safe

You use your browser a lot. You use your e-mail program a lot. But the chances are better than even that you spend a big chunk of your workday in Microsoft Word. There's no way any application used by so many people for so many different tasks is going to be set up just right for you. Here are the five settings I changed to make Word work my way, more or less.

I say "more or less" because Word isn't quite the paragon of flexibility. You can make serious changes to the program's look … Read more

There are at least two reasons that waterproof hard drives were inevitable. First, portable storage devices started down this path a long time ago, so the idea must be a popular one. Second, people apparently view their hard drives with more affection than in the past, when it was a necessary but boring utility.

But we never imagined one that could survive 24 hours under water and temperatures of 1,550 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes, as Maxtor and Sentry Group claim their new "Fire-Safe" line does. The products are basically hard drives sealed in battle-ready safes, but … Read more

The New York Times reported last week that led by robots, roaches abandon [their] instincts. Specifically, when left to their own devices, groups of cockroaches followed their instincts and natually preferred a darker hiding place to a lighter hiding place virtually all the time. And when a minority group of robotic cockroaches replaced some of the bugs in the cohort and followed natual cockroach rules, again virtually all cockroaches sought the darker hiding place. But when the robots were programmed to seek the lighter, rather than a darker hiding place, fully 60 percent of the wild cockroaches teamed with the robots rather than obeying their instincts, thus demonstrating that even cockroaches are susceptible to bug peer pressure.… Read more

McAfee announced plans on Tuesday to acquire ScanAlert in deal worth approximately $51 million in cash.

And what is McAfee looking to get for its money? For starters, it'll snap up ScanAlert's Hacker Safe Web site security certification service, bolster its own SiteAdvisor security-rating system, and become the keeper of ScanAlert's proverbial "good housekeeping" seal for sites seeking to reassure customers that they are conducting safe online transactions.

The acquisition, expected to close in the first quarter, calls for integrating ScanAlert's e-commerce security certification service into McAfee's SiteAdvisor system. McAfee last year acquired SiteAdvisor, … Read more

Open-source software start-up Cleversafe has a new twist on an ages-old warning not to put all your eggs in one basket.

If it were up to the Chicago-based company, you'd protect your data by putting slices of your eggs in multiple baskets scattered across the globe.

In the earlier version of the company's software, you could reconstruct your entire egg collection even if five of eleven baskets were destroyed in earthquakes, swamped by tsunamis, consumed in an overheated data center inferno or otherwise lost. A new version released Tuesday, though, lets users choose their own egg slice and … Read more

MacBook Pro owners are apparently having trouble supplying power to their computers both from the battery and from the wall.

AppleInsider is reporting that Apple is getting ready to introduce new 85-watt MagSafe adapters for MacBook Pros following a litany of complaints about fraying cables on the adapters. When they were first introduced, most customers liked the idea of flexible cables that would detach from the computer if subjected to excessive stress, preventing your nice laptop from flying across the floor of the coffee shop when somebody trips over the cord.

However, the flexibility of the power cable has caused … Read more

While we East Coast folks celebrated Columbus Day, McAfee announced its acquisition of privately held SafeBoot for $350 million. SafeBoot provides software for file and full disk encryption.

Now, I certainly understand the rationale behind this deal. McAfee can now bundle encryption software into its PC security software and integrate key management into its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO). We saw this same market consolidation pattern a few years ago with antispyware, which went from a stand-alone product to an integrated feature in endpoint security suites. In that transition, CA bought antispyware vendor Pest Patrol, while Microsoft grabbed Giant. Obviously, the same … Read more