Opinion

SNOWDEN’s ‘doomsday’ insurance policy — MICROSOFT…has a plan? — BITCOIN burglary — COURIC cornerstone of Yahoo mobile strategy

SaaS is cloud computing’s quiet killer app

IaaS and PaaS may get all the headlines, but SaaS is where the majority of action takes place in the cloud

5 must-have capabilities for every monitoring system

Solid infrastructure and application monitoring are critical to maintaining performance and uptime, but not all systems will make the cut

Video: Pour on the ASCII nostalgia

From the Doing More with Less Department comes this fun little demo of fluid dynamics

Who (still) pays Mozilla’s bills? Google, mainly

Mozilla's dependence on search engine revenue raises questions about its effectiveness as a champion of the free, open Web

Mobile doesn’t need the cloud as its engine

Cloud-dependent gaming isn't the cure-all Amazon would like you to believe it is

Microsoft cuts the hassle from email encryption with Office 365 upgrade

Office 365 Message Encryption uses Microsoft Exchange's EHE for easy mail security, but experts should look at its implementation

The feds’ guide to bringing down a hacker from the inside

Jeremy Hammond faces 10 years in prison for hacking Stratfor Global, but many details of his conviction don't add up

New Fling installs VMware Tools on nested ESXi virtual machines

Free tool provides new capabilities and makes administration easier when installing a VMware hypervisor inside a VM

IE11 leaves Flash media hanging on YouTube, more major sites

It looked like Microsoft was going to fix IE11's Flash problems with this month's Black Tuesday patches, but no such luck

NSA malware infects 50K nets — CHINA nears 100-petaflop system — Silk Road to BITCOIN — TWITTER’s bot problem — Valuations gone wild

Python 3.4.0 goes to beta with slew of new modules

Statistics modules, asynchronous I/O, memory allocation tracing, and better hash algorithms are in, but upgrades still largely manual

Software as a service vs. old-school IT

Salesforce's Dreamforce show hints at the event-driven future of cloud services. As cloud capabilities get increasingly business-critical, how will enterprise IT's trust be earned?

SNMP: No one likes it, yet no one cares to replace it

SNMP's halcyon days are well behind it, if they existed at all. What's next for networking protocols?

Pray for the blue swamp — and other Microsoft mysteries revealed

Who's feeding the patent trolls? What's inside Google's ships? What else smells besides a Dell? Submit your conspiracy theories below

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 boasts cloud tie-ins

Latest version of Red Hat's flagship product includes major OpenStack and Docker support, and many more under-the-hood improvements

BREAKING in-flight cellphone silence — SPOTIFY valued at $4B — Google’s SCHMIDT: ‘Encrypt everything’ — BERNERS-LEE: Protect Snowden

Secunia fixes PSI to work with Windows 8.1 and IE11

Secunia has just released an update to its popular Personal Software Inspector that works with IE11 on any version of Windows

Red Hat, Rackspace defend OpenStack against analyst’s barbs

Gartner analyst's look at reasons for slow OpenStack adoption in enterprises provokes responses across OpenStack community

Salesforce’s Marc Benioff tries to out-Oracle Larry Ellison

Salesforce.com's CEO preached the 'Internet of customers' at a Dreamforce extravaganza sure to stir Oracle's ire and envy

Big trolls vs. small trolls: The real battle behind patent reform

Rogue software patent trolls are the scourge of the tech industry. But the larger, better-dressed trolls don't get a pass either

Malice or mistake? Cyber sleuths weigh in on Internet hijack attack

Security experts investigate roots and motive behind surprise rerouting of Internet traffic through Belarus and Iceland

YARN unwinds MapReduce’s grip on Hadoop

Hadoop has been known as MapReduce running on HDFS, but with YARN, Hadoop 2.0 broadens pool of potential applications

Bye-bye, boy’s club? Why the new IT may be a woman’s world

A lot of hand-wringing over female participation in tech may be moot as the nature of tech changes

AWS may dominate, but it’s not necessarily best for business

Enterprises need multiple cloud options, which no single provider has — and AWS competitors need to focus on its gaps

Salesforce goes all in on APIs

Newly announced Salesforce1 platform delivers platform services via APIs and represents re-envisioning of the company

ACER in tailspin — Devs flock to SALESFORCE — APACHE TOMCAT breach — 70% of SNAPCHAT users female — MIKE ALLEN, native ad pioneer

IBM, Microsoft strike a blow against patent-troll reform

Tech giants help defang provision in current anti-patent-troll legislation designed to invalidate low-quality patents

Good news, job seekers: IT certifications are hot again

The torrid pace of job growth in IT may (or may not) be slowing. But employers are definitely paying more for the right skills

6 secrets of JavaScript Jedis

Are you a competent JavaScript developer but have yet to hit Jedi-level secrets? No worries — these steps will take you to the next level

Welcome to the era of encryption by default

From here on out, it'll be impossible to think about networking without it being encrypted — to everyone's benefit

Jailbreak a phone, go to jail: Copyright law, the TPP way

Even more examples of ill-informed thinking lurk in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the SOPA/CISPA/PIPA redux

Apple still making it hard to think differently

Apple repeatedly bows to censorship demands in places like China

BENIOFF bellows — Mobile carriers KILL theft ‘kill switch’ — GATES chokes up — Desktop printing CIRCUITS on paper, cotton

The rise of white-box switches

Software-defined networking centralizes control logic and argues for generic switch hardware — and should drive strong adoption of white-box switches

Why Office 365 is a better Office

Microsoft's flexible approach to Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and Office means each business can get the right mix of cloud and local for its needs

3 stooges and a bozo make a mockery of the IT department

Apathy, chaos, and mediocrity are the norm at a company that doesn't seem to care about the quality of its products

Orange Script could be fruitful for Android app development

Android developers, particularly those with JavaScript, C, and C++ skills, have another option for mobile apps

Devil is in the details of Oracle-to-PostgreSQL migration

EnterpriseDB execs have moved customers off Oracle, but contracts and app packages can tangle switch to PostgreSQL

A good, cheap smartphone: Mobile’s final frontier

The Moto G and Galaxy S III Mini set out to prove you don't have to be rich to have a modern smartphone

Google’s Dart language turns 1(.0)

Google's homebrew language for creating Web apps hits its first full release, but faces long road to displacing JavaScript

Cloud providers’ green claims are full of smoke

Ironically, their focus on touting use of alternative energy sources obscures how they really go green

CIOs say IT hiring for 2014 looks grim

Labor stats and interviews indicate a slowdown in hiring due to economic uncertainties, but may not reflect health of tech sector as a whole

Welcome to the Internet of things. Please check your privacy at the door

Your smart devices are talking about you, and they have a lot to say. This time, opting out may not be an option

Believe the hype: PHP founder backs Facebook’s HipHop technology

Rasmus Lerdorf also discusses language's security status, coming upgrades, and importance of getting out of the coder echo chamber

Startup Adallom takes on SaaS security challenges

New cloud-based offering detects anomalies in employee cloud use across the enterprise, raises alerts on risky behavior

SALESFORCE goes all API crazy — BITCOIN = Big Coin, breaks $600 — APPLE buys KINECT 3D tech — The Kids Aren’t Always All Right

‘Blurry fonts’ bug KB 2670838 persists with IE11 and Windows 7

Six-month-old 'fuzzy fonts' bug that hit Firefox and Chrome is still around — and may now ensnare Windows users upgrading to IE11

Salesforce.com launches Salesforce1 integration platform

New 'social, mobile, and cloud customer platform' is designed for building next-generation social and mobile apps

Can we talk? The sorry state of modern messaging

Despite iMessages, Google Talk, texts, Facebook, Viber, Skype, and even email, it's harder to communicate than ever