Paul McNamara

News Editor

and 'Net Buzz columnist.

paul_mcnamara@nww.com (508) 490-6471 Fax: (508) 490-6438

Network World, Inc. 118 Turnpike Road Southborough, MA 01772

Recent articles by McNamara

Verizon exposes the wrong 1,200 e-mail addresses
Oct. 09, 2008
A Net Buzz reader on Verizon: "In a period of three hours I received 14 e-mails promoting Verizon's 'Secure the Information. Secure the Infrastructure' webinar series, and three e-mails promoting their '2008 Data Breach ...

Airport 'X-ray art' courts TSA trouble
Oct. 02, 2008
Techno-artist/open-source developer Evan Roth has a message for the Transportation Safety Administration -- several messages, actually -- about what he considers excessive airport security "theater." He also has chosen ...

Google has gone and redefined 'beta'
Sep. 29, 2008
The question of why so many Google products are classified "beta" - and classified thusly for so long -- has knocked around the tech press for some time. However, no one really seemed to know the answer, at least no one ...

'Net Buzz
Oct. 13, 2008
'Net Buzz By Paul McNamara Network World, 04/19/99 The buzz - and static - from last week's Spring Internet World '99: On Tuesday, I had lunch with Alexandre Konanykhine, president of KMGI.com, a New York-based ...

Verizon robo-caller torments my household
Sep. 18, 2008
Nine robo-calls in 24 hours, all from Verizon: Nothing could make them stop; not my wife's increasingly urgent pleas (I was away); not the hapless customer service reps who promised relief; not the "in-charge supervisor ...

Rifling through my DEMO notebook
Sep. 15, 2008
Seen and heard last week at Network World's DEMOfall 08 in San Diego: When RealNetworks took the wraps off new DVD-to-PC copying software, one major selling point was that users now can sleep soundly knowing for the ...

Was MythBuster's RFID tale only a myth?
Sep. 04, 2008
It all started when Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame told a convention audience that legal bullies from the credit card industry had cowed Discovery Channel into scotching an episode of the show that was to have taken on ...

Fooling Google News is as easy as s-p-o-o-f
Aug. 14, 2008
Google News cannot tell the difference between real news stories and spoofs, especially when both the real news and the spoof are ostensibly about the same topic. Google News cannot tell the difference because it ...

Airport art? Or asking for it?
Oct. 02, 2008

Circuit City, Mad magazine and Streisand
Aug. 07, 2008
About 10 days ago, someone at Circuit City spots a Mad magazine parody of his beleaguered company and dashes off an e-mail demanding that all copies of the periodical be purged from the electronics chain's shelves. I ...

About that Verizon/pit-bull blog post
Jul. 31, 2008
I need to apologize to Buzzblog readers for writing recently that Verizon deserved praise for standing up to animal rights activists who found offensive the company's new commercial for its LG Dare cell phone. That spot ...

Aiming to make data-breach research easier
Jul. 23, 2008
The monstrous data breaches involving millions of records make all the headlines — TJX, AOL, the Veterans Administration. However, it's those whoppers combined with the rat-a-tat-tat of seemingly daily divulgences ...

Doing the Laptop Drive of Shame
Jul. 17, 2008
If you bring your work computer home with any regularity -- or especially any irregularity -- chances are good that you've done the Laptop Drive of Shame

Bank of America to support Firefox, finally
Jul. 10, 2008
Bank of America, the nation's second-largest bank, will support Firefox, the world's second-most-popular Web browser, in the very near future.

'I have a lost laptop horror story for you'
Jul. 01, 2008
The devil of identity theft is in the details: Russ Jones tells a tale of woe that isn't particularly dramatic -- or rare -- and yet it's exactly the kind of story that worries me enough to ignore my better judgment and ...

Is Google News scapegoating technology?
Jun. 26, 2008
Well, the company did cite a technical problem as the reason that the Google News front page was an hour later than other online media outlets in reporting the recent death of NBC journalist Tim Russert.

Data leaks out .. and lawyers rake it in
Jun. 19, 2008
What made the Ameritrade data breach particularly memorable was not that 6.3 million customers had their personal info compromised and inboxes stuff with spam as a result. No, what made it memorable was that the company ...

AT&T manager on laptop loss: 'It is pathetic'
Jun. 16, 2008
It's just another in a long line of stolen laptops .. unless you work in management at AT&T and you're worried about your Social Security number falling into the hands of identity thieves. Or, you're worried that your ...

Tank on Empty: Tales from beyond E
Jun. 09, 2008
A year after launching Tank on Empty -- a site dedicated to collecting data and anecdotes about how far cars can drive once the warning light goes on -- the project has managed to land Justin Davis in hot water with ...

Can tornado warning nets sound too soon?
Jun. 02, 2008
Unbeknownst to you, an F5 tornado -- the kind that can obliterate a house in a heartbeat -- is barreling directly toward yours: Would you prefer 60 seconds warning or 20 minutes?

The real sticking point with Microsoft/Yahoo!
May. 26, 2008
Microsoft's desperate struggle to acquire all or part of Yahoo! has gotten hung up not on disagreement over a fair price for the latter's online advertising operations, sources say, but rather the value of Yahoo!'s ...

Worst of the lot for two years running
May. 19, 2008
That's the uncomfortable verdict for PCMall and PCConnection rendered last week by the "ForeSee Results Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index." Not only did those two outlets bring up the rear among computer and ...

'Bribe' or 'miswording'? You make the call
May. 12, 2008
The Consumerist last week posted an item about an outfit called TheCellShop.net and its apparent attempt to buy itself a top-notch reputation on resellerratings.com. The practice is not uncommon on ratings sites, but ...

Why is this called 'virtual kidnapping'?
May. 01, 2008
The crime itself is horrific -- beyond comprehension in its cruelty -- so there's some hesitancy to complain about semantics. But this is a technology column and the underlying issue -- society's tendency to blame ...

Is a fox guarding the schoolhouse IT subsidies?
Apr. 24, 2008
Is a fox guarding the schoolhouse IT subsidies? The critics who say yes have an obvious self-interest, as you'll see: They didn't get the contract. But they also appear to have a point.