InsideTech

WASHINGTON - There is no kill switch for the Internet, no secret on-off button in an Oval Office drawer. Yet when a Senate committee was exploring ways to secure computer networks, a provision to give the president the power to shut down Internet traffic to compromised Web sites in an emergency set off alarms. Corporate leaders and privacy advocates quickly ...

WASHINGTON - Safety investigators told federal regulators three years ago that it was dangerous for bus drivers to talk on cell phones while driving and recommended a ban. The National Transportation Safety Board put that recommendation on its list of most important safety measures. Industry and safety groups had no objections. Yet the regulatory agency that would write new rules ...

NEW YORK - Verizon Wireless will start selling its answer to the iPhone - the Droid - for $200 this week as the company taps into the growing appetite for smart phones that go far beyond making calls. The Droid could help Verizon retain its status as the nation's largest wireless carrier and contribute to a turnaround of its manufacturer, ...

Photo: Lachlan Hardy/Flickr (CC) You need to know how to deal with different types of people in order to get along. Some are especially sensitive to certain things, like the conflict resolution rep that hates to hears insults around the office, even when they're said in jest. IT workers like us are no different. We take our geekiness seriously and ...

Oct. 19 - One surprising thing about Microsoft's recent PC operating systems is how they reflect the mood of the time, not just in Redmond but across the U.S. Like a popular song or movie, Windows Vista echoed the confused and security-obsessed state of the country midway through the decade. Its heavy-handed security warnings clashed with people's growing desire to ...

'World of Warcraft reaches milestone in the lead up to the release of Wrath of the Lich King expansion.' - In a press release Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that the subscribership for World of Warcraft has exceeded 11 million players worldwide. This milestone was reached as Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft's second expansion, nears its worldwide launch ...

NEW YORK - When I was a kid, my dad bought a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It had 32 volumes and took up 4 feet in the book case. I loved to sit on the couch and flip through it, reading articles at random. Now, I'm returning the favor, giving my father an encyclopedia that has the equivalent of 1,000 ...

GeoCities has finally closed its doors, ending an era of free homepage service that many PC enthusiasts remember from the mid-90s.   GeoCities, a Yahoo subsidiary, hosted millions of free websites that were mainly built from stock templates that allowed anyone to have a personal site for blogs and pictures before Blogger and other similar services were launched. Earlier in the ...

DETROIT - An engineer copied thousands of electronic documents and stole trade secrets before quitting Ford Motor Co. for a new job in China, authorities said Thursday in announcing criminal charges. Xiang Dong Yu, also known as Mike Yu, was arrested Wednesday in Chicago after traveling from China, the U.S. attorney's office said. An indictment here in Detroit charges Yu, ...

Cloud computing, the new buzz-phrase of the tech world, is actually an exercise in common sense for many applications. Eric Knorr, a tech blogger at InfoWorld.com, contends that hosting a company's e-mail on local servers "is a storage hog, a time-suck to manage, a compliance liability, and about the least strategic thing imaginable," and I'm inclined to agree for the most ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - State health officials are tracking the spread of swine flu through electronic prescription records, developing what they believe is a model that could help doctors more easily identify and respond to an outbreak of the illness. Rhode Island is believed to be the first state to use electronic pharmacy prescription data to track swine flu among its entire ...

CUPERTINO, Calif. - Amazon.com Inc. is cutting the price of its Kindle electronic-book reader yet again and launching an international version, in hopes of spurring more sales and keeping it ahead of a growing field of competitors. With Wednesday's $40 reduction on the Kindle, the device now costs $259. It debuted in 2007 at $399 and started this year at $359, ...

Last year about this time, Google launched a new program called 10 to the 100 seeking ideas from everyday people that could help others around the globe. Google reports that it received over 150,000 ideas and has chosen the best as part of a handful of finalists for the public to vote on. Out of the 150,000, ideas that were submitted ...

PHILADELPHIA - Comcast Corp. is in preliminary talks to take a 20 percent to 50 percent stake in NBC Universal and increase its ownership of the TV shows and movies it distributes to its cable subscribers. General Electric Co., which owns 80 percent of NBC Universal, has been in talks with multiple parties, including Comcast, to unload part of the entertainment ...

Many potential SSD customers have been waiting for 32nm NAND flash production to increase significantly before they make a purchasing decision. The new smaller chips are much cheaper to make, which would lower the price of SSDs made using those components. Samsung is the world's largest producer of NAND flash chips used in SSDs, but there is a very large fly ...

Inside an unassuming building in a Waukesha industrial park, computers are strapped to a vibration table, thrown into dust storms, assaulted by noise and baked in a high-temperature oven. Such extreme tests are routine for Dedicated Computing LLC, a company that "ruggedizes" off-the-shelf computers for use in military vehicles, flight simulation equipment, CT scanning machines and other products. Dedicated has weathered ...

Toyota's third-generation Prius is a certified hit with consumers. While the Prius has been one of Toyota's more popular models in recent years, the 2010 Prius with its promise of 50 mpg has pushed sales and demand into the stratosphere. At first, however, Toyota was a bit worried over how much damage Honda's cheaper 2010 Insight would do to the sales ...

Microsoft has long cooked up new and experimental operating systems whose features eventually got rolled into its central Windows offerings.  Most recently it's been dabbling with Singularity, an experimental OS designed for increased reliability thanks to kernel, device drivers, and applications being written in managed SING# (an extension of C#) code.  Another test OS is Midori (not to be confused with ...

There have been many details made available at the Intel Developer Forum about future Clarkdale desktop and Arrandale mobile chips. Yields are very good and defect density is steadily decreasing. They will be launched very soon as part of the 32nm Westmere family. Intel also revealed some details about production of chips using the Sandy Bridge architecture in 2010. The company's "tick-tock" strategy of ...

In the early twentieth century, airships were a promising new front of warfare, with dirigibles serving both for bombing and for intelligence gathering.  However, the advent of airplanes and key disasters such as the Hindenburg fire spelled the death of the airship as a war weapon.  Airships still stuck around, though, in the form of the blimps that float over sporting ...