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

Forget about getting a Kindle for Christmas
Dec. 04, 2008
Forget about getting a Kindle for Christmas, unless your special gift giver happens to be an early shopper -- a very early shopper.

Taking aim at popcorn-popping viral marketers
Nov. 25, 2008
The National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus said in a press release: "Advertising claims made in the context of viral videos produced to build interest in a product are subject to the ...

'Net Buzz
Dec. 03, 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 ...

You've been 'synergy-related headcount restructured'
Nov. 13, 2008
Even the word layoff is a euphemism, when you think about it. Yes, it can serve to draw a distinction between budget-based and performance-based termination, but not many laid-off workers get recalled to their old jobs ...

'Net teaches print another lesson
Nov. 10, 2008
How thoroughly has the Internet come to torment the dying industry that is print newspaper publishing?

I need a 'wallet phone' why?
Oct. 31, 2008
This looks to me like still-not-here technology aiming to eliminate a minor inconvenience that existing technology has already all but eliminated.

Predictive markets and other online gambling
Oct. 23, 2008
My knowing little about the ins and outs of online "predictive markets" hasn't kept me from wondering over the years why U.S. politicians don't attack this kind of Internet gambling with the same vigor they apply to ...

An unsettling week for everyone but Joe
Oct. 20, 2008
Bill Gates told a symposium at the Harvard Business School that he expects today's unemployment rate of 6.1% to top 9% before the dust settles. But I read a story on Network World's own Web site about Gartner assuring ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...