P. J. Connolly

There will be some unhappy people this Christmas now that the acquisition of T-Mobile from AT&T is off the table. But I won’t be one of them, and I can say with a straight face that it has nothing at all to do with my crush on The Girl in the Pink Dress. [WP_IMAGE] Nor […]

Newsflash: College kids are careless. Okay, that’s not exactly stop-the-presses material, but thanks to Cisco, one can now get an idea of how careless they actually are. According to the company’s 2011 Annual Security Report, released today, over 85 percent of college students have allowed someone – even a stranger – to use their computers […]

So it seems that this year’s hot technology gadget is the Kindle Fire. Although it seems to be dredging the ranks of potential customers for other devices such as the Apple iPad, the Amazon tablet is selling well enough, and with a software update expected to be released between now and Christmas, the big question […]

In many ways, compliance is the new security. It’s a hot-button topic, it isn’t going away anytime soon, and there are loads of consultants and vendors trying to make a buck off misunderstandings as well as actual needs, and if the customer can’t tell the difference, so much the better. But how big of a […]

If I had to pick the most vulnerable part of the Internet, my choice would be DNS. It’s far too easy to spoof, and the main stakeholders have been fairly resistant to making changes to it that would make it more reliable and less subject to shenanigans. Even workable proposals such as DNSSEC have failed […]

It’s time to rethink drive interfaces again, if we’re going to wring the most out of solid-state drives. As Chris Mellor pointed out today on The Register, PCI Express is currently unavailable as a means to directly connect SSDs to a system; currently, the best choice for most of us is a relatively poky SATA […]

As the Carrier IQ story unfolds, I’m kind of glad that I’ve had other things on my mind for the last couple of weeks; thankfully, my preoccupations have kept me from shooting off my mouth before I have a better sense of what’s happening. The question I have is: what data was actually sent by […]

There’s a proposal floating around the U.S. Senate’s committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions that would seriously rework the standards for who in IT is eligible for overtime. This bill, the so-called “Computer Professionals Update,” or “CPU Act,” on its face simply brings the existing job titles and work techniques that define exempt IT […]

If the rumors are correct, Microsoft will be showing off a beta of Office 2012 (or “Office 15” for those of use who keep count) at CES 2012 in Las Vegas this coming January, and – here’s the real news – I actually give a whit. It’s been so long since I saw anything to […]

We’ve had a running joke in the office about the Android platform being a hive of scum and villainy, but the latest quarterly threat report from McAfee would seem to confirm even the most irrational prejudice. Although Symbian remains the all-time leader for danger, by virtue of the sheer amount of malware for the platform, […]