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In the wake of a string of high profile data breaches reported by banks, retailers and credit card companies, a U.S. House panel on Thursday approved a bill drafted to protect consumers from identity theft and credit card fraud. The House Financial Services Committee cleared the Financial Data Prote...

A new Internet venture that screams "too good to be true" is testing users' taste for gamesmanship in the online auction space, offering electronics, jewelry and other luxury items at a fraction of their retail prices. The idea is that Unique Auction, launched in September, makes up for the loss on ...

Microsoft inked a deal with Epic Records that will give Xbox Live users a year's worth of free access to downloadable music and high-definition on-demand video from Epic artists. Xbox Live is the online, interactive portion of the Xbox 360 gaming platform that debuted last year as the first of what ...

High-speed chip interface designer Rambus on Friday said it has signed a technology licensing agreement with IBM. The agreement allows IBM to building Cell Broadband Engine processors and companion chips using Rambus' technology. IBM is licensing Rambus' FlexIO processor bus and XDR memory interface...

Microsoft has launched a US$500 million marketing campaign aimed at using its new products, including Windows Vista and Office 2007, to wrest enterprise customers away from rival IBM. Microsoft said Vista and the new version of Office will enable desktop computers to become control stations for hard...

It's interesting to observe, over time, the changing business fortunes of various countries. If we look back a couple of hundred years, we see that the dominant country worldwide, politically and economically, was Great Britain. In fact, it maintained its dominance until shortly after World War I. S...

Continuing its aggressive campaign to cut down on piracy of its products, Microsoft has filed eight lawsuits against eBay sellers, accusing them of distributing counterfeit versions of the software giant's programs. The suits were filed against individuals in Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, M...

In one of the first major efforts to bring an ad-supported broadband television experience to Internet users, America Online formally launched its In2TV service, with four major advertisers already signed up to have their commercials interspersed with the full-length programs and short video clips. ...

Three computer researchers created a stir Wednesday when they released a paper at a conference in Pisa, Italy, describing how to infect Radio Frequency Identification tags with a computer virus, but the likelihood of a digital disease rampaging through the world's supply chains is slim, at least for...

Shining new light on the issue of wireless privacy, the state of California has filed a US$10 million lawsuit against a firm that sells cell phone numbers. State officials filed suit Tuesday in San Diego Superior Court against Florida-based Data Trace USA, claiming the company misrepresented how it ...

For years, the vast majority of purchases made from e-commerce sites have relied on the same technology to keep them safe and protect consumers from identity theft. Secure socket layer, or SSL, has helped complete millions of Web transactions, often working without consumers knowing it. When an SSL ...

VeriSign on Monday declared its entrance into the broadband content services market, announcing its US$62 million acquisition of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Kontiki to help establish its presence in the field. VeriSign plans to provide rich digital media over IP networks and has signed a definitive agre...

With the timeframe for its PlayStation 3 release already being questioned by some, Sony was dealt another setback this week when it lost a bid to appeal a ruling that it violated a smaller firm's gaming patent. Sony had hoped to be able to appeal the ruling that found it had infringed on the patent ...

The showdown between Google and the Department of Justice (DoJ) over the search engine's refusal to turn over search records heads to court on Tuesday, with Google planning to argue that the right to privacy outweighs the government's need for the information. The two sides were scheduled to make ar...

The Web analytics market is heating up, as evidenced by at least two recent high-profile business deals in this area. Google entered the picture with a successful US$30 million bid for Urchin last spring, and NetIQ sold WebTrends to a group of company executives for more than $90 million. The name o...