Lance Ulanoff

About

Lance Ulanoff is Editor in Chief and VP of Content for PC Magazine Network, and brings with him over 20 years journalism experience, the last 16 of which he has spent in the computer technology publishing industry.He began his career as a weekly newspaper reporter before joining a national trade publication, traveling the country covering product distribution and data processing issues. In 1991 he joined PC Magazine where he spent five years writing and managing feature stories and reviews, covering a wide range of topics, including books and diverse technologies such as graphics hardware and software, office applications, operating systems and, tech news. He left as a senior associate editor in 1996 to enter the online arena as online editor at HomePC magazine, a popular consumer computing publication. While there, Ulanoff launched AskDrPC.com, and KidRaves.com and wrote about Web sites and Web-site building.In 1998 he joined Windows Magazine as the senior editor for online, spearheading the popular magazine's Web site, which drew some 6 million page views per month. He also wrote numerous product reviews and features covering all aspects of the computing world. During his tenure, Winmag.com won the Computer Press Association's prestigious runner-up prize for Best Overall Website.In August 1999, Ulanoff briefly left publishing to join Deja.com as producer for the Computing and Consumer Electronics channels and then was promoted to the site's senior director for content. He returned to PC Magazine in November 2000 and relaunched PCMag.com in July 2001. The new PCMag.com was named runner-up for Best Web Sites at the American Business Media's Annual Neal Awards in March 2002 and won a Best Web Site Award from the ASBPE in 2004. Under his direction, PCMag.com regularly generated more than 25 million page views a month and reached nearly 5 million monthly unique visitors in 2005.For the last year and a half, Ulanoff has served as Editor, Reviews, PC Magazine. In that role he has overseen all product and review coverage for PC Magazine and PCMag.com, as well as managed PC Labs. He also writes a popular weekly technology column for PCMag.com and his column also appears in PC Magazine.Recognized as an expert in the technology arena, Lance makes frequent appearances on local, national and international news programs including New York's Eyewitness News, NewsChannel 4, CNN, CNN HN, CNBC, MSNBC, Good Morning America Weekend Edition, and BBC, as well as being a regular guest on FoxNews' Studio B with Shepard Smith.

Will Challenge/Response Save Us from Spam?

Spam is everywhere—I mean everywhere. The other day, UPS delivered a small package to my office. The box, which was festooned with labels indicating it had traveled through a number of countries, was filled with shredded crepe paper that covered—lucky me—a can of Hormel Spam. The box had actually come from a PR firm hawking […]

Get Free WiFi, While Its Hot

Over the years, Ive seen a handful of news items and at least one documentary on water divining. Usually the practice proliferates during droughts. It involves a tool such as a forked or Y-shaped stick and someone—a dowser—who can use the tool to find water underground. The tail end of the Y bends down when […]

The Hack Attack that Wasnt

A few days ago, CNNfn scheduled an interview with me about the recent hacking contest in which hackers worldwide were supposed to compete to see who could deface 6,000 Web sites first or the most Web sites in a six-hour period. The announcement of the contest appeared at http://www.defacers-challenge.com/. On July 7, the morning after […]

Can We Ever Really Can Spam?

CAN SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) is an awfully catchy name for a bill. I suspect that Senator Conrad R. Burns (R–MT) and Senator Ron Wyden (D–OR) conferred with some marketing execs to craft that one. The bill is intended to stem the flow of spam onto our desktops, but I […]

DRM is Not Evil

Last week, Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux and the effective leader of the open-source movement, made what, I think, is his most heretical statement ever: “DRM [Digital Rights Management] is perfectly ok with Linux!” I say bravo, not because DRM is always good, but because we need a rational discussion of its uses. One […]

Glaser Says Mobile Video is Real

2003 has already been productive for the Seattle technology company RealNetworks. With its partners, it launched two new major services: ABC News Live, a 24/7 online news broadcast, and MLB.TV—a venture with Major League Baseball to Webcast live video of the leagues thousands of games. RealNetworks technology also became the de facto delivery mechanism for […]

Dont Let Your Old PC Haunt You

I remember getting a hand-me-down laptop some years ago. It came to me through the IT department of the company I was working for at the time (not Ziff Davis). As I was setting the system up, I discovered that the network privileges on the machine gave me access to the server-based My Documents folders […]

Say Goodbye to 3.5-inch Floppy Disks

Its happening: 3.5-inch floppy disk drives are disappearing. Theyre following a well-worn path to the final resting place of the 5.25-inch and the 8-inch drives. The demise of the now-ancient standard wont happen all at once, but with Dells recently announced phasing out of 3.5-inch floppy disk drives in the companys popular Dimension desktop line, […]

Sequent Takes Visual Surveillance To New Level

We live under the watchful eyes of countless video cameras on street corners, in stores, in our offices, in police cars, and elsewhere. Most of the devices capture only images, and virtually all of them are hard wired to central offices where the video is either discarded or recorded to tape. California-based start-up Sequent Technologies […]

Saddling Up for More DVD Authoring, Part III

DVD authoring remains such a new and fertile area that I cannot resist returning to it again and again in my columns. With so much of our industry burdened by a been-there, done-that, ho-hum attitude, its almost refreshing to see an area where theres little agreement. Nearly every DVD-based drive, software application, and player works […]