Chris Conrath

In a talk with journalists after his speech at the Empire Club of Canada in Toronto recently, Symantec Corp. CEO John Thompson admitted that the Slammer worm two years ago was the eye opener that changed the direction of the company.

Scott Charney, Microsoft Corp.

In a display of industry solidarity, all players involved in 64-bit computing are convinced there is no turning back. It is not longer a matter of if, rather when. At Thursday

Few industries have successfully sold overkill as much as IT. For the vast majority, the desktop is a Lamborghini cruising in the bike lane. The e-mail server earns its way, but that is only because spam has forced it to. And at the very high end

When Slammer hit two years ago it caused an upheaval in a lot of places.The worm led many security product vendors to rethink their strategy. One of them was Symantec Corp. CEO John Thompson admits that Slammer was the eye opener that changed the direction of the company.

Microsoft Corp. has again launched an initiative to help it battle piracy

With its recent release of Team Developer 2005 for Linux, Gupta Technologies LLC has created a tool not only to develop Linux applications but also port the application to a Windows environment simply by recompiling the code.

Scott Charney, Microsoft Corp.'s chief security strategist, was in Toronto Thursday and sat down with IT World Canada assistant editor Chris Conrath to discuss everything from securing Microsoft products to the fact the company is held to a high security standard, something he agrees is appropriate. Microsoft, says Charney, has mde great progress in the security race -- which, he says, is a race with no finish line.