Rob Fixmer

Frankly, Ive been surprised and a little disappointed lately by the number of people who ask, when the subject of 10 Gigabit Ethernet comes up, “Who needs all that bandwidth, anyway?” What surprises me most is which folks are asking. Often, they arent your typical corporate Luddites—the CXOs and bean counters who are paid to […]

The time has come for a reasoned, national dialogue on the merits and dangers of a national ID. What is at stake is not just an improvement, however slight, in domestic security but vastly increased convenience in an ever-more- digital culture. Unfortunately, the debate is currently dominated by a din of paranoia and knee-jerk ideology—often […]

John Moore is arguably the person most likely to influence widespread acceptance of smart cards in the United States. Thats because he is the program analyst for the General Services Administrations Office of Electronic Government, in Washington, and he is overseeing a federal effort to supply 3 million smart-card IDs to the nations military personnel […]

Ten days after terrorists transformed passenger jets into bombs in attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison touched off a technological and political furor by suggesting that airline travel could never again be safe until everyone in the United States—citizen and guest alike—was required to present a national ID […]

Common sense tells us the FBI and other police and intelligence agencies need Internet surveillance tools to track the communications of terrorists and other criminals. But the effort to extend the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act to networks that Congress had no way of anticipating when it passed the law in 1994 is misguided. […]

One day a few weeks back, I found myself in a van circling the central New Jersey town of Bedminster. It was a trip to nowhere, and it was a trip to the future. At the click of a mouse, Alan Kuritsky, vice president of marketing for Flarion Technologies, produced a live streaming image on […]

“Were no longer the dot in dot-com,” a Sun Microsystems executive recently wisecracked. “Now were the O in Old Economy.” Beneath the sarcasm of that statement lies a sad truth: Sun, the indisputable engine of the World Wide Web, is fully engaged in one of the most remarkably ill-conceived retreats in the history of American […]

Americas next civil war will be fought on the Internet, and the fundamental values in question will be the right to privacy versus the need for national security. Right now, that assertion might seem far-fetched. This is a time of flag waving and patriotic fervor that ranges from genuine statesmanship to banal jingoism. And thats […]

In the introduction to Go To (Basic Books, October 2001), a compelling new history of software as seen through the eyes of the men and women who invented it, The New York Times Steve Lohr offers a single quote that encapsulates the relentless challenge of programming. It is a line from the memoir of Cambridge […]

It smells like a recovery in the making. Start with the Bush administrations economic stimulus package, coupled with huge investments in cleaning up and rebuilding lower Manhattan. Then add an expected surge in federal outlays for military and intelligence technologies in the war against terrorism – and perhaps even the private government Internet proposed last […]