I find myself pretty busy now with writing, both for private clients and for publications. I’m back on ZDNet and trying to write as much as I can there. I believe this is actually my 4th time writing for them, going back to when they were started and I was a Ziff-Davis employee.
Here are my first few columns:
Windows 10 updates still largely opaque
The details Microsoft provided for the Patch Tuesday updates to Windows 10 are vague and unactionable, but that’s usually all we’ve ever gotten from them.
The internet of military things: Logistics dream, security nightmare?
IoT is a natural for the military, not just on equipment but for health monitoring on soldiers. But oh, what an attack surface!
When the Internet is down for us, many of the things we do become unavailable. Many organizations are, in effect, crossing their fingers rather than planning in earnest.
At the enterprise level IAM and SAML mitigate the password problem. Out on the civilian Internet our best attempts, mainly OAuth and OpenID, have fallen short. Passwords are a problem that will be with us for a long time.
If Microsoft has enough patience to stick with it, Windows Phone could be a much more successful platform within a few years. The future is the mobile web.
Finally Microsoft has provided a way to unify endpoint management of mobile devices and Windows desktops, but it’s doomed to many years of impracticality.
Nothing has changed the way I use computers in the last few years more than Dropbox. The ability to get at my files from anywhere has made a huge difference. But it’s the cloud – not Dropbox specifically – that has made the difference. Any cloud storage service that also supported all the platforms I need would do as well… wouldn’t it?
There are a few biggies in the market, but Dropbox is the biggest, best-known name. My opinion is that they got this good reputation for a simple reason: They have the best software. I’ve tried a bunch of these services in the past: Box, Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive. There are others, like SugarSync, but I’ve never paid much attention to them.
About a year ago I gave Box and Google Drive serious attempts. I thought Box’s software was awful. Google Drive was OK as was SkyDrive, but at the time Dropbox seemed the best deal because the software was drop-dead simple and many of the people I was working with already used it. I have a 200GB Dropbox account, the subscription for which expires in October, so I thought I would re-evaluate things.
Larry J Seltzer 
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