Articles by Jay Lyman

Cisco and IBM have announced a new partnership and new products to tie the network and datacenter closer together to reduce IT complexity while increasing performance The two companies said their "global strategic alliance" will integrate Cisco's networking technology with IBM's systems and software through products and services such as an IBM-Cisc...

It may be coming half a decade late, but an independent software seller is now offering a service pack for Windows 98 Second Edition (SE), which Microsoft itself never got around to doing. And just as Alper Coskun released his own "unofficial" service pack for the aging but well-liked Microsoft operating system, the software giant indicated it wou...

With Web services bringing together an array of different users, applications and services, their interactions must be choreographed, so the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published the first in a series of drafts for the Web Services Choreography Description Language, Version 1.0 (WS-CDL) The consortium, created to leverage the Web through co...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has kept Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology free from the same regulatory requirements and fees charged to traditional circuit-switched telephone carriers, but the agency also has been considering how much VoIP purveyors must pay for use of local exchange networks In a recent interview, Yankee...

UK residents volunteering their faces, irises and fingerprints for a pilot passport program are previewing what may become mandatory for all of England if draft legislation is enacted. The ID-card approach is being promoted by the country's Home Secretary, David Blunkett, and is touted as the key to the United Kingdom's future and as a defense against terrorism, fraud and identity theft...

It appears writing viruses is becoming as easy as ABC, particularly given the deluge of worm variants in the Bagle, Netsky and Phatbot families. But the collections of worms are causing some confusion among virus fighters as well as increased danger for users The latest example is the Bagle.Z variant, which, among various antivirus and other securi...

The Recording Industry Association of America is succeeding at pushing Internet users away from illegal music downloads, but those in search of free file trading are also moving to lower-profile applications and other platforms, such as e-mail and instant messaging, according to the latest research The Pew Internet and American Life project reporte...

In what analysts have described as the company's biggest transformation ever, security giant Network Associates sold the Sniffer network protection product line this week to orient its focus on antivirus, intrusion prevention, research and consumer business -- changing its name to McAfee in the process. The deconsolidation and reorganization is am...

Chip challenger AMD marked the one-year anniversary of its Opteron processor this week, touting the chip's 64-bit computing capabilities and indicating it will expand its market to the four-way server datacenter sector as well AMD credits Opteron's lowering of the 64-bit threshold for the success of the chip, which is 32-bit and 64-bit compatible w...

In response to growing interest in and deployment of Web services and similar business process technologies, IBM has announced new software and services designed to make IT infrastructures more modular and flexible. IBM said it wants to help its customers build "service-oriented architectures" (SOAs) -- sets of business processes that rely on reus...

Serious Internet security warnings are rushing in from a variety of sources, indicating that the Internet's underpinnings could come under attack and that conditions are ripe for a worm attack as well The most recent security alert came from the United Kingdom, where the government warned of a critical vulnerability in the Transmission Control Prot...

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has withdrawn its offer ofamnesty to file-sharers. Previously, the group had agreed not to sue individualswho would pledge to stop trading copyrighted music through peer-to-peer (P2P) services and applications However, the RIAA also diverged from its standard message of blaming online P2P file-sh...

Apple is building on its forays into servers with the Xserve and Xserve RAID hardware, introducing a new storage area network (SAN) file system that it claims is destined for wider enterprise use beyond its traditional audience of video and media professionals The Cupertino, California-based company said the Xsan -- touted as an end-to-end, "high-p...

U.S. residents not only are accessing the Internet via high-speed broadband connections more than previously presumed, but also are moving from dial-up access to mostly DSL or cable broadband more quickly than ever as they put performance at the top of their priority list, according to the latest Pew Internet and American Life Project report. The ...

Paired with printing specialist Toppan, Sony has announced a new, Blu-Ray-based disc capable of holding 25 GB of high-definition programming through digital information's prehistoric precursor: paper Sony said its new optical data storage medium, to be detailed next week at a storage industry conference to be held in Monterey, California, uses a to...

Small outfits have been providing high-speed wireless Internet service to rural and isolated communities for a couple of years, but now larger players, such as Verizon and more recently Nextel, have begun their Internet-access plays to compete with cable and DSL broadband as well as one another. While Verizon is rolling out its own wireless broadb...

High-speed wireless -- or WiFi -- provider Wayport will be serving wireless access alongside Bic Macs and Happy Meals to McDonald's customers as the two companies team to roll out 802.11b and 802.11g technology throughout hundreds of the fast-food restaurants. The companies said that after testing with a pilot program that delivered WiFi connectiv...

In its monthly scheduled security update, Microsoft released four sets of patches, totaling 33 updates, to counter several vulnerabilities in the company's widely used Windows operating system and other software products. Microsoft said three of the four patch sets are "critical vulnerabilities," with the fourth rated as "important." Absent its pro...

How far Sun Microsystems and Microsoft take their newfound cooperation remains to be seen, but analysts agree both companies are being forced to embrace one another to fight off the successful interoperability and multiplatform approach of others, such as IBM, HP, Dell and Novell The recent announcement of collaboration between the two technology g...

Now that it has more firmly projected 2006 as the year it will deliver the next-generation Windows operating system, known as Longhorn, Microsoft is cutting overly ambitious parts of the software to avoid delays and ensure quality. The industry, which has been promised much by Microsoft with its talk of a revolutionary new file system and tighter ...