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Are federal computers more secure today than they were in 2002 when the Congress passed the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)? That depends. Some agencies are in various stages of compliance, while others are not as far along "The task is brutally difficult, at best," said Yvonne Donaldson, a spokeswoman at BindView, a federal IT ...

Broadband experts gathered in Washington, D.C. this week to discuss the future of high-speed Internet access. Much of the talk centered on Texas, where a major battle recently took place between telecom companies and cable firms The focus of the war was a Texas bill that would have allowed telecom companies like SBC and Verizon to offer cable servi...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the oversight group for the World Wide Web, has begun negotiations that could lead to the establishment of a separate domain for pornography sites ICANN said it has begun to have "commercial and technical negotiations" with ICM Registry about establishing a top-level domain, or TLD, t...

Samsung and Airgo, a company that plans to take 802.11n or WiFi wireless to another level with its multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna technology, announced this week they will ship new notebook computers that incorporate the extended reach and higher data rate wireless solution The companies did not announce a release date, but they did...

Almost since its inception, Monster.com has been the biggest job board on the Internet and number one stop for job seekers in Cyberspace. Yesterday, the Web site, which is the flagship of Monster Worldwide, announced two moves designed to maintain its stature as the leading career site on the Internet First, Monster pulled the wraps off improvement...

Microsoft yesterday announced that it is adopting industry-standard Extensible Markup Language (XML) technology for the default file formats in the next version of Microsoft Office editions, currently code-named "Office 12." The new file formats, called Microsoft Office Open XML Formats, will become the defaults for the "Office 12" versions of Micr...

In a move to extend its open-source portfolio, Red Hat announced plans to release the Red Hat Directory Server yesterday. The announcement came alongside the launch of its Red Hat Certificate Management System at the first annual Red Hat Summit in New Orleans and officially moves the company into the identity management market Red Hat Directory Ser...

In a deal analysts say should make some stockholders happy, Sun Microsystemsannounced today that it would buy StorageTek for US$37 a share, or $4.1 billion, in cash. Both boards of directors have approved the move Sun also agreed to assume StorageTek employees' stock options. Buying the data storage equipment maker gives Sun a wider range of data s...

EBay will buy comparison shopping and search Web site Shopping.com for US$620 million, the auction giant's largest acquisition in nearly three years and one that positions it to compete against Yahoo, Google, Amazon.com and others in the quest to help online shoppers quickly find their e-commerce quarry EBay said the purchase would give it and its ...

You've devised a brilliant opt-in marketing campaign, complete with an educational newsletter that's all the rage. Your sales are spiking and your list is growing Then it happens -- some spammer uses phraseology that is similar to your corporate name or some malicious code writer launches a virus with a common word in your product description. Sudd...

If you're looking for a laptop, you couldn't have picked a better time. New models seem to be appearing on a weekly basis, each with its own mix of features to entice buyers Gateway, for instance, has introduced its M680 series, which packs power into a thin, yet full-sized package. Sharp, with its Actius AL3D, takes display technology to a new fro...

Amid skepticism from some industry observers who have been wary of Intel's Itanium processors, HP has continued along the road to a server switch to Itanium, touting its higher-end Integrity NonStop server as the latest to leave behind reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processing technology for the new technology HP unveiled its new server a...

A beta tool launched by Yahoo Research Labs this week gives searchers control over the way results are sorted with the slide of a bar. At one end of the spectrum is commercial sites and at the other, informational sites Yahoo ranked sites from most commercial (-2 points) to most informational (+2), but cautions that the rankings may need fine-tunin...

Antivirus experts report the new Sober-N worm is the most widespread virus in the wild. Sophos detected the Sober-N worm, which poses as tickets for the 2006 World Cup in Germany, in May SophosLabs' May 2005 report indicates that the bilingual Sober-N worm has rapidly spread across 40 countries -- accounting for 4.5 percent of all e-mail. That puts...

Aiming to take the popular financial news and information pages of its portal to new levels and target an affluent class of users in the process, Yahoo's Japan subsidiary has announced plans to link with two stock trading brokerages Yahoo Japan said it struck basic deals with E*Trade Securities, Japan's top online stock broker, and Nikko Cordial Se...

Gateway introduced three new server and storage products for the education, government and business markets yesterday, in a move analysts perceive as the niche player's attempt to take advantage of low Network Attached Storage, or NAS, price points The Gateway 9715 Server is a 4-way server platform for enterprise applications anddatabase deployment...

Microsoft claims its Xbox 360 promises an all new gaming experience, but the company has ensured that the sound will remain the same by re-upping its deal with Fonix Speech for voice recognition technology Fonix already provides the voice recognition for Xbox games such as the Tom Clancy series including Rainbow Six 3, Rainbow Six 3 Black Arrow, Ra...

An international standards group has approved a new DSL standard that it says will increase the technology's upstream and downstream speeds to as much as 100 megabits per second -- 10 times faster than the fastest DSL now offered by carriers The Geneva, Switzerland-based International Telecommunications Union (ITU) approved the standard for Very-Hi...

Recently, we came out of the age of curiosity, entered the age of scarcity and are now sinking in the age of abundance. Everything is here Today, all over the world, millions of identical companies are producing millions of identical products and services, and they are pushing identical prices on identical delivery platforms. On top of that, they h...

President Bush let it be known on April 14 of this year that he does not send e-mail -- not even to his twin daughters -- because he fears his "personal stuff" may be made public. His remarks were made during a discussion of whether his administration is being responsive to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. "There has got to be a certain sense of privacy" he said to the American Society of Newspaper Editors...