Wayne Rash

I guess I touched a nerve when I wrote about ways to check your laptop safely when you find that you can’t take it on board the airplane for your flight. When I wrote the article, laptops (and all other electronics) were banned only from some transatlantic flights, but there was concern that such a […]

The television images of flaming Dell laptops may be fun to watch, but to the Federal Aviation Administration, those laptops are not a significant problem for air travel. Dick Hill, the FAA’s program manager for Aircraft Fire and Cabin Safety Research, has been testing lithium ion batteries like those used in laptops to see how […]

The US Department of Transportation has announced that a laptop computer containing names, addresses and social security numbers of 133,000 Florida residents was stolen two weeks ago. According to a letter sent to Congress on August 9, the theft of the laptop happened on July 27 in Doral, Fla., a suburb of Miami. The theft […]

The Department of Veterans Affairs is hiring ID Analytics to perform data breach analysis to ensure that information on 26.5 million veterans contained on a stolen laptop was not compromised. The laptop has since been recovered. According to a release from the VA, ID Analytics will look for patterns of misuse and suspicious activity related […]

Sprint Nextel will begin offering a high-bandwidth wireless service to customers by the end of 2007 that will use WiMax technology and operate in the 2.5GHz band, where Sprint has extensive spectrum holdings. The company expects the 4G service to reach 100 million people in the United States in 2008, according to a Sprint spokesperson. […]

WASHINGTON—Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs announced this afternoon that a VA contractor has discovered that a computer containing information on as many as 38,000 veterans is missing. Matthew Burns, spokesman for the department, said the contractor, Unisys, told the VA that the computer was missing from its Reston, Va., offices on Thursday, Aug. […]

WASHINGTON—What was billed as the great net neutrality debate of the season started off with the participants in complete agreement. Fortunately for the audience, it didn’t stay that way. Yet by the time the debate was over, the most startling fact was how close the two sides were in their positions. The debaters were Vinton […]

A lack of oversight, personality conflicts and a serious underestimation of the scale of the information loss all played a significant role in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ response to the theft of millions of veterans’ records earlier in 2006, according to a scathing report issued by the VA Office of the Inspector General […]

It may not be the World Cup, but in one way, at least, France and Germany are working together in the United States. Orange Business Services, the enterprise unit of Orange France, which in turn is the wireless division of France Telecom, announced July 5 that it had entered into an agreement with T-Mobile USA […]

WASHINGTON—Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) told eWEEK on June 22 that he does not want any sort of net neutrality legislation to be part of the telecom bill currently being debated by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. The committee held a markup session on Senate Bill 2686, the Communications, Consumers’ Choice and Broadband Deployment […]

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs told eWEEK June 19 that the agency has hired Internet Security Systems, of Atlanta, to help determine exactly what information was lost in a massive data theft in May. “ISS has been hired by VA to analyze the nature of the data the employee had been working with prior […]

WASHINGTON—Members of the U.S. Senate heard from the telecom industry and others in what was the final hearing on its version of a new telecom bill. This is the only hearing since the U.S. House of Representatives passed a similar bill during the week of June 5. The Senate bill, called the “Consumer’s Choice and […]