Articles by Jennifer LeClaire

A coalition of over 60 European open-source service providers earlier this week united to form an organization dubbed the Open Source Consortium (OSC) The group's stated purpose is to act as an independent reference point to give an unbiased "proprietary-vendor free" voice for all organizations deploying or contemplating open-source software altern...

Microsoft today announced it has filed seven lawsuits against defendants who allegedly sent spam e-mail that violated the federal Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) anti-spam law The suits are just the latest in a Microsoft legal barrage. The company has supported more than 115 legal actions worldwide aga...

Three holiday shopping indices are reporting a sluggish start to the giving season, with some analysts trimming holiday sales forecasts after a disappointing Thanksgiving weekend in brick and mortar stores Meanwhile, online data crunchers are reporting a much different story for e-commerce stores. VeriSign's data demonstrates that online shipping p...

Singingfish.com is fine-tuning its image with the launch today of a revamped multimedia search engine on its Web site that specializes in finding audio and video content This marks the AOL property's transformation from developer and marketer of multimedia search services to companies like RealNetworks to a strategically positioned player in the co...

How will this holiday season pan out for online retailers? That depends on whom you ask An NPD Group survey of consumer holiday buying intentions reveals that the 2004 holiday shopping season could be challenging for retailers....

Linux solutions developer Xandros today announced that Wal-Mart's online store is carrying a full range of Linux desktop computers with the pre-installed Xandros Desktop Operating System Built by Microtel and available at Walmart.com, the offerings provide a range of inexpensive home, school, and small office desktop machines loaded with Xandros De...

Microsoft has filed its first eight lawsuits accusing defendants of distributing counterfeit Certificate of Authenticity (COA) labels in an attempt to authenticate unlicensed software Yesterday's filings are the first fruits of the software giant's effort to identify and target computer resellers who allegedly buy or sell counterfeit COA labels....

Will consumers have a safe and secure holiday shopping season? Or will identity thieves walk away with the lion's share of the profits? According to VeriSign's latest Internet Security Intelligence Briefing, which covers the period from July through September, the number of security attacks has declined slightly from the first and second quarter of...

Research firms are predicting gangbuster sales for antivirus software vendors over the next few years IDC forecasts the antivirus software market will increase to reach US$4.4 billion by 2007, with significant market share from corporate customers, and customers in North America and Western Europe....

The holiday shopping season has officially begun, and the sales results are in for the first weekend of the 2004 race for fourth quarter profits. Online and offline retailers alike have a lot to smile about Indeed, while both brick and mortar and e-commerce outfits are reporting boom times, it promises to be a race to the end to determine which cha...

Are you searching for holiday profits? Join the e-club Countless thousands of online retailers are competing in what analysts call a "zero sum game" where only one vendor can win the sale. However, take heart. There are plenty of sales to go around....

Black Friday is taking on a new meaning this year as Yahoo today sets out to shake up the holiday shopping season with the world's largest interactive snow globe smack dab in the middle of Times Square "We wanted to get the word out about our Comparison Shopping and award-winning Product Search and show people how searching is really fun," Rob Solo...

The three most famous European authors of open-source software today issued an appeal against software patents in Europe Linux author Linus Torvalds, MySQL author Michael Windenius and PHP author Rasmus Lerdorf are urging the European Union Council, which will convene later in the week, not to adopt a draft directive on software patents that they c...

In what marks one of the world's largest single enterprise-level implementations, the U.S. Air Force has entered into a multi-year agreement with Microsoft that could bring the software maker more than US$500 million in revenues over a six-year period. Dell is also a winner Microsoft will provide core server software, maintenance and upgrade suppor...

Instant messaging provider ICQ plans to officially launch a premium Web-based e-mail service later this week. The America Online property's latest offering gives users 2 GB of e-mail storage, and a suite of other features, for US$19.99 a year That suite of other features includes an online calendar, task manager, notepad and wireless access, for st...

Symbian has reported that a virus dubbed "Skulls" has been introduced to its operating system for wireless phones. The malware is targeted at the Nokia 7610 smart phone, but might affect other phones using Symbian's Series 60 User Interface Skulls is a malicious SIS file trojan that will replace the system applications with non-functional versions ...

America Online is beefing up security with today's release of AOL 9.0 Security Edition that provides a suite of safety and security features, marking the Internet giant's first version to focus specifically on safety and security "First among our commitments to our members and the online community is that AOL will always help our members feel safer...

Overstock.com announced today it will sell 1.2 million shares of common stock at an expected price of US$57.53 per share. That would give the online closeout retailer approximately $65.3 million in proceeds The company said underwriters have an option to purchase up to an additional 180,000 shares to cover over-allotments, if any....

Seagate Technology hopes to super size its revenues with a hard disk drive targeting PC users that offers a whopping 400 GB of storage space and 133 GB on each platter Seagate says the Barracuda 7200.8 model is the world's highest-capacity PC hard drive with the highest data density and the fastest performance and the greatest reliability....

In a competitive move against IBM and HP, Microsoft came as close as it might ever get to supporting Unix and Linux when it bought a minority share of platform integration solutions firm Vintela Vintela technology will allow companies to use Microsoft Windows software management tools to manage Unix and Linux systems....