Holtz Communications + Technology

San Jose State University has temporarily lifted a ban on Skype that it had implemented earlier, but plans to reinstate the ban if its concerns over the impact of Skype on the university’s network are not addressed. The ban was lifted because of protests from both students and faculty who have come to rely on Skype for a variety of university-related…

ZDNet reports from the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas that security experts are increasingly concerned about the potential for malicious attacks perpetrated through web feeds.

SPI Dynamics examined a number of online and offline applications used to read RSS and Atom feeds. In many cases, any JavaScript code delivered on the feed would run on the user’s PC, meaning it…

I had written just a fairly lengthy post in the text entry field in Expression Engine, the blogging platform I use, and wanted to add a link. I clicked the “link” button, which opens a pop-up window where you enter the URL. But I had forgotten that I was using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 (public beta 3). If I had listened hard enough, I…

There’s a lot of debate on the issue of Net neutrality, with the telecoms and their advocates muddying the waters with a lot of doublespeak. (Not that it matters. The telecom lobby in Washington is a whole lot stronger than the unaffiliated collection of neutrality supporters, as the House of Representatives recent vote against neutrality proves.) On the other side, neutrality…

On Monday, Micro Persuasion blogger Steve Rubel posted “35 ways you can use RSS today.” The list of links to offbeat feeds (like tracking drunk athletes) prompted numerous comments, most of which either listed other interesting feeds or pointed to similar lists. Neville Hobson applauded the list, calling its contents “terrific examples of how to think about RSS—a tool that enables you to get news and…

The more services I see roll out that aggregate content from “the edge,” the more convinced I become that this represents a considerable shift in publishing models that will become more and more common. The idea, if it’s new to you, is simple. Rather than send your content to someone else to publish—such as a classified ad in a newspaper—you publish it on your own site and tag…