Nearly three weeks after security vendor Symantec Corp. released a free tool to clean up PCs crippled by the Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) update, Microsoft Corp. issued a fix that should reestablish lost Internet and wireless connections.
Google has enlisted Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane to create an original animated series that it will distribute on the Web via its AdSense advertising system, according to The New York Times.
June 27, 2008 (Computerworld) Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox 3.0 browser uses memory much more efficiently than its rivals, according to an independent tester who wrote a memory-monitoring utility to track usage by Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE), Flock, Opera and Safari.
THE MAKER OF WORLD-CONQUERING MMORPG World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment, has finally announced the long-awaited third installment of the Diablo games series - currently named Diablo 3, with stunning originality.
Starting July 1, users who have registered domains with Yahoo's small-business site will see their annual fee for the service jump from $9.95 to $34.95.
The New York Times is reporting that, according to an anonymous tipster close to Intel, the chip giant has decided against upgrading its computers to Windows Vista, and is instead clinging to Windows XP. The company, which employs about 80,000, made the decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the potential benefits of moving to Vista. It found none. At first glance, it would seem that Intel might be following in GM's footsteps and is considering "bypassing Vista," but after taking a closer look, this is not explicitly said. Intel is testing and deploying Vista in certain departments but it has not stated whether it is dismissing Vista altogether or if it is simply holding off a bit longer.
Today is Bill Gates' last day in the office as a regular employee of the company he co-founded in 1975. But as non-executive chairman and someone who is deeply married to Microsoft, Gates is not disappearing from the company.
With GPS becoming more common in people's everyday lives, new products are making use of the information gleaned from GPS to provide real-time tracking applications for cars, people, pets, and corporate assets.
Nokia has announced that it is taking up several initiatives as part of its strategy to address India's rural market, which is seen as the next big opportunity for mobile service providers and handset makers.
Yahoo, under intense pressure, reorganised its upper management on Thursday as part of a plan designed to improve its products, underlying technology and operational execution, the company said.
In April, the number of web attacks rose sharply, and Microsoft was quickly blamed for the problems. The software giant investigated and concluded that security groups had jumped to conclusions and that the attacks were not related to security vulnerabilities in IIS 6.0, ASP, ASP.Net, or Microsoft SQL technologies. Instead, it was found that the attacks were due to automatic exploits of SQL injection vulnerabilities, and the company pointed to its own guides on following good practices to avoid such attacks.
In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner is wary of building a baseball diamond on his farm, which is already near foreclosure. But a voice tells him, "If you build it, they will come."
Verizon used to offer "unlimited" BroadbandAccess, its name for its 3G EVDO service. After an investigation by the New York State Attorney General that led to no charges, Verizon agreed to change its terms and terminology. Their new high-end plan had a 5 GB cap, exquisitely spelled out, with 49 cents per MB ($490 per gig!) overage charges with new contracts; a lower-end plan capped usage at 50 MB per month. As you approached the monthly limit, you're warned via email, text message, and your connection software, which shows actual--not estimated--usage.
I had a very frustrating experience this morning. I decided to start editing an internal team wiki and ran into a significant roadblock: To edit the wiki, I first needed to learn "wikiml." What is wikiml? I'm glad you asked. It's a wiki markup language so that wikis look more like Web pages/documents, and not like a stream of undifferentiated text.
Microsoft is expected this week to announce that it has completed work on Hyper-V, a virtualization technology that allows a single server to act as many separate servers.
SAN FRANCISCO--During a panel discussion at the Structure conference here Wednesday, various representatives from the cloud-computing world offered their views. Panelists included:
LimitNone, a small software-development company, is seeking nearly $1bn (£508m) in damages in a lawsuit that accuses Google of reneging on a partnership with the company and misappropriating its trade secrets for the Google Apps online service.
Mobile operator Blyk will launch its ad-supported free phone service in Germany, Spain and Belgium next year, it said Wednesday. The company offers U.K. subscribers free telephony and messaging (up to a point) in exchange for receiving ads on their phone.
Multiply, a social network that has done a fine job of flying under the radar since its 2005 launch, has announced a new paid-account program that focuses on media storage. Called a "digital scrapbook," this premium feature will cost $19.95 annually.
Adobe on Wednesday released a revamped version of its Acrobat document creation software that includes built-in support for Flash and multimedia content.
Google, Yahoo and Baidu have found themselves atop Asia's search rankings, with Korean Internet users looking for information most often, a comScore survey released Tuesday said.
Beijing Wicity is setting out to cover several key parts of Beijing with Wi-Fi access, and it is supposed to be free until after the Olympics, but service is spotty in advertised coverage areas.
Is that spin I smell? Despite earlier rumors to the contrary, Microsoft seems now to be standing firm behind a 2010 release date for the next-generation version of Windows, currently known as Windows 7. Nobody is being too specific just yet, but a letter sent by Microsoft senior vice president Bill Veghte reiterated that the new OS would ship "approximately three years after the January 2007 general availability launch date of Windows Vista."
If you're trying to adopt good e-mail habits and clear our your inbox, creating a system to deal with all of your incoming e-mail is an essential first step. But one of the reasons e-mail often gets stuck in an Inbox is that a reply is needed, but the time and energy required to craft that reply is too daunting. Here are a three tricks to help you speed up the process-at least part of the time.
LimitNone, a small software development company, is seeking nearly $1 billion in damages in a lawsuit that accuses Google of reneging on a partnership with the small company and misappropriating its trade secrets for its Google Apps online service.
Computer researchers at Johns Hopkins University have discovered a flaw within most recent version of Adobe's Reader and Acrobat software applications that could allow hackers to take control of vulnerable systems.
Talkster, a company that provides free ad-subsidized international calling, can now be used with Skypeout, which already enables Skype users to pay for calls to landlines as they go.
Chipmakers have been applying lessons learned in mobile computing to servers in an effort to increase efficiency by lowering power consumption. But a noted Google engineer threw some cold water on the approach on Monday, arguing the two styles of computing are too different.
It's way too early to declare the battle between Microsoft and arch-rival Alcatel-Lucent over. Last week, a judge upheld a big jury decision against Microsoft and tacked on some interest. That just made the defendant a little angrier.
The judge presiding over Microsoft's antitrust case said on Tuesday that the company needs to make available the details of how its different programs work together, according to a Dow Jones Newswires report.
Motorola today unveiled a new 5-megapixel camera brought to market with the aid of Kodak, with emphasis shifted to the built-in camera and away from the features on the phone itself.
The organisation that manages the world's most important web address extensions — what goes after the dot in a URL — is to hold a vote on Thursday that could see an entire new generation of URLs made possible.
Mobile phones designed around Google's Android software may not be available until the fourth quarter of this year, and some companies are struggling to even meet that deadline, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, citing unidentified sources.
Carefully managed virtual servers can make the job of attackers more difficult by reducing the time that any one version of a server is exposed to the Internet, according to a George Mason University professor who has developed software that phases virtual servers in and out of use.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation weighed in this week on the Jammie Thomas file-swapping case, where the judge has asked for public comment on whether just making a file available for download on a P2P network should count as copyright infringement. In its filing (PDF), the EFF goes for the jugular, seeking to show that the RIAA's entire approach to file-swapping cases is flawed.
A Harvard University dropout who ushered in the home computer age and made billions of dollars along the way will have his last official day of work at Microsoft on 27 June.
Despite continued fighting in the nation, Afghan Wireless Communications and rival Roshan both said their subscriber numbers have each hit 2 million in Afghanistan, marking fast growth in a nation that in 2002 first launched mobile phone services.
Following the announcement of Sun's plans to make Java free and open under the General Public License (GPL) at JavaOne 2006, there have been a few struggles on the path to open source. At the time of the OpenJDK release in May last year, around five percent of the code — the portion not owned by Sun — was still closed.
When Mario Puzo sold the film rights to his critically-acclaimed novel, The Godfather, he apparently did so for a low fee; he was a young writer looking to support his family. Paramount, however, entered into an agreement with the author in 1992, stating that he would receive a healthy portion of the profits earned from any audio-visual products sold or rented containing elements of the Godfather movies. According to documents filed in the Los Angeles court system, Paramount has yet to hand over a penny to Puzo's estate in relation to EA's tie-in games. Puzo's estate is now seeking damages.
In an response to the new wiretapping law that was introduced in Sweden this week, The Pirate Bay will ask international ISPs to block traffic to Sweden, to protect their customers. In addition, the BitTorrent tracker will add SSL encryption to their site, and roll out a new VPN service.
Disney's California Adventure, having earned the reputation of being a $600 million money pit, is currently undergoing a billion dollar face-lift, including updates that gamers may find appealing during their visits to the park. One of the most problematic zones for the park has been its Paradise Pier location, which only had two real rides and was–until recently–dominated by a number of rotten boardwalk games and underwhelming souvenir shops. Now, however, the newly installed Toy Story Midway Mania rests underneath the California Screaming roller coaster, and actually moves riders through a series of 3D challenges, making it effectively a real-world collection of minigames.
As Bill Gates prepares to walk away from Microsoft, both the man and the company he founded will face challenges getting along without each other, according to the new issue of Newsweek magazine.
LucasArts is prepared to make many a Star Wars fans' dreams come true this fall with Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which will feature lightsaber battles controlled by the Wiimote.
Security researchers Friday warned of a new, massive spam campaign that tries to convince users to install the long-running Storm bot Trojan on their PCs.
The firm responsible for building the database upon which the Last.fm Internet radio service is built, has created software to enable iPhone users to use Last.fm -- if they want to risk it.
T-Mobile has announced a cut of 80 percent in its European data-roaming charges, in time for the 1 July deadline imposed on operators by the European Commission.
On Saturday, it will be exactly 60 years since the world's first stored-program, electronic, digital computer flickered into life in a laboratory at the University of Manchester.
The NHS has taken delivery of 7,500 infection-resistant keyboards, which could significantly cut the rates of hospital bugs such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile.
The departure of Microsoft's founder and iconic leader Bill Gates comes at a pivotal time in the company's history as it struggles to compete with Google, the architect of the new Web economy and perhaps the company's most formidable foe ever.
Last month, Microsoft disclosed that it had added 22TB worth of imagery throughout the month of April. Triple that number and you still don't have enough for what was added in May: 69.2TB. While April's update focused on adding images for Australia and Canada, May seems to be once again focused on the US. All the additional Obliques, also known as Bird's Eye View, seem to be only for American cities (289 cities in total, to be exact).
Dan Hesse told attendees of a communications trade show Wednesday that its much hyped 4G data network will see its first commercial deployment in September in Baltimore.
French publisher/developer Ubisoft has announced that it will be launching a new casual line of games, dubbed Play Zone. The brand will focus exclusively on creating party games for the Wii.
Investors and industry watchers may have their eyes on Yahoo's executive departures and coming reorganization, but for most people involved with Yahoo are just users of the company's technology.
A US-based IT security watchdog on Thursday issued a clear warning to email users: if you want information about the earthquake in China, get it from a news site and not from a link to a video that arrives in your email inbox.
With hundreds of millions of user names already tapped out, Yahoo has now decided to add two more domains -- ymail.com and rocketmail.com -- to its e-mail addresses for Web users.
YouTube may make a lousy place to hold a class, but that doesn't mean that the YouTube experience isn't shaping the expectations of students, especially those engaged in online learning. Those expectations are not being met by universities, where most online student support systems have a rigid, hierarchal structure modeled on the university itself. According to an essay by a professor at the Open University in the UK (OU-UK), this mismatch between expectations and reality create a challenge for the university system, one that it may be poorly equipped to meet.
Apple on Thursday released a new version of Safari for Windows that includes a security fix for a high-profile carpet-bombing desktop attack vulnerability previously dismissed by the Cupertino vendor. The Safari update is only for Windows users, not Mac OSX versions. Version 3.1.2 of Safari for Windows can be downloaded and installed from Apple Downloads, or you can download Safari 3.1 here.
The Mozilla Project has smashed its target of five million Firefox 3 downloads in 24 hours, acheiving a final tally of 8,290,545 downloads of the new browser, and reaching a market share that peaked at over six percent.
Upstart Nanosolar says that it has built the Ferrari of solar cell manufacturing: a one gigawatt machine that prints solar cells at 100 feet per minute.
China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) Thursday denied press reports that it was investigating or planned to investigate Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior, saying the office doesn't even handle such cases.
Ever the publicity hound nipping at Google's heels, Ask.com has issued an open letter to the public about adding a privacy policy link to its home page.
Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang made the rounds on Capital Hill on Wednesday, in an effort to dispel antitrust concerns surrounding its search advertising deal with Google.
Yahoo Mail, the top provider of Web-based e-mail, is letting users sign up with the ymail.com and rocketmail.com domains in an attempt to attract new users and keep existing ones loyal.
Celebrating the release of British alt-pop group Coldplay's new album "Viva la Vida: or Death and All his Friends," Amazon has taken the opportunity to offer customers the band's entire back catalog for $1.99 per album.
For a long time, I've said that YouTube could become the Web's supreme ruler of short-form and long-form video should it ever offer feature films and TV shows.
Bon appetit for Cooking.com: The kitchen appliance retailer announced Wednesday that it has pulled in $13 million in venture funding in a round led by Azure Capital Partners. ORIX Venture Finance also contributed venture debt to the round, and Azure partner Michael Kwatinetz is now on the company's board of directors.
Over the past few months, many countries have looked into the possibility of disconnecting file-sharers from the Internet. Today, France is the first to present their new “3-strikes” law, which allows anti-piracy outfits such as IFPI, RIAA and MPAA to police the Internet.
William Goldman's beloved story "The Princess Bride" was turned into a movie more than 20 years ago starring Cary Elwes and Robin Wright Penn. Now, at long last, the story has become a video game. The Mac version will launch on June 30th, following the PC version's release on Wednesday. It costs US$19.99.
The European Commission appears to have thrown its weight behind the principle of net neutrality, after the telecommunications commissioner told a global internet forum that the issue was "a political question to be answered by the people".
Three groups including Georgetown University teamed up Wednesday to develop a new way to measure the glucose levels of diabetes patients without a finger prick to draw their blood.
Net phone provider Skype is expected to begin public testing on Wednesday of a new version of its software that aims to make casual video chatting more common.
It's been a while since a major Skype release, and on Wednesday, the eBay-owned VoIP communication service will issue the first of several planned version 4.0 beta builds for Windows that are anticipated to drop over the next few months. (Stay tuned for the link; we'll also supply it when we've got it.)
Business-networking site LinkedIn announced on Tuesday evening that it had netted $53 million in a Series D funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures and with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures. CEO Dan Nye wrote in a blog post that this values the company at a smidgen more than $1 billion.
Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband-and-wife co-founders of the Flickr photo-sharing site Yahoo acquired in 2005, are leaving the Internet giant.
When Glam Media raised $84.6 million in February, international expansion was on its radar, and now we're seeing the results: the women's-focused ad network announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Monetise, a London-based digital-ad sales start-up.
Microsoft is pinning its hopes on European researchers to help it shake up the search and advertising marketplace. It plans to open a search technology center somewhere in Europe by the middle of next year.
A 19-year old Chinese man is in police custody after allegedly hacking into a provincial seismological bureau's Web site to place a false earthquake warning, Chinese state media reported Monday.
Sun has become its own free software foundation, open-sourcing everything from Java to Solaris, and acquiring the open-source MySQL database for $1bn (£500m) in January of this year, as a way to grow its revenue.
GUT WRENCHING news for Yahoo shareholders. Microsoft has revealed how much it had offered its board before walking away from trying another deal with the petulant company.
Internet Explorer 8 is set to be Microsoft's most standards compliant browser ever. After originally stating that IE8 would default to the same noncompliant behavior exhibited by IE7, Microsoft relented and plumped for standard-by-default. The first beta of IE8 was released in March and it did indeed default to standards compliance. Web developers have been clamouring for standards compliance for a long time; IE is a long way behind the competition, requiring considerable hacks and workarounds to get pages working properly. IE8 should make things a lot better—but it will still fall far short of the standards set by Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Some of these problems are technical, but others are cultural. Where the other browser developers are open and communicative, Microsoft is still leaving web developers in the dark.
Plans for a national UK cybercrime policing unit remain on track despite the government stalling on funding, according to the Metropolitan Police Service's e-crime chief .
EBay will open a tool used by 700,000 of its merchants to external developers, the next step in an ongoing effort to promote the creation of applications for its online marketplace.
Samsung Electronics on Monday unveiled two new mobile phones made with plastic made from corn as it expands initiatives aimed at being more nature-friendly.
Microsoft has become a sponsor of The Open Source Census, a project started earlier this year that aims to track and catalog the use of open-source software in enterprises worldwide, the group announced Monday.
Motorola, the number-three mobile-phone maker, said Friday that it would roughly halve the size of its research labs to about 300 people as it plans to halt some projects and move at least 180 people to other units.
During the last couple of years, hundreds of people have received letters from lawyers demanding compensation for the alleged uploading of copyright works. Their demands state that if you don’t pay up, you will be taken to court and dealt with severely. However, when people refuse to pay - nothing happens.
Research carried out by ZDNet.co.uk has revealed that although virtualisation is not a priority for many companies at the moment, it rates highly in plans for the next five years.
The Hong Kong Domain Name Registration Company (HKDNR) announced late last week that the daily average number of .hk domain name spam and phishing cases drops 92 percent year-on-year.
This past weekend, I spent time setting up four new laptops for one of my business clients. Out of habit, one of the things I do when I get to the point of setting up e-mail is send test messages. I didn’t have any reason to believe that e-mail wouldn’t work, but I’m glad I stuck to my habits.
Most of the attention to the recent Google/Yahoo partnership has focused on the two companies' search advertising plans, but the deal has implications for instant messaging, too. "In addition," reads the companies' press release, "Yahoo and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users."
Steve Jobs unveiled the long-awaited iPhone 3G at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, with prices starting at $199 (about £100) for the 8GB storage model.
With the Microsoft/Yahoo/Google triangle taking a new shape as Microsoft exited and Yahoo and Google connected, the analysts covering tech industry sports are weighing in with their opinions.
Media companies should see Google not as an enemy but as an ally trying to make advertising work on the internet, chief executive Eric Schmidt said on Wednesday.
There have been a lot of stories since the Google-Yahoo deal was announced Thursday saying that Microsoft would be mounting a massive campaign to block the deal. But until now, I haven't seen Microsoft itself saying much about the antitrust implications of the actual deal.
Microsoft said in its statement Thursday that it was offering Yahoo a deal worth even more than its original $33 a share offer for the whole company. That appears to be the case, according to details confirmed by those familiar with the offer.
Late Thursday afternoon, the news came from Google that it will indeed become a full-time provider of AdSense advertising for Yahoo's search pages, and the two companies' IM protocols will become interoperable.
SanDisk could be considering offering customers of its Wi-Fi enabled music players a method to download music directly to players, if its latest acquisition is any indication.
Late Wednesday, a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews that a TechEd session in Orlando today summarized some of Internet Explorer 8's key new features for administrators, one of them being crash recovery.
Two U.S. Congressmen on Wednesday accused China of hacking their office computers, possibly compromising information on Chinese dissidents, the Congressmen and news reports said.
eBay has pulled the plug on Media Marketplace, a controversial pilot program designed to buy and sell radio and TV advertising on the Internet. The Internet auction house confirmed the closure of the program after one year with the brief message: "We have ended our pilot program in this market."
If you think there's something a little odd about a bunch of corn farmers lobbying Congress to hold hearings on the details of a Google-Yahoo advertising deal, you may be right.
Wireless technologies have played a major role in opening up internet access — and thus the ability to communicate with others in remote locations — to more people in more places.
U.S. cell phone operators are starting to embrace Wi-Fi in order to extend the reach of their high-speed wireless networks without breaking the bank, but some are being more cautious than others.
Cisco Systems will join Clearwire Corp., Sprint Nextel Corp. and three WiMax equipment providers on Monday to announce an initiative aimed at simulating WiMax innovation through the sharing of WiMax patents.
Six technology titans are banding together to jointly license patents that cover WiMax in an effort to prevent costly royalty rates that might deter adoption of the wireless technology, according to a report on Sunday on the Wall Street Journal's website.
Microsoft last week set its June patch list, saying it would issue seven security updates, three of them "criticalf ," to patch Windows components such as Bluetooth, DirectX and Internet Explorer (IE).
The FCC chairman has floated a proposal that would result in a free nationwide -- but censored -- Wi-Fi Internet service, according to a recent news reports. Kevin Martin's proposal is to try again to auction off some of the spectrum that failed to garner the required minimum bid during the recent auction. The likelihood that this will happen seems to be quite low, but the proposal does demonstrate an impressive single-mindedness on the part of the FCC chair.
Microsoft plans to issue seven sets of security patches next week, including critical fixes for DirectX, Internet Explorer and Bluetooth wireless software for Windows.
The rumour mill is dizzy with speculation about what 'cool new stuff' Apple's iPhone will shortly be sporting, ahead of chief executive Steve Jobs's keynote at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday.
Microsoft on Wednesday released a white paper targeted at the many businesses that have chosen to stick with Windows XP instead of moving to Vista. It argues that Vista is more secure, reliable, and can save companies money when it comes to management and deployment.
A conglomerate of privacy groups has called for Google to link to its privacy policy from its homepage, claiming not to do so contravenes Californian law.
JetBlue passengers, rejoice. Now there is yet another way to pass the time during flights. JetBlue's free in-flight Wi-Fi will no longer require Yahoo or BlackBerry accounts to check e-mail and chat with friends.
I was joking with an editor of mine this afternoon that CNET News.com should put a little permanent widget on our front page that says something along the lines of, "Has Electronic Arts announced a timeline extension of its offer to buy Take-Two Interactive today? Yes or no." And then it would have a little check-box for each choice.
Fulfilling a second major part of its promise to make the internal workings of its website more open, Yahoo is opening the interface for its address book for outside use.
Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock fired back at Carl Icahn Wednesday evening, accusing the investor of having no comprehension of the facts and no plan for the company besides selling it to Microsoft.
Microsoft has announced that manufacturers will be able to sell Windows on so-called 'nettops' — that is, low-cost desktops — in another move that looks set to keep XP alive for several years yet.
McAfee is set to release a study late on Tuesday that indicates the domains that tend to be the most dangerous or malware-prone on the Web, and at the top of the list is the Hong Kong (.hk) domain.
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