happygeek in a Nutshell
I am a freelance technology journalist from England, and have been for fast approaching 20 years now. For 14 of them I have enjoyed being Contributing Editor with PC Pro magazine, the biggest selling monthly IT publication in the UK.
Currently, I hold the title of Information Security Journalist of the Year (2008) an award that I also was fortunate enough to win in 2006 as well. Other awards include Best Information Security News Story (2008) for a DaniWeb piece about TomTom satnav Trojans, Best IT Security Feature (2008) and (2007), as well as Technology Journalist of the Year back in 1996. All of the above being UK based awards, I hasten to add.
My latest book 'Being Virtual' was published by Wiley, in conjunction with the Science Museum in London, during May 2008.
Currently, I hold the title of Information Security Journalist of the Year (2008) an award that I also was fortunate enough to win in 2006 as well. Other awards include Best Information Security News Story (2008) for a DaniWeb piece about TomTom satnav Trojans, Best IT Security Feature (2008) and (2007), as well as Technology Journalist of the Year back in 1996. All of the above being UK based awards, I hasten to add.
My latest book 'Being Virtual' was published by Wiley, in conjunction with the Science Museum in London, during May 2008.
Blog Stats
Entries: 557
Last Entry: 23 Hours Ago
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I have been a supporter of RAID for the longest time; after all it would be crazy not to like something that brings efficiency and protection to the data storage process. RAID has certainly provided both, but that was then and this is now, and it is time for RAID to step down and let a new storage... (Read More)
Featured Apr 11th, 2007
Ever since I interviewed Bradley Horowitz, Head of Technology at Yahoo!, 18 months or so ago I have been keeping a keen eye on pretty much everything the company does in the search realm. Not least because Bradley is a man with a real vision for the future of social search, and with his enthusiasm... (Read More)
Featured Apr 8th, 2007
Leading security vendor Kaspersky Lab has uncovered the first ever proof of concept virus designed with the sole intention of infecting the iPod media player. Like all proof of concept viruses though, Podloso poses no real world threat to users. For a start it requires a Linux installation, not on... (Read More)
Featured Apr 6th, 2007
The latest Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics has been published, and makes fascinating reading for anyone geek who really cares about the effect that technology has upon the environment.
Greenpeace ranks the leading mobile and PC manufacturers on their global policies and practice with... (Read More)
Featured Apr 4th, 2007
So the Sony PlayStation 3 has been available for a little over a week in Europe, and in that time it has officially become the second fastest selling games console ever in the UK. ChartTrack, an organisation that monitors such things, reports that the first two days of release saw some 165,000 PS3... (Read More)
Featured Apr 2nd, 2007
Proposals for a virtual red light Internet district have been overturned for the third time during a contentious meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Portugal. Concluding business at the meeting, a resolution rejecting a proposal from the ICM Registry to... (Read More)
Featured Apr 1st, 2007
IT security specialist Sophos is warning anyone with a website about recently uncovered evidence that spammers are hacking into legitimate sites in order to sell drugs.
Online pharmacy spam, be it under the Viagra or just general prescription drug banner, has become one of the most annoying and... (Read More)
Featured Mar 30th, 2007
Having a professional interest in security, and a personal distrust of politicians and their promises of providing the same, I was not at all surprised by the findings of a BBC TV investigation that has just been broadcast in the UK. Inside Out, a news reporting and investigative documentary series... (Read More)
Featured Mar 27th, 2007
Wireless networking has, in my rather sadly predictable geeky opinion, made computing not only a whole lot more accessible but sexy as well. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that the social Internet service explosion would not have happened, or certainly not happened as quickly, were it... (Read More)
Featured Mar 26th, 2007
Web security company ScanSafe has published its latest monthly Global Threat Report that looks at corporate usage of the web. The results should not be shocking as we all know that if you give someone free access to the Internet at work then they will abuse that access if at all possible, but... (Read More)
Featured Mar 24th, 2007
Every now and then, as a journalist, a press release lands upon my virtual desk that stands out because it relates to ‘a good thing’ and one of them arrived today. In fact, it relates to a number of good things:
Good Thing Number One
It raises awareness of what it is like to live in a world... (Read More)
Mar 23rd, 2007
In something of an unusual twist of late, Google would appear to be playing catch up to Microsoft for once. The Redmond giants bought the market leader in the in-game advertising business, Massive Inc, last May for close on $200 million. Today Google has confirmed it has finalized the deal to buy... (Read More)
Featured Mar 19th, 2007
It seems that Apple has got all the big boys of IT whipped up into a mobile phone frenzy with the huge interest that surrounded the recent announcement of the iPhone. Microsoft is rumored to be developing a cell phone version of the Zune MP3 player. And now as part of an interview with Spanish news... (Read More)
Featured Mar 17th, 2007
The MHW2040AC Parallel 2.5-inch mobile hard disk drive has a capacity of just 40 GB, a rotational speed of 4,200 rpm and an 8Mb buffer size, so why is Fujitsu making such a fuss about it? Perhaps it has something to do with the temperature tolerance, this thing will comfortable keep working within... (Read More)
Featured Mar 15th, 2007
A number of users are reporting that the new Kaspersky AV component in the latest ZoneAlarm Security Suite 7 is broken. And broken in such a way as to leave your system unprotected while appearing to be fully functional.
The problem manifests itself after a successful installation with the AV... (Read More)
Featured Mar 14th, 2007
Reports have come in over the weekend of a series of dawn raids by the Metropolitan Police on a number of terrorist suspects with Al-Qaeda connections in London. All the suspects have been arrested. The raids follow the seizure of computer files last year suggesting that the target of their planned... (Read More)
Featured Mar 13th, 2007
The Symantec State of Spam report is always something to look forward to, although it can often make depressing reading. Everyone is plagued by junk mail, filters are straining under the load, and spammers are managing to stay on top of their evil trade by employing cunning new techniques to avoid... (Read More)
Featured Mar 11th, 2007
New research from Vizu Answers and Ad Age suggests that when it comes to blog posting discovery, the majority of readers use links from other blogs to arrive there. The fact that the figure is as high as 67.3 percent is slightly surprising, given the amount of people that use services such as Digg,... (Read More)
Featured Mar 9th, 2007
Remember Google Answers? Anyone? No, didn’t think so, as it was hardly the most popular service that Google ever provided. Indeed, you can probably count the number of services that Google has launched and then closed on the fingers of one hand, and possibly even one finger. Google Answers... (Read More)
Featured Mar 8th, 2007
Well, what a weekend that has been. Ever since the reports started emerging online of a brute force attack on the Vista activation code using a modified version of the original software license manager script file I have been, shall we say, dubious as to the authenticity of the claim. Not least... (Read More)
Featured Mar 5th, 2007
Microsoft Windows Live OneCare was already struggling in the credibility stakes after failing to pass the Virus Bulletin VB100 certification tests as I reported here last month.
Talk about kicking a wounded animal, now the results of the latest, and much respected, av-comparatives are in, and do... (Read More)
Featured Mar 4th, 2007
During the course of this week there have been numerous reports floating around, mainly online and mainly pretty devoid of any real substance, claiming that the popular anonymous browsing solution Tor has been cracked. In fact, what these reports should have been reporting is the fact that... (Read More)
Featured Mar 3rd, 2007
Face it, the PDA is dying if not dead, killed off by the evolution of the cellphone into smartphone. This is no great shame, because it means you now have a smaller device in your pocket that does twice as much as either a cellphone or PDA on its own. In fact, the latest smartphones do three times... (Read More)
Mar 2nd, 2007
Marc Andreessen may not have actually been knighted for his contributions towards making the web what it is today, but if he were British then I am sure Helen Mirren would have bestowed that honor upon him alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Not that a lack of a knighthood is stopping the graphical web... (Read More)
Featured Feb 27th, 2007
The trouble with asking your customers what they want is sometimes they tell you and it is not what you were expecting to hear. Case in point, Dell requesting just such feedback 10 days ago and being inundated with thousands of customers and, one assumes more importantly, potential customers... (Read More)
Featured Feb 26th, 2007