Brian Livingston

LAS VEGAS — It’s awfully hard to get me excited about yet another USB Flash drive. I’ve seen them all, from silvery bullet shapes to cutesy cartoon animals and everything in between. But at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), America’s high-tech trade fair held in the Las Vegas Convention Center, I saw the future […]

Many companies are locked in a death struggle with spam. Unfortunately, a simple error in your e-mail setup can allow spam to flood your inbox almost unchallenged. I found this out the hard way, although the solution quickly became obvious. Fortunately, it’s something that almost every company can easily fix, in case the problem is […]

Two counties in Florida have terminated their use of Diebold computerized voting equipment after computer experts showed that vote totals could be changed by a single individual in a way that would be undetectable later. The county commission of Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, voted on Dec. 13 to scrap its Diebold equipment and switch […]

An unusual metasearch service named Gada.be launched its public beta on the Web in October. By November, its novel approach to search got it banned from Google’s listings. The ban has been lifted now, and Gada.be once again appears in Google’s index. But the whole experience — and the goals Gada.be is trying to achieve […]

The World Wide Web was once so slow that, other than using it to surf to various sites and fill out order forms, we never considered it for actual work. The programs that were installed on our PCs were much faster and far more capable. But the promise of today’s new technologies, known as AJAX, […]

It’s always exciting to see a new technology that will forever change the way we work. AJAX is the new, new thing that’s doing just that — and word processing is the place where you may feel the impact the most. I wrote last week about InetWord, an online word processor that strives to make […]

Someday, all of our applications will live on the Web. We’ll carry around a USB drive as small as a sweet pea. It’ll store all of our data, allowing us to use any monitor and keyboard, wherever we happen to be. Some people aren’t waiting for someday, of course. They’re developing applications that take advantage […]

If you come to work one morning and find that your company’s traffic from Google has fallen to nothing, a competitor may be redirecting traffic from your site to his. Amazingly, there may be little or nothing you can do to stop this blatant rip-off. The cause is an obscure HTML command that is interpreted […]

It’s bad enough when people copy articles you’ve written for the Web and post them as though the material was their own. But it’s downright awful when the thieves’ Web pages get higher rankings in search engines than your own pages do for the same search terms. The fact that people who steal your work […]

You might be pretty mad if you found out that your articles on the Web were being copied and inserted into someone else’s site without permission or credit. To add injury to insult, the “duplicate” site can show up in search-engine listings and make your own site’s listings disappear. This is an example of “Googlewashing” […]