Dan McLean

Information security, or lack thereof, may yet be the death of commerce and business conducted online by Canadian consumers. That

New flat-panel displays and televisions that leave LCD and plasma in the digital dust, colour-matching software that can replicate electronic images in true colours under any sort of lighting, and collaborative technologies that allow images to be manipulated on a screen with a mere hand gesture.

Big Brother may not be watching, but your employer most likely is. Every electronic piece of correspondence, such as an e-mail or instant message, written and sent from work is something your company has every right to retrieve and read.

You can't have too many cooks in the kitchen when it comes to chips -- central processors, that is.Conventional desktops and servers need all the help they can get, given that the microprocessor industry seems to have hit a wall in chip performance. Researchers pushing the clock speeds of single-core chips are running into problems because of the amount of electricity required and heat generated.

Big Brother may not be watching, but your employer most likely is. Every piece of electronic correspondence written and sent from work, from e-mail to instant messages, is something a company has every right to retrieve and read. Businesses are increasingly doing just that, and they're getting into the habit of keeping these electronic records for years.

There are millions of air conditioners cooling empty rooms and needlessly burning energy in the sweltering heat that's gripped a good portion of Canada this summer. Those AC units are what most people automatically think of when told to conserve power, but millions of continuously running computer monitors, desktops and notebooks are also drawing precious kilowatt-hours of electricity throughout the day and night.

One organization's computing trash is another's information technology treasure. There is a trove of IT waste that exists among larger organizations -- stockrooms filled with old computing hardware deemed no longer capable of supporting the processes and applications of the business. It's electronic trash that typically ends up being stored or, worse, discarded in a landfill or offshore ''recycling'' facility. Few would imagine there's any use for such obsolete gear.

Information security, or lack thereof, may yet be the death of commerce and business conducted on-line by Canadian consumers.That's an assertion based on research, which among other things suggests there remains much apprehension on the part of Canadians who shop on-line, and that businesses themselves continue to grapple with information security.