Stories about: Sidestep

A security company on Friday asked for help cracking an encryption key central to an extortion scheme that demands money from users whose PCs have been infected by malware.

A SQL injection attack that has affected at least a half-million Web sites has entered a "third wave" that's more resistant than previous versions to traditional security measures, according to IBM security researchers.

Sun continues to pursue talks with Apple Computer to have Java applications run on Apple's iPhone while acknowledging a third party's efforts toward the same goal.

For many users, getting started with Linux is surprisingly easy. New, friendlier versions of the free operating system, such as Fedora and Ubuntu, feature straightforward menus and automated installations that make switching from Windows to Linux a relatively simple process.

Twenty years before most scientists expected it, a commercial company has announced a quantum computer that promises to massively speed up searches and optimization calculations.

Joel Spolsky is one of our most celebrated pundits on the practice of software development, and he's full of terrific insight. In a recent blog post, he decries the fallacy of "Lego programming" -- the all-too-common assumption that sophisticated new tools will make writing applications as easy as snapping together children's toys. It simply isn't so, he says -- despite the fact that people have been claiming it for decades -- because the most important work in software development happens before a single line of code is written.

Spain's venerable Universidad Complutense de Madrid has joined Google's Books Library Project, a controversial initiative that has Google in court facing allegations of copyright violation.

A Massachusetts Senate committee released a report Thursday criticizing the state's Information Technology Division (ITD), claiming that its "unilateral" plan to move all state employees to use software that reads and writes files in the OpenDocument format was poorly planned, ignored the needs of handicapped workers and violated state law.

Google plans on Tuesday to release a free online spreadsheet program that signals the company's increased incursion into the office software space dominated by Microsoft.

Eyeing boosts in application performance, Sun Microsystems is researching how to improve handling of objects in multiprocessors with a project dubbed Maxwell.

Novell is taking a page from Microsoft's marketing playbook while trying to sidestep its juggernaut rival.