Peter Coffee

The arms race—or, should I say, the fingers race—continues. For all who have struggled to free their pointing devices from the surly bonds of wires or the confining ghetto of the “mousing surface,” the laser tracking technology introduced this month by Logitech International is more than mere hype. I found several surfaces on an eWEEK […]

With this months approval by the Federal Communications Commission of an Ultra-Wideband chip set, device designers and users can enjoy new options for robust, high-bandwidth wireless connections with minimal power consumption. The XS110 chip set, now available in sample quantities from Freescale Semiconductor Inc., enables a claimed data rate of 110M bps over distances of […]

You have only until Sept. 9 to object to the federal governments proposed decertification of the Data Encryption Standard. After reading the proposal, Im tempted to complain that it would not leave DES sufficiently dead. Many would say that its already been 15 years since the end of this algorithms useful life, even though theyd […]

In Robert Heinleins classic 1966 novel, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” a computer technician has to explain to a newly awakened conscious machine that some jokes are only funny once. The first time, he tells the computer, youre a wit; the second time, a half-wit. “Geometric progression?,” the computer inquires. “Or worse,” he grimly […]

This month has brought forth a horde of rather obvious one-year-later stories, looking back at the Northeasts massive electrical blackout of August 2003. Many of those stories share an interesting blind spot: They look at traditional issues of power-grid technology and management, while apparently forgetting the initial (and rather hysterical) suspicions that Blaster worm infections […]

“There must be millions of people,” wrote columnist Robert Benchley about 70 years ago, “who are no more equipped than I am to guide a motor vehicle through any more of an emergency than a sudden light breeze. The logical ending to the whole situation is for all the automobiles in the world to pile […]

I wrote last week about the failure of conventional security thinking in dealing with information security threats. As I said in that column, you cant control traffic in information assets by merely inspecting messages—their contents are too easy to disguise. Even if you do hold on to data, you cant be sure that what you […]

I remember a poster in a college dorm room, back in the previous century, that said “I finally got it all together, but then I forgot where I put it.” Information systems have historically been good at putting things together, and in their latest Web services incarnations theyve even gotten good at making things appear […]

Digital tools make and take away perfect copies of information, leaving no tracks behind. They can also be used, though, to distort information in ways hard to detect. Sensitive knowledge easily crosses our borders, while once-trustworthy data such as photographs become no more credible than the person who presents them. We dont know what were […]

A system may fail without telling the user why, which is quite bad enough; worse still, it may fail invisibly, returning inaccurate results with no hint that anything has gone wrong. Two trends in application development make failure warnings more important than ever. First, application developers are consuming a growing number of remote resources, created […]