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In sharp contrast to the harmless pranks that will be played on this April Fools' Day, deceptive phishing schemes are no laughing matter To strike a blow against criminals who prey on Internet users, Microsoft yesterday filed 117 lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle against alleged John Doe phishers....

Even as IBM distances itself from the personal computer industry -- citing foreign competition as a reason -- and others might be prepared to follow suit, private U.S. investors have stepped forward to bankroll the Chinese company taking over Big Blue's PC wing A group of private investors announced it has agreed to buy a 12 percent stake in Lenovo...

One of the most vehement opponents to European patents is throwing in thetowel before the fight is officially over. Florian Mueller announced today that he is stepping down as manager of NoSoftwarePatents.com, the European anti-software patent campaign, and returning to his computer games business ...

A U.S. State Department proposal to include wireless data chips in U.S. passports has been met with a wave of criticism and concern from privacy activists and security experts who fail to see any value in the wireless technology for passports. The chips could only serve to compromise personal data and put U.S. citizens at risk, they argue U.S. offi...

Symantec today made public security vulnerabilities in the 2004 and 2005 versions of its Symantec Norton AntiVirus suite of products. The company said patches have already been released Both vulnerabilities allowed denial of service (DoS) attacks through the SmartScan feature in which a real-time scan of a specific file type could result in "the bl...

Microsoft yesterday released its Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, providing system customers with security enhancements as well as reliability and performance improvements. Analysts said service pack releases are significant events for consumers under typical circumstances, but this Microsoft release offers more than the typical fixes and patches...

In a move that both validates the technology underlying Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and promises to help advance it, especially in terms of security, the Department of Defense (DoD) has taken a step toward developing its own, privately managed VoIP system The DoD said it had awarded Nortel Networks a contract worth up to US$20 million to mi...

Intel's newest platform offering, code-named "Truland," is an evolutionary step in the established path toward dual-core processors and 64-bit architecture Truland, which comprises five different 64-bit Intel Xeon processors MP (multiprocessor) and the Intel E8500 chipset -- codenamed Twin Castle -- is faster than predecessors and offers some techn...

When a company or even a not-for-profit organization collects, uses and/or deals with personal information, it might be legally required to immediately notify individuals whose information it is handling if there is a security breach relating to that information Apart from specific local laws that might require such notification, in both the U.S. a...

Customer data integration (CDI) is becoming important for enterprises who want to target, acquire, develop and retain customers. In order to benefit from it, however, an enterprise needs to create a unified and comprehensive customer view from all disparate data sources -- including CRM, financial, product and external data services. Once integrated, unified customer views provide the entire organization with the ability to drive meaningful business action within and across operational systems...

The space shuttle Columbia disaster on Feb. 1, 2003 sparked development of the world's second largest supercomputer, a system with 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors capable of performing 51.87 trillion calculations per second Not only did the supercomputer, appropriately dubbed Columbia, stretch Linux's performance boundaries, but it also strained ...

Earlier this year, the new Napster was given a bit of a fright when reports began circulating that its recently introduced subscription service had been "hacked." Those reports stung Napster in two ways They suggested that the service, which in its original incarnation was shut down by the music industry as a rat's nest for tune nicksters, had, how...

A new lithium-ion battery from Toshiba may hold promise for the future of electric vehicles. The electronics giant yesterday unveiled a battery that takes only a minute to recharge to 80 percent of its full strength, making it by far the fastest recharging lithium-ion battery available The battery fully charges in less than 10 minutes. The prototyp...

Network Appliance's announcement of its latest V-Series storage and management systems highlight the further spread of a trend that nearly all major hardware and software vendors tout in some form or another: virtualization Network Appliance said its NetApp V-series family of data storage and management systems would use "groundbreaking, dynamic vi...

Even before the news was officially announced by Hewlett-Packard yesterday, the speculation had begun on the wisdom of the company's choice of NCR's Mark Hurd as its new CEO Hurd, 48, who resigned his position has president and CEO after a 25-year career at NCR, will take over the spot Carly Fiorina was asked to leave in February....

EBay has moved closer to scoring a major victory in a long-running legal case after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a finding that patents the auction giant has been found guilty of violating should be revoked The Patent Office issued a preliminary finding suggesting that patents previously issued to MercExchange should be revoked after...

GroundWork Open Source Solutions today said it has it has secured US$8.5 million in its second round of venture capital financing. The Series B financing, led by Mayfield, includes Series A lead investor Canaan Partners Emeryville, Calif.-based GroundWork develops open-source products for the enterprise that enable the monitoring of network and app...

Toshiba and Elpida Memory both announced today high-performance DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips they say achieve the fastest data transfer rate yet attained by any memory device The second generation 512-megabit XDR (extreme data rate) DRAMs each have a peak operating speed of 3.2 Ghz, which provides a data transfer rate of 6.4 GB per sec...

Microsoft made two major advances this week including the launch of its MSN Video Downloads service and announcing plans to offer a new ID system designed to give users more control over personal information Microsoft said MSN Video Downloads will provide daily television programming, including video content from MSNBC.com, Food Network, FOX Sports...

Hackers possess two admirable traits: persistence and ingenuity. These attributes have unfortunately lead to a phenomenon known as "pharming," the latest in a never-ending series of insidious attacks This new threat packages a number of established attack methods, such as phishing, viruses, spyware, and Domain Name Service (DNS) redirection, in a n...