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I've been fighting Internet crime for more than 20 years. In the old days, the daily malware hot sheet was known as the Dirty Dozen -- because it listed only a dozen malware programs.

I've been fighting Internet crime for more than 20 years. In the old days, the daily malware hot sheet was known as the Dirty Dozen -- because it listed only a dozen malware programs.

The Domain Name System -- the distributed network of servers that reconciles the domain names in URLs and email addresses to numerical IP addresses -- is behind every successful Internet transaction. Unfortunately, due to a longstanding vulnerability, it's also behind some of the Internet's most dangerous hacks -- despite the fact that a fix, DNSSec (Domain Name System Security Extensions), has been available for years.

The idea is pretty simple and actually pretty old: Use a distributed architecture on large databases to quickly return the data requested. This approach runs the database query across many servers at the same time, then combines the results as they return from hundreds, perhaps thousands of servers in the cluster.

Whether it happens with that key memo left unfinished, the last scene of a movie unwatched, or an epic gaming battle interrupted, it's likely that at one time or another, you've been left with a dead notebook battery at the worst possible moment. What can you do about it?

"Notebooks are not as efficient as they could be," says Robert Meyers, data center product manager for the Energy Star Program at the Environmental Protection Agency, "and they waste a lot of energy."

Most over-hyped technology trends wear out their welcome pretty quickly, which should make skeptics among us wary about Big Data. However, while Big Data is being touted as the latest trend that will change the world, the skeptics aren't as, well, skeptical as they were about cloud and social.

That's probably because Big Data is generating real-world wins for the companies embracing it. Already, Big Data analytics is starting to fundamentally change such disparate disciplines as pharmaceutical research, sales and marketing, and product development.

Everything is on course for an August Black Tuesday release of the Windows 8.1 patch formerly known as Windows 8.1 Update 2, and now apparently code named "August Update," according to unnamed sources cited by

Everything is on course for an August Black Tuesday release of the Windows 8.1 patch formerly known as Windows 8.1 Update 2, and now apparently code named "August Update," according to unnamed sources cited by