Spotlight Features

You are walking past a coffee shop one morning, your mobile phone beeps, and up pops a coupon for a free croissant. You are driving on the highway when your computer screen displays a message telling you that an accident has occurred 10 miles up the road, so you take an alternate route. Zealous vend...

Biometric security devices -- which authenticate a person's identity on the basis of physical characteristics, such as a fingerprint -- have been available in one form or another for 30 years. But biometrics technology for computer security might never achieve widespread use because of the predomina...

Although worms can create media furor and disrupt business, to date they have adhered to a strange dichotomy: A given worm may spread rapidly or deliver a destructive payload -- but no worm has accomplished both tasks with equal aplomb. August 2003 was the worst-ever month for malware attacks, than...

Only 15 years ago, we watched in amazement while the rusty iron curtain collapsed and the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe embarked on new lives in the global market. For most of us, this neglected region stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans then retreated to the fringes of our at...

As spammers dream up new strategies for slithering into e-mail inboxes, their counterparts, anti-spam software developers, are on the lookout for new ways to stop them cold. The latest tactic, called challenge-response, requires an e-mailer to verify his or her identity before being added to a "whit...

The other day I was asked what the odds were that SCO would win against IBM. On the basis of how the two parties were behaving, I offered a range of between 55 and 65 percent. One of the strongest indications I have that SCO might win is that several of the financial analyst groups who work with me,...

The universal shortage of nurses in particular and healthcare workers in general is getting worse. Meanwhile, baby boomers are moving like a tidal wave toward assisted-living homes. Soon, patients could face the choice of being cared for by a robotic nurse or no nurse at all. When Pearl, a robotic n...

As exciting as the Internet's past 30 years have been, they're only a shadow of what is to come. We are already catching glimpses of the future in projects sponsored by universities and pharmaceutical research labs. Grid computing -- a Web-based operation that will allow companies to share computing...