Recent Articles
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When PKIs Learn to Connect
As overhyped technologies go, PKI was among the all-time greats. Five years ago, it was being touted as the cure-all for enterprise security woes and an absolute necessity for organizations of any size. But after years of failed pilot projects, maddeningly complex implementation problems and vendor flameouts, customers abandoned public-key infrastructure, and advocates of the…
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Hospitals Remedy Telecom Woes
The merger of two hospitals in Atlanta to form one of the largest pediatric health care systems in the country presented a long list of logistic and technological challenges, not the least of which was creating a smooth communications system. Those challenges, in turn, presented the hospital’s CIO with an opportunity to deploy the latest…
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Mobile Robots Take on New Chores
Wireless links and cheap processing power make mobile robots increasingly practical for industry and public-safety applications. Originally inspired by the fictional R2-D2 “droid” of the “Star Wars” movies, iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner now equips U.S. troops in Iraq with battlefield-grade PackBot units that can be thrown through a window to explore a potentially booby-trapped building.…
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Sabre Rebuilds on the Fly
It was about 10 years ago when executives at Sabre Holdings Corp. decided they needed to start thinking about moving their online travel business off their existing proprietary mainframes and onto a new platform. Internet-based travel booking was gaining rapid acceptance among a growing group of computer-literate consumers and among travel agents and airlines, and…
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SarbOx Reaches Far and Wide
Three companies working to meet a rapidly approaching Sarbanes-Oxley deadline show the breadth of systems the act affects and the lengths to which IT managers must go to maintain compliance over time. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, officially known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002, has corporations subjecting themselves to a…
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A Progress Report on Windows’ ASN.1 Vulnerability
On February 10, Microsoft disclosed a dangerous vulnerability in all modern versions of Windows, along with a patch to fix it. Nine days may not seem like a long time, but every day that goes by without a real exploit is great news. Click here for Microsoft’s advisory and links to the patches) At the…
