Articles by Erika Morphy

A virtual equivalent of fisticuffs has broken out online, and no, it is not between warring camps of "American Idol" fans or bloggers with too much time on their hands. Rather, the dispute is between a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination and a once-ardent supporter While much of the argument falls into "he said, he said" territor...

The rules of the road were fairly clear to Kevin Rose, founder ofDigg, until this week Users generally were given free rein, except when they violated the site's terms of use -- for example, by linking to porn or racial hate sites, or to illegal downloads....

Every year, global friends and foes of the United States await the publication of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative's (USTR) Special 301 report on intellectual property (IP) protection overseas The report highlights areas of weakness in most of the major markets, which can range from lax enforcement of intellectual property laws to rampan...

Wikia, the open source search engine initiative and potential Google-killer, has snagged Jeremie Miller, who foundedJabber, an open instant messaging platform Miller was handpicked by the Wikia project's founder, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales....

Microsoft has rolled out alpha and beta versions of Silverlight, its recently announced RIA (rich interactive application) platform, at a keynote address at the MIX07 conference underway in Las Vegas As part of its strategy to flatten Adobe with is own iteration of flash technology, Microsoft has configured Silverlight, essentially a a cross-browse...

Unspam Technologies, a Utah-based antispam provider, has filed a federal lawsuit against so-called e-mail harvesters -- anonymous parties who collect addresses from Web sites and other lists, which they then sell to spammers The suit was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia under the federal CAN-SPAM law and the Virginia Computer Crimes Act, w...

Unica has introduced a new version of its marketing resource management platform, Affinium Plan 7.3 Though it is a point release, some of Version 7.3's new functionality is new to the industry as well....

Adobe is making an aggressive push into open source with its plans to release the code for its Flex platform The Flex SDK (software development kit) and documentation will be available under the Mozilla Public License in the second half of 2007. At the same time, though, Adobe will continue to make the Flex SDK and other Flex products available und...

How do you suppose a professor of computer science and engineering might use Web 2.0 tools? Assisting students to manage an intramural sports league online is probably not the first thing that would come to mind. That, though, is exactly what Yannis Papakonstantinou, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, does He recently helped t...

In 2006, the U.S. high-tech sector employed 5.8 million people -- up by 146,600, or 3 percent -- according to a widely watched report on the subject fromAeA, a nationwide nonprofit trade association Not since the dot-com heyday in 2000 has the U.S. tech job environment looked so inviting, according to "Cyberstates 2007: A Complete State-by-State Ov...

Gadget geeks engaged in the digital equivalent of reading chicken entrails to determine which high-def format the market will ultimately embrace received mixed signals from the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps on Monday, which were promptly rebutted by the opposition First came the news that 70 percent of the high-definition discs purchased by consumers in...

Continuing its drive to expand beyond servicing a company's front-end needs, Salesforce.com is making products developed for its AppExchange platform available to any company -- not just buyers of its flagship CRM application Salesforce Platform Edition gives users access to the 575 or so human resource, IT, legal, financial, R&D and other mashups ...

Research In Motion's service outage earlier this week occurred because a new BlackBerry storage feature had not been sufficiently tested, the company said on Friday RIM added the new component to the BlackBerry server environment to streamline the process for storing items on the devices. However, because the feature was not thoroughly tested, RIM ...

Giving users a hint of what to expect when Fusion is rolled out, Oracle has introduced its Application Integration Architecture, an open standards-based platform for integrating software from its various product lines The platform includes prebuilt integrations for Oracle's enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and industr...

You don't have to be a Democrat to scoff at the White House's recent assertion that some e-mails related to the recent firing of eight U.S. attorneys may be permanently lost. You just have to know something about networking and computers "To truly lose an e-mail to the point that it is unrecoverable is quite a difficult task," commented Rami Habal,...

Research In Motion has restored service to millions of BlackBerry users in North America who lost their connections Tuesday night The company has not said why its network was interrupted over a period of several hours....

Private equity investors are interested in acquiringBCE, the parent company of Bell Canada, the country's largest telecom provider. BCE has confirmed news reports that it is indeed in talks with pension fund managers to take the company private Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., a U.S. buyout firm, along with three Canadian pension funds -- the Canada ...

The U.S. government has received the not-so-stellar grade of "C-" in an annual report card on its IT security practices. The good news is that compared to earlier rankings mandated by the Federal Information Security Management Act, or FISMA, the government has improved its score The Department of Homeland Security, for instance, received a "D" for...

Jennifer Goodwin is on a mission -- and a budget that doesn't go beyond five digits. Goodwin is gearing up to expand her company,InternetGirlFriday.com, which provides virtual business administrative support "I have been turning away business for a couple of years now, in some part due to the lack of IT support systems that I need," Goodwin told Li...

Facebook.com, which has attracted legions of 20-something and younger users with its interactive tools and general networking concept, is getting ready to unveil a redesign with new features that make the Web site easier to use Many of the modifications respond directly to feedback from more than 100,000 Facebook users. They include changes in the...