Now that the new standard is ratified, Wi-Fi equipment makers, such as Cisco Systems , Netgear , Apple Computer and others will incorporate the new security features into new Wi-Fi products, and in some cases, may be able to update them with a simple firmware upgrade available from a Web site.

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Some industries such as banking are fairly well along in making computer systems year-2000 compliant, but others, including food processing, agriculture and farming, some government services, construction, law, and medical practice are lagging, Marcoccio said.

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At the time, Mr. Dotcom set up a software-hacker community and a computer system used to upload pirated software from others, Mr. Bogk said.

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The computer industry went through a similar period of reassessment in 2001-02 when Microsoft and others announced that they were concentrating on making their products much more secure rather than adding new features.

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In their particular case they chose a game that involved four people who had never met (and who interacted via a computer) making decisions about their own self-interest that involved assessing the behaviour of others.

ECONOMIST: Human evolution

One of the main worries is that, if a computer-related problem occurs in one ill-prepared company or country, it will infect others.

ECONOMIST: Nothing to fear but fear itself | The

Dell competes with personal computer manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Acer and Toshiba, and increasingly against IBM and others for IT services.

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NGFWs such as those offered by Check Point, Dell SonicWALL, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks and others are extremely high-performance, turnkey appliances intended to stop threats before they reach a computer network and long before the anti-virus software on the individual computer even gets triggered.

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At HP's bright, pristine data center in Palo Alto, Calif. customers see 324 computer servers, each shrunk to a circuit board and nested in a stack with 30 to 40 others in 6-foot-6-inch-high cabinets.

FORBES: Magazine Article