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Low Latency is a weekly comic on CNET's Crave blog written by CNET editor and podcast host Jeff Bakalar and illustrated by Blake Stevenson. Be sure to check Crave every Friday at 8 a.m. PT for new panels! Want more? Here's every Low Latency comic so far.… Read more

A judge has ordered Apple and Amazon to meet to try to work out an agreement about whether "app store" is a generic term before the case goes to court.

U.S. Judge Elizabeth Laporte ordered the two companies to meet on March 21 with their attorneys in tow and work to negotiate and settle the lawsuit, according to Bloomberg. It seems that the judge is looking to find other ways for the companies to come to an agreement besides taking the matter to trial.

The battle began in March 2011 when Apple sued Amazon accusing the online … Read more

The pay-TV war between Cablevision and Verizon Communications just got a little uglier.

Cablevision came out swinging, filing a lawsuit yesterday in a New York court, alleging that Verizon was using old Federal Communications Commission data to bash its Internet service in its Fios commercials. The two have been tussling fiercely ever since Verizon introduced Fios to the New York area, in a direct assault on Cablevision's market. Despite the newer service, Cablevision has been able to hold its own against the new entrant.

The competition has been brutal. In television, radio, mail, and online spots, Verizon claims that … Read more

Why, when so many have already begun evaluating and even executing on cloud strategies, are there still so many debates about what is and isn't "cloud"? When we've seen a growing number of stories about enterprises successfully consuming both public- and private-cloud infrastructure services, why are there still so many debates about whether one or the other is a smart thing to do?

The answer, I believe, stems from a growing division (or misunderstanding?) among technology and business decision makers about the very nature of cloud computing. I hesitate to go into cloud definitions, but I … Read more

Google has begun shipping a feature called False Start in its Chrome browser to speed up secure communications.

False Start essentially cuts out one set of the back-and-forth conversation needed to set up a secure channel between a Web browser and Web pages. Such secure channels use technology called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security), and a Web site using it shows an address beginning with HTTPS rather than HTTP.

"The latest releases of Chrome now enable a feature called SSL False Start," said Google programmer Mike Belshe in a blog post Sunday. "As … Read more

Google plans to use Chrome as a tool to reform the Web by encouraging use of a technology the company says will reduce data-transfer delays.

The technology, called False Start, has the potential to reduce one round of back-and-forth communications between a browser and a Web server when establishing an encrypted connection. That's a significant time savings--about 7 hundredths of a second for communication across the United States and 1.5 tenths of a second from California to Europe.

Even better, unlike many protocol improvements that could improve communications, it doesn't even require changes on both sides of … Read more

Lie Detector Pro is a fun app that allegedly can detect whether you are generally a liar or generally truthful, but mostly it's just fun to play with. To start the test, place the iPhone in your hand, read the instructions, and hit Next. From there you will be asked a series of questions onscreen, and you will need to speak your answers out loud.

The app supposedly measures your stress level, the tonality of your voice, and whether your hands are shaking to detect if you are dishonest in your replies. The questions are mostly simple ("What … Read more

McAfee pushed out a malformed security patch early on Wednesday that wound up crippling computers running Windows XP, but there is a fix available. Users should note that it's labor-intensive and must be applied manually to each computer. If you're running Windows Vista or Windows 7, your computer shouldn't be affected by the bad update.

If your computer is shutting down automatically, you must address that before you can fix anything else.

McAfee's popular antivirus software failed spectacularly on Wednesday, causing tens of thousands of Windows XP computers to crash or repeatedly reboot.

A buggy update that the company released early in the day turned the software's formidable defenses against malicious software inward, prompting it to attack a vital component of Microsoft Windows. The update was available for business customers for about four hours before distribution was halted, McAfee said.

The damage was widespread: the University of Michigan's medical school reported that 8,000 of its 25,000 computers crashed. Police in Lexington, Ky., resorted to hand-writing reports and … Read more