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Traditional retailers pulled out all the stops to drive traffic and sales to brick-and-mortar stores on Black Friday. But online retailers have set their sights on what is expectantly known as Cyber Monday Both days revolve around Thanksgiving and both days mean big bucks for retailers....

A new survey released last week by Strategy Analytics indicates that the "style" of a mobile phone may be the key feature that users rely on when gauging their satisfaction with mobile phone technology The study analyzes mobile device buyer satisfaction across 20 "critical product attributes" for customers in the U.S. and Western Europe....

A survey of certified fraud examiners says that the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) law -- passed in the wake of scandals at technology companies like MCI/Worldcom -- is an effective tool in fraud identification, though few believe it is actually changing the culture of business The survey, conducted by Oversight Systems, Inc., based in Atlanta, called 2005 O...

Several recent software and service offerings indicate there is a market for users of open-source software worried about the intellectual property and related legal repercussions of that use, but how big of an issue, and how big of of a market, is it? Legal observers and those who provide the services said it is a growing market borne out of the re...

In the month of November, three things happened nearly back-to-back that have had significant effects on the technology landscape. The first was the Sony rootkit fiasco, which may have changed the software arena forever. The second was the acquisition by Cisco of Scientific-Atlanta, in what was likely the WMD targeted at the digital home. And finally, TiVo announced its plans to deliver video content to video iPods, potentially breaking the hard lock Apple has on those devices...

Sloth can be a deadly sin, or at least a potentially litigious one, and the rise of blogging on the Internet has peaked concern about this pitfall The issue arises because bloggers, many or most of them amateurs, often overdose on cut-and-paste editing, which can result in copyright violations, Paul Llewellyn, an attorney with Kaye Scholer in New Y...

Not long ago, it sometimes took Web pages 30 seconds to load, thanks to slow, dial-up connections over-burdened servers and inexperienced Web design Now, with high-speed connections and rapidly evolving technology, the days of slow-loading pages are gone. However, users might want to get used to waiting 30 -- or 15, or 10 -- seconds to see their ch...

Some 72 percent of the businesses evaluated by a Boston-based research firm scored poorly on their policies for re-using their customers' personal data for marketing purposes, but the researchers maintain that more companies are sensitive to privacy issues than ever before and are acting on that awareness Other findings in the report prepared by Th...

At one time, the gap between wireless and wired network capabilities was so vast that wireless networks were used only on rare occasions. That has been changing recently, according to industry watchers "A growing number of enterprises are taking a look at whether a wired or a wireless network offers them the best networking option," said Carmi Levy...

A leading computer security analyst is predicting that even as companies implement more IT security to prevent Internet hackers from tapping their networks, there will be increased theft of secure data by insiders, like employees The data security forecast by Joseph Ansanelli, chief executive officer of the data security firm Vontu, indicates that ...

Hedge funds are investment vehicles that use alternative or non-traditional investment strategies to manage investors' money. These strategies are broad-ranged and include the use of short sales, arbitrage, leverage, or derivatives. Have I lost you? If so, you probably shouldn't be investing in these funds Hedge funds have become popular investment...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission took action against spyware this week by asking a U.S. District Court Judge to halt an operation that allegedly plagued users who clicked for free file-sharing software with performance-slowing, private-information-gathering software that also altered search results for victims The FTC said Odysseus Marketing and p...

I'm either fortunate or unfortunate enough to have gone through a couple of significant corporate cycles in the world of business in recent decades. In the 1980s IBM started as the most respected company in the industry and ended as that decade's "Evil Empire." In the '90s, and over what seemed to be a much shorter period of time, Microsoft went down a similar path. And now all eyes are on Google, who is everyone's darling today, but is clearly showing a disturbing dark side...

Long after they became fixtures in the hands of businesspeople and teenagers alike, mobile phones still hold a unique and unenviable position in the world of technology, a device that's loved and hated as intensely as any Anyone who's ever been forced to listen to half a conversation held on a phone in public, or had a peaceful moment or a business...

Since the end of the U.S. presidential campaign, the issue of outsourcing has ceased to be daily fodder for television news outlets. But it remains an issue that many American corporations struggle with on a daily basis Aside from controversy surrounding the loss of American jobs, companies must decide what processes to outsource and which countri...

Y2K may be a distant memory, but there are plenty of other threats against corporate IT systems. In fact, today's list of disaster threats includes more than just hurricanes and blackouts -- chemical attacks and terrorist bombings have become a stark reality Although fires, floods and earthquakes are no more devastating now than they were five year...

No doubt there will still be lines outside of malls and department stores early in the morning on Black Friday, long the unofficial kickoff of the holiday shopping season But as the busiest stretch of the year for retailers gets under way, there are more signs that retailers themselves believe the lines may be a bit shorter at the stores, with more...

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and BitTorrent yesterday announced a collaborative effort to curb film piracy BitTorrent Founder and CEO Bram Cohen's technology allows Web sites to make large content files available online. The MPAA was concerned that the technology is frequently used to illegally distribute movies and television s...

America Online officially launched an upgrade to its flagship messaging product, AOL Instant Messenger yesterday, and unveiled the AIM Triton upgrade as a desktop bundle of communications applications offering a range of other communications services in a single place Analysts said the integrated platform could build on the success of AIM, by far t...

One in every 74 e-mail messages on the Internet yesterday carried a new strain of the Sober virus, estimates one security analyst "At the moment, this virus is accounting for 65 percent of all virus reports to us," Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant for anti-virus software maker Sophos told TechNewsWorld. "That means, including legitimat...