retail stores in the nearby Natick Mall on June 8 and the ceremonies will be followed by a free concert that evening by ... Weezer?

Followed by millions, they follow no one (or only one) in return

Sure, the headline gives away the answer, but if you had been asked to guess which state has the highest rate of reported identity theft you'd likely have chosen Florida: A large population of vulnerable retirees and a generally high crime rate all but guarantee the distinction.

All’s well that ends well, right? I mean especially when, as here, that ending comes complete with a bottle of wine and a box of Twix candy bars. … Maybe.

By day Chad Roberts, 35, is a Windows Server and Exchange administrator for Berkshire Hathaway Media Group. For play he's an award-winning competitive beardsmith and founder of the RVA Beard League in Richmond, Va.

Marketing consultant Mark Schaefer recently published a blog post headlined: "The best digital business idea that just never worked." It's about being at the SXSW conference recently and noticing that even that collection of digerati remains stubbornly dependent upon paper: paper programs, paper posters, paper flyers and paper name tags.

Twit Cleaner is a popular web app that has been used by hundreds of thousands of Twitter users to clear deadwood from their accounts.

From the No Good Deed Goes Unpunished Department: Security experts trying to tell a Pennsylvania hospital that a pile of its sensitive data belonging to staff -- and possibly patients -- was sitting exposed on the Internet were stymied for five days recently by the fact that no one at the medical facility would respond to their repeated warnings.

Episode 1: Last week the administrators of 7,000 university websites were being called upon to change their .edu domain account passwords after a server security breach. Trouble was that the breach had been reported to the admins by Educause -- the non-profit higher-education IT group that runs .edu -- via an email that some recipients complained bore the familiar markings of a phishing attempt.

An iPhone case that doubles as a cup holder? Looks positively ... well, ludicrous, doesn't it? Yet that detail didn't dissuade a fair number of journalists from covering the contraption's funding appeal on Indiegogo in an entirely too serious manner.

A look back at the most memorable tech-related happenings of 1988

A report surfaced recently contending that BlackBerry OS 10 will include a list of 106 prohibited passwords designed to prevent the clueless from choosing the likes of 123456, blackberry, or the ever-popular "password" as their password.

That there is nothing unusual about either of these anecdotes is what makes them so remarkable.

Software engineer using mind-controlled prosthetic limb scales Chicago tower

Thin-client maker Pano Logic, headed by former Wyse CEO John Kish, has gone out of business ... without so much as a public word to the customers it has left high and dry, or anyone else who might be wondering why.