Articles by Erika Morphy

What is shaping up to be a landmark technology patent lawsuit,KSR v. Teleflex, is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court right now. At its most basic, the decision could redefine the standard of "obviousness" that is usedwhen deciding whether a patent should be granted for aparticular invention or development Under KSR, for instance, 3M's ubiquitous...

Cingular and MySpace are teaming up to offer Cingular customers the ability to navigate social networking site MySpace from their devices. MySpace is one of the fastest-growing Web sites as well as among the most trafficked, with more than 130 million user profiles For US$2.99 a month, users will be able to upload photos snapped from their cell pho...

CosmoCom has upgraded its IP-based contact center software platform to version 5 Called CosmoCall Universe (CCU), the system has been enhanced to address multiple contact center channels in a unified fashion, Steve Kowarsky, executive vice president of CosmoCom, told CRM Buyer. It also improved functionality in several categories ranging from e-mai...

Some 800,000 people associated with UCLA have been notified that their names and certain personal information were in a database that was compromised by a hacker. The database contained personal information about current and former students, faculty and staff, and some applicants There are signs that at least some personal information has been obta...

Microsoft has released seven patches for several of its applications, including Outlook Express and Visual Studio 2005. Two of the patches are rated "critical": a vulnerability in script error handling and a vulnerability in Windows Media Player The first patch addresses a number of vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. "It is significant because w...

Another zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Word has been identified, MessageLabs reported on Tuesday The new, unannounced vulnerability was exploited in an e-mail attack aimed at a few large corporations, Alex Shipp, an engineer withMessageLabs, told TechNewsWorld....

Nintendo's intellectual property right to the technology in its Wii Remote -- or "Wiimote" -- was challenged this week by Interlink Electronics, which was granted a patent last year for a trigger-operated electronic device that can be operated with a pointer sensor Interlink claims Nintendo's Wii game console, which has been on store shelves for le...

There is no limit, it seems, to what the research anddevelopment banks and other financial institutions arewilling to spend to ensure that their customers' moneyis safe. The latest twist? Biometric safeguards, suchas voice imprints or iris scans. To be sure, thistechnology already exists and is used in all sorts ofhigh-end applications. It is likely just amatter of time before it filters down to retail use...

Sage Software this week purchased financial services compliance and document tracking technology from VerticalFalls, in order to expand Sage's ACT product family This is the second vertical market that ACT has targeted; earlier this year, the company released ACT for Real Estate....

Microsoft is currently investigating a vulnerability in certain editions of its Word Software that couldopen millions of unprotected PCs to hacker attacks The vulnerability affects Word 2000, 2002, 2003, WordViewer 2003, Word 2004 for Mac, and Word 2004 version Xfor Mac. The free applications of Microsoft Works --versions 2004, 2005 and 2006 -- are...

IBM this week announced an agreement to acquire Consul Risk Management, a provider of identity access monitoring software that works across mainframe and distributed environments. When the acquisition closes sometime during Q1 2007, the software will be part of IBM's Tivoli software unit, complementing other access and control management offerings ...

Samsung Electronics and Microsoft will be offering the Samsung Ultra Messaging i600, a full-keyboard phone from Samsung's ultra slim product line powered by Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0, in Europe and Asia early next year The i600 is the first phone to offer HSDPA (High SpeedDownlink Packet Access) support, the companies say. Itis also being market...

Downloading movies from the Internet may be easierthan ever to do, but it isn't necessarily advisable,according to McAfee, which sees trouble ahead with thistechnology and Internet security. It cites the growingnumber of video-sharing sites on the Web as a primetarget for hackers next year....

How many dinosaurs could you build out of the carbon in one gallon of gas? Before the introduction ofGoogle Answers and other Q&A Web sites, that question might never have been asked, much less answered. However, within hours of its initial posting, it received an apparentlywell considered answer. The short response: You can build 1/460th of a tyra...

Microsoft lost a key ruling this week in the South Korean Supreme Court, which upheld a finding that the company infringed on Korean-English translation software patents held by a local inventor The plaintiffs -- the academic who invented the language-switching process and the company representing his interests -- have requested that the version of...

Salesforce.com on Monday introduced ApexConnect, a new family of integration tools that connect its on-demand customer relationship management solution with back-office systems ...

Spam is reaching unprecedented levels according to a survey released earlier this month by Internet security vendor Postini. The firm reported a 59 percent increase in spam from September to November, when it processed nearly 70 billion e-mail connections. Unwanted e-mail has now reached a whopping 91 percent of all e-mail, it said By most measures...

Hackers are incorporating virtual machine detection into their Trojans, worms and other malware in order to thwart antivirus vendors and virus researchers, according to a note published this week by the SANS Institute Internet Storm Center Researchers often use virtual machines to detect hacker activities....

No longer having to hear that "CRM is dead" is one thing to be thankful for, says Brad Wilson, general manager ofMicrosoft Dynamics CRM That was a talking point making the rounds a few years back, and it developed sudden and significant traction when it was echoed by an executive of one of the leading CRM vendors at an industry conference. No more ...

Talk about art imitating life. A self-replicating worm dubbed "Grey Goo" has caused the virtual community Second Life to shut down at least once, according to the site's owners, Linden Life. Within the Second Life virtual environment, Grey Goo's creators claimed to spin gold rings, and unwitting players interacted with them to spread the malware further...