Techworld Blogs

Twitter can be a lonely place

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:56:09 GMT

At last someone has taken a peek into what really goes on inside social networking phenomenon Twitter, and dug up something surprising. Far from being busy and gregarious, a lot of the time it’s remarkably friendless and silent.After analysing 19...

The Forbes rich list - what happened to technology?

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:40:31 GMT

However driven by short-term share prices, it feels like a significant moment that the world’s richest person as measured by Forbes is no longer Bill Gates, and is not even an American. That crown now goes to a Mexican, Carlos...

Why Apple is paranoid about Android

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:41:51 GMT

Every morning I wake up to the Chart of the Day delivered to me from Business Insider. There are usually some interesting statistics to look at but nothing truly staggering, however, this morning's, on smartphone marketshare in the US, caused...

Two and half cheers for the Tories

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:43:49 GMT

Well, that didn't take long.No sooner did I suggest that the political parties should come clean about their plans for IT than the Conservatives do exactly that with their Technology Manifesto. And it's a pretty impressive document too.It's a bit...

Mobile malware will be sneakier

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:00:45 GMT

Mobile malware often looks like a scare story put out by security companies with products to sell and programmers who over-estimate geeky theoretical risks.Fair assessment or delirious complacency?Every security show held (the recent RSA Show for instance) has its mandatory...

Time for parties to come clean on technology plans

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:19:14 GMT

How big a part is science and technology going to play in a forthcoming general election?The date hasn't been called yet but already there have been more mentions of scientific and technological research that I can recall. I'm too young...

Google shakes up apps market

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:32:12 GMT

Google's introduction of Apps was a massive shockwave to the marketplace. For the first time, Microsoft had a competitor with real credibility trying to its business software lunch.The launch of the new Google Apps marketplace has taken Google Apps to...

Apple apps contract - the devil's in the detail

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:59:02 GMT

The news that Apple's contract with developers of apps for the iPhone has leaked to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) appear to have caused consternation at Apple's head office. For the first time, Apple's strict controls on the contracts' contents...

All eyes on Cisco ... well, some of them

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:10:40 GMT

What's Cisco plotting?The company has been dropping teasers for some weeks about an announcement that will "forever change the Internet" and at 3.00 this afternoon (Blighty time), the waiting will be over.There hasn't been so much speculation about a company's...

Where were the cops when Microsoft busted Waledac?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:29:00 GMT

Name the most important anti-crime organisation on the Internet. Not easy. An international police body? Some wing of the US government? Here’s my guess, and I base this on some evidence. It’s Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit a small department so...

Outlook still cloudy

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:38:13 GMT

How many more surveys are there going to be on the state of the cloud market? And how many will it take before IT managers give an answer that all manufacturers and cloud providers want to hear - that cloud...

The world's right to web access

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:06:38 GMT

Here's a contrast with the current shenanigans with the Digital Economy Bill - according to a BBC survey nearly 80 percent of the population of the world thinks that Internet access is a fundamental right.A poll for the BBC World...

A tale of two countries

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:26:37 GMT

The ongoing row about the ACTA treaty has highlighted the differing ways that countries treat copyright infringement, revealing how hard it's going to be to get any sort of consensus. Take Germany, a country that has a rather unmerited reputation...

Getting physical

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:50:48 GMT

What’s the future for physical appliances? Are we getting so accustomed to virtual appliances that we can forget all those long hours of shifting boxes into a server room?The subject came up in the middle of an interesting chat...

Microsoft plays big bad wolf. And then blows down its own house

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:11:56 GMT

Microsoft watchers will have watched in horror (or perhaps delight) this week as Microsoft did something monumentally ill-advised. It phoned its corporate lawyers, who phoned domain hoster Network Solutions, who took down the small but well-known anti-secrecy website, Cryptome.org.Taking down...

Why business software isn't like Facebook ... yet

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:44:56 GMT

Marc Benioff, the ebulliant CEO of Salesforce has been at it again.Writing in Techcrunch, he poses the question; Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?" and sets out his thought on the matter - the next stage from the question...

Mixed-up world of virtualisation security

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:53:18 GMT

Surveys often throw up odd results.But what are we to make of the Symantec survey that reveals that a third of IT managers think that virtualisation is going to make their infrastructure more insecure, a third less insecure and a...

Culture clash in the clouds

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:26:46 GMT

Talk about a culture clash. CA’s purchase of 3Tera is more than just CA getting more of a foothold into the cloud (if that’s not a mixed metaphor) but shows the difference between two sharply contrasting companies.CA is as old...

Doubt cast on Windows tests. But where was Microsoft?

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:53:27 GMT

So I wasn’t the only one scratching my head over claims made a week ago that real-world memory usage on Windows 7 could routinely hit the 90 percent mark. It turns out that the company from which the unusual claims...

MPs live in dark ages with their software choice

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:14:36 GMT

Shouldn’t there be some sort of law about keeping IT out of MPs’ hands? What we to do about a group of people whose every step into the IT word is greeted with laughter and contempt. The announcement that MPs...

Floyd Landis - champion cyclist, alleged Trojan hacker

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:05:12 GMT

Sports stars have been accused of a number of things over the years, but the hacking allegations against former US Tour de France cycling champion Floyd Landis always set a new benchmark for murk. To my knowledge the Pennsylvania Mennonite-born...

Windows 7, unfairly condemned

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:54:56 GMT

The words ‘Windows’ and ‘frugal’ have rarely been seen in proximity to one another, but even by those standards a new claim that Windows 7 gorges on memory is unusual.Devil Mountain Inc draws its stats from its 23,000 PC Exo.performance.network...

Time to bring domain name registry into the open

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:56:37 GMT

On the Internet, no-one knows you're a dog.Remember that? Originating in a New Yorker cartoon, it was the phrase used in the early days of the World Wide Web to emphasise how anonymous the Internet could be - a fact...

Microsoft's chronic lack of innovation

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:09:01 GMT

Credit to Silicon Valley Insider for telling us what we thought we knew. Microsoft makes its money from yesterday’s products, fashioned in a pre-Internet age few of us can remember.The first interesting thing about the graph published on the magazine’s...

Can chip and PIN be fixed?

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:03:47 GMT

A new chip and PIN vulnerability has the industry shrugging its shoulders, and consumer groups up in arms, but the bigger question is this: can it be fixed?The Cambridge University research team cracked the apparently impregnable four-digit PIN verification system...