Kurt D. Lynn

Sometimes, there's a good reason that the "privacy policy" has been placed almost invisibly at the bottom of the page, and that when you click on the link, it presents you with a mountain of microscopic legal-like gobbledygook in a document 24-pages ... long. The reason the policy is placed in a small, out-of-the-way location is simple: the site owners don't really want you to realize that you've just agreed to allow any information they collect about you or your PC to be distributed across the Internet for the rest of your life. But you'll miss that because you won't bother to read beyond the ... (view more)

Every marketer on the Internet understands that targeting is the name of the game. Better information about website visitors or email lists will produce higher advertising yields. However, there's now a growing group of lawmakers that want to limit ... that practice. In fact, some want to make using personal data for advertising, or "behavioral tracking", a crime. All the ruckus seems to have been started by Richard L. Brodsky, a little-known assemblyman in the New York state legislature who recently introduced a bill that would make the use of personal information for advertising a criminal ... (view more)

Although often credited as the father of computing, Charles Babbage (author of the "analytic engine"), probably didn't envision anything like mobile computer access or smart phones. Today, however, a growing percentage of the population cannot do ... without mobile communications and Internet access in their day-to-day lives. A recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 62 percent of Americans use mobile access to digital data or tools. Moreover, the same study found that most would have great difficulty in giving their gadgets up; the cell phone would be the ... (view more)

We all know that many modern medical tools rely on sophisticated software to perform their magic in life-saving and life-threatening situations. However, it's now software that's being asked to decide, quite literally, whether someone lives or dies. ... Sound like a science-fiction fantasy? Maybe something from Huxley's 'Brave New World' or a Vonnegutt novel? It may have started that way, but with increased frequency, computer programs are being asked to make life or death decisions because of their intrinsic impartiality. Example 1: As far back as 2006, software, designed by a Beijing hi-tech ... (view more)

The next time you're in an airport, train station, bus station, coffee house, or other public place and decide to "jack in" to the Internet, you might well be exposing yourself to identity thieves -- or worse. Here's how it works: the girl across ... from you in the airport coffee shop has a laptop in her briefcase that's set as an 'access point', or a 'WiFi hotspot'. She's even given the access point a legitimate-sounding ID, say, something like "Free Airport WiFi". You power up your own laptop, quickly browse for available networks, see "Free Airport WiFi", note that it's unsecured but ignoring ... (view more)

Are you a 'laggard'? Do you typically wait years before being forced to upgrade to the newest hardware, software, or heck, soda pop? Everett M. Rogers, a communications scholar and pioneer, developed the theory of 'innovation diffusion'. Simply put, ... it described how new innovations become assimilated by the general populace. His theory was that adoption of new innovations followed a bell curve where 2.5% of the population were so-called "Innovators", 13.5% were labeled as "early adopters", and categories were followed by the "early majority, the late majority, and the 'laggards'. Ever since ... (view more)

Over the last several years, Google has been slowly sucking up advertising dollars that might normally be spent on television. Now, the six largest cable companies want to stop that. To do so, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Cox ... Communications, Charter Communications and Bright House Networks are planning a joint venture to allow advertisers to purchase interactive and custom ads across their cable systems. Collectively, the companies will invest about $150 million in the project. (Source: nytimes.com ) The announcement of the cable company's "Project Canoe" comes only a week after ... (view more)

When you're king-of-the-hill, everybody wants to knock you off. Google has opened a new assault on Microsoft by going after the software giant's SharePoint program, an application that provides a collaboration platform for groups of workers. ... Google's new application, labeled Google Sites, will be added to the existing suite of Google Apps. It was originally developed by start-up JotSpot, which was acquired by Google in late 2006. A key difference between Google Sites and Microsoft SharePoint is that the Google service will be free. (Source: nytimes.com ) Essentially, Google Sites is a "wiki" ... (view more)

If Adobe has anything to say about it, application programs will soon be as interoperable between the web, your PC, and other documents as a PDF document. As the maker of one of the most popular software platforms on the planet (including FLASH ... player and Acrobat Reader), Adobe is optimistic about the ability of its new Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) environment to become as popular. How Does it Work? The AIR environment is very powerful. It will permit existing FLASH, HTML or JavaScript code to be used to create applications that appear, act and behave like conventional PC-bound programs. ... (view more)

The mainframe computer, thought by many to be the equivalent of a "cyber-dinosaur", is not extinct yet. IBM is introducing a new one, the IBM Z10, a far faster computer with a much larger capacity than any of its IBM predecessors. According to IBM, ... the mainframe computer heralds a big step forward in high-performance, energy-efficient computing. (Source: nytimes.com ) At one time, PC manufacturers were quick to compare the performance of individual PCs, or clusters of PCs, to mainframes. The idea was that mainframes were big and expensive while PCs were small, and inexpensive. Now, IBM has ... (view more)