Are Botnets Run by Spy Agencies? In other words is Big Brother indeed watching? But consider this - having remote control of millions of PCs, and a large percentage of the world's PCs seems like a very tempting target for the world's various intelligence agencies. Most zombies are used for external purposes, but it would be easy to have them searching their own disk drives for interesting documents, and sniffing their ... Read full entry

Linux: Who got it right, who got it very wrong? An in-depth article that looks at the uptake of Linux powered operating systems and servers. While Linux has enjoyed a moderate rate of adoption it hasn't quite been at the levels predicted several years ago. In 2004, IDC predicted that growing Linux adoption would push the operating system from three percent market share to seven percent by 2008, with sales ... Read full entry

The chess games of Deep Blue Slideshow series depicting the chess games IBM "supercomputer" Deep Blue played with chess masters Garry Kasparov, David Bronstein, and Judit Polgar. Deep Blue is a chess computer designed and produced by the computer company IBM. Deep Blue's programming code is written in C and runs under the AIX operating system. It won a game against Garry Kasparov on February 10, 1996, marking the ... Read full entry

Mapping the disaster zones A variety of technologies are assisting cartographers map out areas devastated by natural disasters, which helps better focus relief aid efforts. In such desperate times, relief workers are in urgent need of fast, detailed and accurate information of the new situation on the ground. In other words, they need a new map. And, thanks to a series of technological innovations, mapping natural disasters has become a ... Read full entry

Happy 12th birthday digital-web.com! Digital Web Magazine marks 12 years online today, and has been on my bookmark list since I discovered it sometime in the late 1990s. Many happy returns to Nick Finck and the Digital Web Magazine crew. :) Way back in 1996 we registered the domain and over the years it took shape to become the online magazine you see today. In 1999, just 3 years after ... Read full entry

Windows XP SP3 upgrade spells trouble for Internet Explorer The imminently due Service Pack 3 for Windows XP apparently doesn't permit rolling back to a prior version of the Microsoft web browser once a new version is installed. Writing on the MSDN website, Jane Maliouta said people who are trying out Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and want to roll back to IE6 would need to complete that downgrade before installing ... Read full entry

The iMac turns 10 The computer that changed computers. It was the colours, the choice of colours, that excited everyone (PC users especially) more than anything else, when the iMac was first unveiled ten years ago. People realised that they were bored of the clunky beige coloured boxes currently sitting on their desks. In response PC manufacturers started producing... carbon black coloured PCs with... rounded corners. To understand how far the ... Read full entry

Google lays out plans for VisualRank image search While image recognition (of some sort) by search engines is already here, the technology is set to vastly improve with the arrival of Google's VisualRank, which will look for images based on searches for visual cues, rather than text, associated with an image. Over the years, image search has been a significant challenge for Google and others, like start-ups Polar Rose and ... Read full entry

Flash is not sexy or so they say Flash, in a place where there was no need for Flash, is particularly non-sexy. To me there is nothing worse than going to a site constructed almost entirely in Flash that at first glance you are like, "wait is this just straight HTML & CSS?", nope they tricked you. I truly do not understand this one ... Read full entry

Improving Code Readability With CSS Styleguides Organising and structuring your CSS code, or stylesheets, is just as important as any other aspect of the design process. An article all CSS coders should read.