Spotlight Features

About three years ago, it seemed as though reverse mergers were falling out of favor with the SEC. The agency sanctioned some of the companies that were created by this process and some were actually suspended from trading. Now it seems that reverse mergers are once again regaining their popularity....

Indications are that 2007 will be a bumper year for the solar power and renewable energy industry, as was noted in Part 1 of this two-part series. As an increasing number of state governments are introducing renewable power and energy standards and incentives, Washington, D.C., lawmakers at the clos...

The first computers were programmed by electrical engineers moving jumper cables around in the back of a giant mainframe. This is how the concept of a "bug" in software got started. A bug crawled into some of these wires, shorted a couple of them, and changed the logic of a program. In addition to...

Although 2006 was filled with surprises in the telecom space, as described in Part 1 of this two-part series, there were equally dramatic changes in terms of the pure processing ability of computers and how that power translated to consumers in the form of lower-cost, higher-end products. "Good news...

Professional cyberthieves and organized crime rings are looking to cash in on stolen identities and are releasing an increasing amount of malware in the process. McAfee predicts the following disturbing trends: a rise in the number of password-stealing Web sites that use fake sign-in pages for popul...

The renewable energy snowball is gaining momentum, spurring the evolution of a full-blown economic ecosystem -- from small local businesses selling and installing solar PV systems for the residential retrofit market to large-scale commercial and residential installations that involve public and priv...

The pending January release of Windows Vista raises questions about the security benefits of using one operating system over another. Microsoft claims that Vista's new architecture hardens it against vulnerabilities from viruses, spyware and adware attacks. However, users should be wary of putting t...

Unsolicited e-mail is an old Internet nemesis, but spammers have come up with a new twist, and it's causing corporate and individual users alike e-heartburn. It's called "image spam," and it's waiting in an in-box near you. Image spam contains little ordinary text to analyze. Instead, it uses the .g

When making forecasts for a year ahead, I have always found the "greater fool" theory comforting. In short, it takes a fool to make a forecast, and a greater one to believe it. On balance then, I think it wise to hide these predictions from children, the gullible, the insane, etc. Some people wil...

As most people know now, the practice of pretexting was publicly highlighted earlier this year when it was revealed that HP had hired private detectives to spy on reporters whose reporting appeared to be based on leaks from members of its Board. The PIs has used pretexting ruses to gain access to th...