standards

Shakespeare opined "what's in a name?" in the classic story of Romeo and Juliette. Well, a rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but just because you slap a "4G" label on a wireless service doesn't make it so. The semantic battle between T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint over what exactly 4G is or isn't illustrates that 4G is little more than a marketing tagline.

While HTML5 will mark significant progress for the Web overall, one can't help but think that some existing elements of web publishing aren't going to be adversely affected by the latest version of HTML.

The PCI standard, long touted as one of the private sector's strongest attempts to regulate itself on IT security, is increasingly being slammed by critics who claim that the rules aren't doing enough to protect credit and debit card data.

Sun announced today that it is throwing its hat into the standards arena, proposing that its open-source key management API be used as a universal way to allow encrypting devices to communicate with key management systems.

The Distributed Management Task Force has launched a standards initiative, the Open Virtual Machine (OVF) Format, which would offer a way for all participants to gain the benefits of virtual appliances while reducing the friction of multiple, competitive, incompatible implementations. OVF addresses the three key issues that have previously hindered virtual appliance adoption and supports multiple virtual image formats, so that virtual machines for any hypervisor may be carried within an OVF payload. Furthermore, OVF payloads are digitally signed, ensuring tamper-free distribution and user peace of mind.

Should European governments favor open source software when they hold tenders for public contracts? Economists and policy makers appear to think so but industry giants including Microsoft argue that this would be discriminatory and are considering legal action to prevent this from happening.

Countries whose appeals were dismissed regarding the ISO/IEC's approval of Microsoft's OOXML as an international standard are questioning the judgment and relevance of the ISO/IEC and the standards they approve.