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Two federal agencies are charged with disbursing broadband expansion stimulus money, but critics say they've been stuck at dial-up speed since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was passed by Congress earlier this year. So on Tuesday the agencies announced they would streamline the approval ...

Many consumers are still afraid of shopping online, and it's not hard to see why, with reports of fraud, identity theft, data loss and other security breaches regularly making the news. The fact is, though, online shopping is safer than ever before, and new and emerging security technologies, method...

Europe is ratcheting up its opposition to Oracle's proposed $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The European Commission has issued a formal statement of objections to the deal, based on a perceived threat to competition. Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes raised those concerns last mont...

The Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in Bilski v. Kappos, a case that has been making its way through the legal system for more than 10 years -- and along the way has morphed into the software industry's worst nightmare. "It's been called 'the case of the century,' and to a large extent I hav...

The majority of global markets are growing significantly faster than the United States. Bill Gates has even stated that in the 21st century, a business must use e-commerce to survive. In this economy, thinking outside the proverbial box and expanding a company without taking on significant overhea...

It's not so much a war of words, but a war over words, between News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and search giant Google. Murdoch fired another broadside over the weekend by announcing his intention to eventually close off News Corp. content to Google's search technologies. In an interview with Sky...

The FBI official in charge of major cybercrime investigations told a international gathering of computer security experts last week that financial services companies have suffered massive thefts due to hackers. "The financial services sector has seen losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars in ...

While recent reports don't predict a major recovery for retailers this holiday season, the outlook for e-commerce sites is slightly more optimistic: 2009 will post an 18 percent increase in online holiday shopping over last year. For many consumers, though, the convenience of online shopping comes w...

Sales of Microsoft's Windows 7 boxed software over the first three days of its release have vastly surpassed those of its predecessor, Vista, for the same time period, according new figures from the NPD Group. Specifically, NPD's weekly tracking service is reporting that Windows 7 software sales in ...

This holiday season's biggest entertainment blockbuster likely will be a sequel to a popular franchise, with jarring depictions of war and an intricate story of good versus evil. It could easily rake in more than last year's record $155 million opening weekend for "The Dark Knight." But this blockbu...

This week, I headed southwest as I continued making the rounds of travel-planning Web sites for the E-Commerce Times. My first impression of Southwest Airlines' Web site was that its online presence faithfully reflected its corporate persona: It looked to be a roll-up-your sleeves, no nonsense outfi...

Google has introduced a search engine for online retailers. Priced at $50,000 annually, the Software as a Service offering is aimed at high-end e-commerce operations that want to provide customers looking for a particular product on their site with more accurate search results. Search is arguably on...

By and large, IT favors grand pronouncements and overheated rhetoric, and the industry abounds with "unprecedented" efforts firmly rooted in precedent and "unique" solutions fashioned from the commonest clay. Is that the case with Cisco, EMC and VMware's new Virtual Computing Environment coalition? ...

Cisco is broadening its footprint with a major move into the cloud computing space. The company has formed a far-reaching partnership with EMC -- a joint venture in which VMware, a majority owned subsidiary of EMC, will also play a large role. Intel's Xeon processors and other data center technology...

AT&T Wireless has filed suit against Verizon over the latter's latest ad campaign. That campaign, which claims Verizon has five times more U.S. 3G wireless network coverage than AT&T, shows two maps of the United States side by side, one with each company's coverage. The map purporting to sh...