Stories by Ellen Messmer

Bell Canada field-service techs say 'Goodbye laptops, hello smartphones'

Thousands of Bell Canada field technicians this fall will begin doing their jobs of installing and testing telecom and media services connections with help from custom-designed smartphone apps rather than via their laptops. It's all part of what Bell Canada is calling its "One Device" mobile initiative, in essence, a mobility makeover.

TrueCrypt's abrupt demise 'puzzling, bizarre'

The abrupt discontinuation of the disk and file encryption freeware TrueCrypt by its secretive software developers has left many security experts stunned, some of whom say there now are no viable alternatives left in non-commercial encryption software.

Juniper; Palo Alto settle long-running firewall patent lawsuits

Juniper Networks and Palo Alto Networks today agreed to settle their long-running firewall-related patent infringement lawsuits against each other, with Juniper saying Palo Alto Networks has agreed to pay US$175 million in cash and equity as part of the settlement.

Dept. of Homeland Security tools aimed at Heartbleed-like security evils

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has launched a Web portal aimed at assisting software developers in vetting their code for weaknesses hackers can exploit. The DHS calls this portal the Software Assurance Marketplace, or SWAMP for short. It's not a ‘marketplace' in the sense that money is changing hands for products and services, but rather more a place to share tools, techniques and information.

Coca-Cola Co.'s 'Black Book' application squeezes best out of OJ

Everyone wonders about the secret formula for Coke. But at The Coco-Cola Company, whose brands like Minute Maid make it the No. 1 juice maker in the world, there's a secret formula in an internal application called the "Black Book" that tells how to run the company's global juice business.

IBM extends e-commerce into cloud with ExperienceOne suite

IBM has broadened its e-commerce offerings with a new range of digital marketing and customer analytics that can be provided through on premises software or via a cloud service that customers appear increasingly open to adopting.

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