Articles by Andrew K. Burger

Though opinions are mixed, industry experts and economists expect a reasonably good holiday retail sales season this year despite an economy struggling with higher oil and import prices, decreasing home values and the after-effects of mortgage market problems. Online holiday sales, in particular, should do pretty well, though the outlook is more clouded for sales of high-end consumer electronics products, as Part 1 of this series discusses...

Who would have thought that it would be so easy to get PC and network users to install viruses, worms, application-downloading Trojan horses and other forms of malware on their PCs? Through a simple form of social engineering -- sending out enticing, unsolicited e-mail spam -- Internet users are doing just that. Part 1 and Part 2 of this series di...

The holiday shopping season is upon us. Import prices are up as the U.S. dollar continues its descent, oil prices are hitting record highs, and the American economy is still struggling to absorb shocks from mortgage market problems, falling home values and tighter credit conditions Given a backdrop of rising inflation and a slowing economy, what ar...

Web portal Lycos released its eighth annual list of the Top 50 most popular holiday season toys and games, and already a few online sales trends are becoming apparent in the realm of consumer electronics The quality of video games continues to improve along with the increasing capabilities of today's online game applications and Internet platforms....

Spam network operators, otherwise known as "botnet herders," are becoming increasingly proficient at evading detection and harnessing the power of peer-to-peer (P2P) computing, much to the consternation of spam detection, prevention and IT security specialists, as Part 1 of this series discusses Botnet operators are using spam and recipients' "zomb...

It's not a comforting thought, but while you're sleeping peacefully, your PC may be hard at work acting as a spam server or peer-to-peer node, providing processing power to a malware network engaging in any of a variety of criminal activities online Spam is being used by botnet operators in a multiplicity of new forms -- such as those behind the no...

Research into encryption technology is on the rise at universities and colleges, spurred on by technological advances, pressing security needs, and new legislation and regulations, asPart 1 of this series notes Investigators in both industrial and academic settings are now looking into a wide range of areas where encryption can be applied....

Technological advances are making adoption of network and data encryption more practical than ever, spurring its use in enterprises. Sixty-six percent of respondents to aPonemon Institute survey said they were hatching strategic plans to meet their organizations' encryption needs, and 16 percent of them already had enterprise-wide encryption strategies in place...

There's a wealth of opportunities available for aspiring and small to medium-sized business (SMB) e-tailers looking for shopping cart technology, as Part 1 of this series points out While this makes it easier than ever to find this important piece of the e-tailing puzzle, it also means startup and SMB e-tailers face greater challenges when it comes...

For those aspiring or already doing business as an e-tail merchant, there is no shortage of e-commerce software developers with shopping cart technology for start-ups and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The real difficulty may lie in choosing among them and then putting it to productive use To get the most out of shopping cart software, a...

Radio frequency identification technology (RFID) vendors are now seeing demand from a wider range of end users for a broader range of applications -- from ID and access control to asset tracking, traceability and supply chain management. Vendors and developers are looking forward to the day when process improvements and demand reach a point where competing suppliers will drive down costs and lever RFID growth to the next level, as was discussed in Part 1 of this series...

Governments, international development organizations and transnational corporations are looking to technology transfers and the growing number of budding green IT initiatives to address economic and social development, as well as concerns about greenhouse gas emissions, climate change and environmental degradation resulting from industrial processes, as was discussed in Part 1 of this series...

Vendors and developers have invested large sums in RFID (radio frequency identification) and heavily promoted its use, especially in the retail, credit card and transportation industries, as well as across sectors for supply chain and inventory management Retailers, among others -- small and medium-sized businesses, particularly -- haven't been kee...

Improving RFID (radio frequency identification) systems for specific applications and industry sectors -- along with mandates from governments and large companies with extensive supply chains and logistics needs -- is spurring adoption by a wider range of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the public and private sectors SMBs needing to tra...

The sharing of new technology -- particularly in the high-tech sector -- is taking place faster than ever before, yet economics, political and socio-cultural differences, vested interests and national agendas remain obstacles constraining the potential benefits To a greater degree than in previous decades, commercial organizations and governments a...

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) has been a highly touted technology in recent years, but concerns -- particularly among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) -- about high costs and actual benefits have hindered its adoption That's gradually changing as developers and vendors focus on systems design, development and interoperability of spe...

Mayors and city governments around the U.S. bought into citywide WiFi project plans, which often included unsupportable performance claims and grossly inflated forecasts for the numbers of users they would attract. Those decisions have come back to haunt them and have led to some abrupt reversals of fortune in cities large and small, as was discussed in Part 1 of this series...

In their eagerness to bring the benefits of wireless internetworking to their cities, mayors in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and other U.S. cities have bought into untested, inflated claims. Now, they are revising their plans to roll out municipal WiFi networks Last month, Chicago began backing out of plans to launch a citywide WiFi service afte...

The stakes are rising in the race to develop multimedia search engines capable of searching, indexing and cataloging the growing amount of music, images and video available on the Web The challenges are substantially more involved and complicated than traditional text searching. A lack of resources devoted to tagging and marking up content for use...

Making use of distributed computing, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) and integrated Web application services, means greater complexity and security design challenges for organizations and IT managers Open standards play a big role in developing and making better use of efficient and effective security measures as computing becomes more ...