The rise of digital technology has changed the way people use and store information. As more and more data takes a digital form—shifting from physical media, such as film, tape, or paper, to bits—the need to protect both the content and the privacy of information has increased. For example, music and video copied from a digital versatile disk (DVD) results in a perfect copy, a factor that has held up the adoption of DVD because studios are afraid to leave their valuable content so vulnerable to theft. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a few years ago, the term “network” referred to a mainframe in a back room connected to a series of dumb terminals. Today, the network is a worldwide array of computers connected to increasingly more intelligent clients ranging from personal computers to personal digital assistants (PDAs) to cell phones. Traditionally, these clients connect to the worldwide array over wire or some other physical medium, such as a cable or copper twisted pair. Wired connections provide reliable, high-speed information pipelines, but they tie clients to a location. Read the rest of this entry »

If you think that developing new designs for the conventional analog plain-old-telephone-service (POTS) line is like designing for dinosaurs, think again. The Consumer Electronics Association (www.ce.org) estimates that manufacturers last year sold about 16.8 million desktop and laptop PCs, and nearly every one of them had a V.90/56-kbps modem as a standard feature. In addition, vendors shipped millions of relatively invisible embedded modems within devices such as set-top boxes and home-based controllers plus about 5 million retrofit modems for PCs. Read the rest of this entry »