Articles by Jack M. Germain

With the first shipments of the new Microsoft Vista operating system still lingering on store shelves, many consumers may not yet be sure whether Vista's much ballyhooed security enhancements will make them less vulnerable to virus, adware and spyware infections. Microsoft claims its restricted access to the operating system's kernel will lock out hackers and malware purveyors...

Themis Computer announced Thursday a joint project withTerra Soft Solutions to develop a complete Linux distribution to run on the TPPC64, Themis' new line of 6U VMEbus single board computers based on the IBM PowerPC 970FX superscalar RISC processor The TPPC64 is a high-end computer built around a next-generation single-board computer, featuring an...

Secure Computing has been delivering solutions for Internet security for 20 years. With more than 11,000 global customers, the company offers support by a worldwide network of partners. The company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and has sales offices worldwide Secure Computing has gone through huge changes since last year. It had 38 employee...

Internet security firm Check Point Software Technologies announced that it has completed the acquisition of NFR Security and is nearing completion of it purchase of Protect Data and Pointsec Mobile Technologies Company officials said the acquisitions will help Check Point expand its reach into the data security market. The acquired technologies wil...

Centeris released on Tuesday a product that lets network administrators manage multiple environments on the same computer Likewise Identify 3.0 is a cross-platform application that joins Linux and Unix machines to a Windows Active Directory. This major upgrade extends directories to all of the structures on a network with one password, Centeris off...

Looking for a franchise opportunity? The World Wide Web is overflowing with Internet-based businesses for sale An online search of the term "Internet franchising" will reveal dozens of Web sites promising both online business and franchise opportunities in a variety of Internet-based companies. The listings go on and on. They include the promise of...

GroundWork Open Source develops open source systems and network management software. The company melds together over 180 open source projects, including Cacti, Ganglia, NeDi and Nagios, into a comprehensive, fully supported IT infrastructure and networking monitoring solution Datacenters want to get business-critical functionality at the lowest pos...

Some Internet security companies are warning about the dangers they say exist from a new level of cyber attacks based on dynamic code obfuscation. However, makers of top-rated antivirus protection software claim such warnings only amount to a new spin on an old hacker tactic Dynamic code obfuscation warnings have raised concern that such attacks co...

Chances are that one or more of your consumer products uses the Linux operating system. In order to find out, you'll have to look at the fine print. Manufacturers do not openly advertise with labels announcing "Linux Inside." Linux has steadily become the operating system of choice by manufacturers of toys, video and telephone equipment, along with...

Mobile security solutions firmColumbitech announced on Monday support for Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9 and 10 The added support combines Columbitech Wireless VPN with Suse Linux Enterprise Server to enable customers to automatically configure any computer as a VPN (virtual private network) server and firewall....

"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" The question seemingly has no real answer, and biologists can argue either reply ad nauseam. The computer world has an equally pervasive question that cannot provide a single answer: "What are the top three Linux distributions?"...

Qlusters is the commercial company that sponsors the open source openQRM project. openQRM provisions and manages Linux, Unix and Windows virtual environments and physical servers within the enterprise datacenter Four components make up an openQRM-managed environment: the openQRM server, a pool of computing resources, centralized disk storage and th...

Telecommunications industry analysts have been evangelizing the arrival of cell phones running on the Linux operating system for the last few years. The sermonizing has recently reached a fevered pitch in some quarters The message, they say, is undeniable -- the Linux operating system is on its way as a full-powered alternative to the Windows Mobil...

Making New Year predictions about technology requires a very polished crystal ball Eric Openshaw, principal and leader of Deloitte Consulting's technology, media, and telecommunications practice in the U.S., offers some sobering insights into the world of consumer technology, providing details about a few of the most significant trends he sees taki...

Founded in 1998 in San Antonio, Rackspace started as a managed hosting company for small businesses. Today, it includes Fortune 500 firms in its customer Rolodex, as well. However, just as when it first opened its doors, Rackspace offers no add-on services such as hardware sales or phone company services to supplement its bottom line When Rackspace...

The pending January release of Windows Vista raises questions about the security benefits of using one operating system over another Part 1 of this two-part series outlines the relative attractiveness of operating systems to hackers and other criminals. This second installment looks at the security "hardness" of popular operating systems in the fac...

TurboLinux last week announced the release of a palm-sized USB device that comes with the firm's FUJI operating system embedded in its 4 GB flash memory Called "Wizpy," the device will allow users to run the Linux OS on any computer....

Coming to computer stores in the not-too-distant future will be a new type of PC. It will not have a hard drive, and the operating system will be burned onto a chip, making malware manipulations and viruses problems of the past This trend toward solid-state PCs is being driven, in part, bysecurity concerns and a push to converge operating systems t...

The planned release of Vista at the end of January has provoked a great deal of speculation about its expected impact on hackers. Vulnerabilities in Windows and its related Office suite of applications have been the primary targets of hackers and criminal data seekers for years Microsoft claims that Vista will offer completely new, more secure core...

As consumers experiment with the Linux operating system and consider switching from Windows, the first carryover they expect to find is applications for virus and spyware protection. However, few exist because Linux does not need them Nearly all Linux distributions bundle a firewall package, but they don't include other intrusion protection softwar...