Kurt D. Lynn

The Internet's most popular social networking sites might also turn out to be the most dangerous. Lack of age verification and deliberate or inadvertent bugs on these sites have been used to harvest private information, implant spyware, or enable ... child predators. It would seem that the old "danger: stranger" warning to young children is still appropriate to users of social networking sites. MySpace.com, with over 100 million active users worldwide, is a case in point. Two weeks ago, district attorneys in Queens announced that two underage girls using MySpace were enticed into the home of a ... (view more)

A little more than a week ago, Wal-Mart Stores quietly chucked its video download offering into the waste bin. Introduced less than a year ago, Wal-Mart appears to have given up when Hewlett-Packard, its technology partner in the venture, cut ... support. (Source: zdnet.com ). This doesn't mean that downloading video directly to the consumer is a dead issue. This week, Netflix -- the company that sends DVD's to more than 7 million consumers in little red envelopes -- joined Apple and Amazon in experimenting with ways to offer complete media "choice" to the heretofore limited selections offered ... (view more)

Who will Americans choose in 2008 to lead the country into a new decade? Republican? Democrat? Conservative? Liberal? Independent? The conventional wisdom is to compare the various presidential candidates on all the so-called "popular" issues: ... things like immigration, Roe vs. Wade, the war in Iraq, the economy, Global Warming, and health care. But the stance a president takes on 'high' technology can also result in world-changing events and may be more important than you think. Don't believe it? Consider President Kennedy -- his going-to-the-moon objective catalyzed years of technology ... (view more)

Along comes Jimmy Wales with a $4 million (not billion) investment from Bessemer Ventures, an investment from Amazon of an undisclosed amount, and some private money from a handful of angel investors that include Marc Andreesen (cofounder of ... Netscape), Josh Kopelman (Half.com), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), and Ron Conway (an early investor in Google, PayPal and Ask Jeeves). And while no one knows the exact amount of funding that Jimmy has received, it's probably safe to guess that, altogether, it's less than $100 million. In a relatively short span of technology history, Google has achieved revenues ... (view more)

Google is well positioned to expand its dominance of the Internet advertising space -- if -- it can pull off a triple play in the market. In baseball, a triple play is almost unheard of: it requires one team to get three outs in a single, continuous ... play. But it does happen. The most recent was this last September when the Philadelphia Phillies made a triple play while playing the Colorado Rockies. Now Google may be on its way to the first Internet advertising "triple play." Google's first play, of course, was unseating Yahoo! as the search-engine-of-choice. From Google's launch in 1998, it ... (view more)

After three decades of year-after-year innovation, it would be hard to remember any company that has had a better fiscal year than Apple in 2007. It seemed that Apple, Inc. just couldn't do anything wrong: not only did they introduce a large string ... of new products and new milestones, but almost everything was buzz-worthy. Let's recap: January: the year started off great. Apple introduced the iPod Shuffle, declared its intentions with the iPhone, announced Apple TV, and the iTunes library hit 2 billion songs. February: a time of peacemaking. Apple makes peace with Apple Corps and Apple and ... (view more)

The holiday dust is settling and industry observers are beginning to tally the season's winners and losers. One of the winners, it seems, are 'e-cards', the emailed greeting cards that your friends send you with those corny graphics, animations and ... music. In previous years, e-cards might have been fun, sure, but you wouldn't really use them for important occasions. This year, however, it would seem that e-cards are becoming "OK" for traditional events like Christmas. According to American Greetings, one of the biggest e-card producers, e-card utilization has increased by 10% this year. ( ... (view more)

Scary: A recent survey sponsored by Deloitte ... (view more)

These days, there's a lot of concern about the economy. Under these circumstances, people begin to worry about the security of their own jobs; the auto industry, for example, feels a bit shaky right now. This is also true of the real estate and ... mortgage industries. But, according to the latest Robert Half Technology survey, IT jobs are staying the secure course. According to the Robert Half Chief Information Officer (CIO) survey of 1,400 companies with more than 100 employees, 82% of CIO's expect to maintain the status quo for the next quarter. Another 13% of those CIO's expect to add IT ... (view more)

The theme behind Jack Finney's "The Body Snatchers" has been replicated in movie after movie since 1956. Each remake advances the same basic theme: aliens are taking over people one by one and it's almost impossible to tell who has been taken over ... and who hasn't. With the arrest last month of John Kenneth Schiefer, 26, we learned that there are aliens taking over our PCs too. Schiefer, or "Acidstorm" to his friends, pleaded guilty to using the snatched identities of over 250,000 "zombie" PCs to conduct identity theft and fraud. Schiefer and accomplices used 'bot' software to compromise ... (view more)