Today, Google rolled a much-anticipated new component into its family of online applications: Google Sites. The new service is the fruit of Google’s 2006 purchase of hosted wiki provider JotSpot, and I’ve been looking forward for some time now to see what the search giant would do with its purchase, and to see how well it would integrate it with the rest of the Google Apps suite. I’ve only spent a short time with Sites so far, but the service…

When I read about the recent Princeton University paper on subverting hard drive encryption by fishing for encyption keys in system RAM, I got to wondering about the vulnerability of my own Ubuntu-powered notebook computer. After all, support for out-of-the-box hard drive encryption is one of the reasons why I opt for Ubuntu for my primary work machine. Ubuntu inherits this capability from Debian, which introduced the security feature in its Etch release, and, surprisingly, Fedora and OpenSUSE still lack…

Today Microsoft laid out a major new interoperability initiative that’s meant to “increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.” During the press conference that Microsoft executives Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia and Brad Smith held this morning, much was made about the pains Microsoft is taking to include the open-source software community in the new interop initiative. However, the legal environment surrounding interoperability between Microsoft’s products and…

For the past several months, anyone who’s asked me about the latest big new thing in IT has gotten an earful about Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. Building out a Windows Compute Cloud (WC2) service would give Microsoft the opportunity to demonstrate its new server’s chops while better serving Windows-reliant customers and channel partners.

Wireless handset and infrastructure giant Nokia has announced plans to acquire Trolltech, a purveyor of application frameworks for desktops and mobile devices. Armed with its new Trolltech assets, Nokia might find itself in the perfect position to deliver us the sort of next-generation computing devices we need to bid adieu to today’s bloated client paradigm.

Today, Sun Microsystems turned heads by announcing plans to lay down seven and a half percent of its current market capitalization to acquire open-source database vendor MySQL AB. Why did Sun do it? Look no further than the other major acquisition announced today, in which Oracle declared victory in its months-old bid to purchase middleware giant BEA Systems.

Apple’s subnotebook wunder-machine is nigh. I’ve been waiting for an ultralight Web and writing machine for a long time now. So, should I run out and pant outside my local Apple store until the first units arrive? Based on the information available right now, let’s weigh the pros and cons…

Back when Windows XP was in development, I wrote a column titled, “Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead (Almost)!” I was writing about how Windows 98 was soon to done in by a more stable, more secure version of Windows, and about how the new version would, alongside OS X and Linux, usher in an era in which applications would be more sanely isolated from each other. No longer would we have to worry about single applications crashing and taking…

If you are a command line guru, you call upon your zypper, yum, conary, or apt-get from the terminal, and you awk sed grep your way to what you’re after. For me, unless I know exactly what package I want–and I often don’t…

I received an iPod Touch for Christmas, and before I loaded it up any MP3s or set a single Safari bookmark, I “jailbroke” the device, thereby opening it to all sorts of handy community-supplied applications, including, as Ryan Naraine is reporting today, potentially malicious code: Security Watch – Apple – Malicious iPhone (Prank) Trojan is Eye-Opener According to warnings from two different anti-virus vendors, a malicious iPhone software package circulating on the Web could cause legitimate third-party applications to be…