Technology

Police and prosecutors are fashioning a new weapon in their arsenal against criminals: digital evidence. The sight of hard drives, Internet files and e-mails as courtroom evidence is increasingly common.

"Digital evidence is becoming a feature of most criminal cases," said Susan Brenner, professor of law and technology at the University of Dayton School of Law, in an e-mail response for this article. "Everything is moving in this direction."

Digital evidence may play a significant role in the trial of pop superstar Michael Jackson on charges of child molestation.

It's funny how technology developments work in the wireless market. When a technology is first introduced, it's hailed as the next great thing. Then during the gruesome standardization process, it's seen as a failure and non-start. Next, once the technology is standardized and praised again, members of the design community start looking for ways to knock the technology off its pedestal.

Hewlett-Packard plans to catch up to IBM this year in a crucial Unix server efficiency feature--an improved ability to run multiple operating systems on the same machine--executives said this week.

An increasingly popular game of grown-up hide-and-seek is leading adventurers around the country on high-tech hunts for hidden treasures.

It's called geocaching, and all you need to play is a portable Global Positioning System, access to the Internet and a sense of adventure.

Players enter coordinates in longitude and latitude from a Web site into their GPS, and the hunt is on. Geocachers follow the navigation signal and a list of clues that take them through cemeteries, caves, forests and even historic homesteads.

A company called Streamload is offering consumers a free 10 gigabyte online storage locker for multimedia files, potentially raising the stakes for larger companies such as Yahoo and America Online.

Streamload typically provides online storage space for a price, making it one of the few companies to survive in that business through the dot-com shakeout. However, it is increasingly competing with larger companies that offer online homes for digital photographs, and even the huge archive space provided by Google's Gmail service.

A computer model that can predict the impact of a tsunami from the San Francisco Bay area to Alaska is helping scientists plot danger zones in coastal cities to guide emergency planning.

The model is being combined with maps to show the detailed effects on the narrow inlets and bays sandwiched between the high cliffs and mountains that make up much of the West Coast.

Welcome to the new era of communication where voice, data and multimedia services can be integrated and run simultaneously in real time. With the advent of new technology called IMS (Internet protocol Multimedia Subsystem), the way people use applications or communicate with each other via cell phones will change.

Instead of communicating through distant machines, IMS turns each cell phone into either a host server or a client, allowing them to talk to each other directly.

The silicon chip is the most significant invention developed during the past 50 years, according to a poll of CNN.com users.

More than 119,000 CNN.com users voted in the three-month online survey, part of the Explorers special report, looking at technology of the past, present and future.

Twenty four percent -- or 28,500 people -- of those who voted believed the silicon chip was the most important of the 24 inventions listed.

"That was a bad move," Bram Cohen tells me. We're huddled over a table in his Bellevue, Washington, house playing a board game called Amazons. Cohen picked it up two weeks ago and has already mastered it. The 29-year-old programmer consumes logic puzzles at the same rate most of us buy magazines. Behind his desk he keeps an enormous plastic bin filled with dozens of Rubik's Cube-style twisting gewgaws that he periodically scrambles and solves throughout the day. Cohen says he loves Amazons, a cross between chess and the Japanese game Go, because it is pure strategy.

Malicious programs that can delete address books. Junk messages that flood a cell phone's inbox. Stealthy code that uses Bluetooth wireless technology to sneak onto handsets.

Scared yet? Security experts say plagues like these will target mobile phones, but others contend cell phone viruses are the tech equivalent of smallpox: To the best of anyone's knowledge, they exist only in labs.