Best of ECT News

Recently, while replying to e-mails from readers of my book, The Design of Sites, I came across a comment from a designer who claimed that my recommendation to use pop-ups was hopelessly out of date. Did this reader not understand me, my recommendation -- to use pop-ups primarily in situations when ...

Governments at both the state and federal level in the U.S. are getting serious about addressing the void in the legal framework for fighting "spyware." To begin with, we need to define the term "spyware," due to the fact that this term has been used to describe everything from keystroke loggers, to...

Internet security firms are gearing up for an onslaught of new attacks that hackers will hurl at inboxes and against Web sites. As the computer industry awaits the release of Service Pack 2 of Microsoft's Windows XP -- which will feature improved security capabilities -- hackers are waiting too. The...

Your most critical business decisions often come down to prices: how much to charge and how much to pay. Prices have been driven down in the South Asian call center industry in the last two years, thanks to a flood of new entrants into the industry, a glut of low-end capacity, and improvements in te...

If someone were to ask you, "What are the most important financial controls for a small business?" what would your answer be? This article looks at the minimum monitors that must be in place in order to protect and preserve the assets of a business. What you should aim to achieve is to have a system...

What does performance mean to your e-business? If you are like most e-business executives, you immediately think about high-level performance metrics such as revenue, costs and customer satisfaction, with varying degrees of emphasis depending on whether your e-business Web site is focused on serving...

Why is Pakistan the hot new offshore information technology (IT) destination? This is because of a combination of favorable economic circumstances. Just when many Western managers are finally becoming comfortable with the idea of working closely with Indian IT firms, along comes Pakistan. Pakistan i...

Judging by its strategy, firewall vendor NetScreen is committed to a holistic view of enterprise security, leading the charge to integrate and deepen the firewall beyond its original parameters. The company's recently released Deep Inspection Firewall, for example, is designed to prevent application...

Although worms can create media furor and disrupt business, to date they have adhered to a strange dichotomy: A given worm may spread rapidly or deliver a destructive payload -- but no worm has accomplished both tasks with equal aplomb. August 2003 was the worst-ever month for malware attacks, tha...