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Among the many questions that might be answered by the presidential election on Tuesday is whether electronic voting can silence its critics by turning in a seamless performance or, instead, will fall prey to any of the number of concerns that have been raised This week, a number of major e-voting machine vendors submitted millions of lines of soft...

Mandrakesoft is giving the penguin a makeover with its latest Linux release, complete with extended support for mobile devices, enhanced hardware compatibility and major application upgrades Company officials said Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official will become the basis for a large part of the software publisher's product range while attempting to stay tr...

A Japanese company is heralding its new fuel cell technology, claiming that it might be readyfor mobile PCs within the next two years. Industry analysts, however,point to several major hurdles for the technology, which has already beenheralded several times before Materials and Energy Research Institute Tokyo (Merit)claims that its borohydride fuel...

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has revived its long-running campaign to stem file-swapping through legal action, suing 750 alleged file sharers across the U.S. for copyright infringement The latest batch of suits included 25 users on 13 university campuses around the country and like past batches focuses on users of peer-to-pe...

Most businesspeople get a knot in their stomachs when they think of bankruptcy. The reasons for this, I believe, are twofold: They don't have the basic knowledge about the implications of bankruptcy; and they feel a loss of control whenever they think about it This article attempts to dispel the myths about bankruptcy and provides some of the basic...

There's a major disconnect between the expectations and results companies are getting when they realign processes aimed at serving their customers, as I've discovered in conversations with several manufacturers There are several reasons why these unrealistic expectations take hold. First, nearly every manufacturer that has complained about a lack o...

This month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a microchip that can be implanted in humans to provide access to medical records. Privacy regulation advocates were predictably horrified, but the chip does not create the privacy crisis some might imagine The VeriChip, made by Applied Digital Systems, is an implantable radio frequency ide...

A barrage of lawsuits against several dozen defendants have been filed in federal courts by an antispam alliance of the nation's leading Internet service providers in the latest crackdown on e-mail spam The lawsuits were filed by Earthlink, America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo. They represent the second round of suits in the ISPs' get-tough approach...

A group of tech heavyweights have joined forces to push a mobile security specification they say will clear the way for a boom in m-commerce Wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo, chipmaker Intel and IBM said the spec they call "Trusted Mobile Platform" will protect mobile devices against viruses and other attacks and make transactions done on them more secu...

To make amends for a disruption in its service earlier this month, PayPal is waiving transaction fees for payment recipients in the United States and some other countries Sellers will be credited for any transaction fee -- normally 1.9 percent to 2.9 percent -- charged on payments made today from 12 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. Pacific time....

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has given preliminary approval to two new Internet domain names, ".travel" and ".post." The two suffixes have been under evaluation by ICANN, a public-private partnership that oversees the Internet's addressing system, and the approval moves the review process forward into the contract negotiation stage...

Each season, Legoland Denmark welcomes 1.6 million guests, and about 1,600 of them end up getting lost This spring, the theme park adopted an AeroScout RFID location solution, offering parents use of an RFID bracelet for their children at a nominal fee. If their children wander away from them in the park or try to exit unaccompanied, parents can re...

In a possible reaction to hacker concerns, the Bush Administration has blocked at least some foreign visitor access to its official re-election site The British Internet traffic analysis company Netcraft reported several locations have not had access to the site since Monday....

Yahoo has launched a mobile version of its Web, image and local search offerings, a move that opens up a new and wireless battlefield in the search engine wars At least initially, Yahoo's mobile search will be stripped of content-relevant ads from its Overture paid listings business, a sign that analysts saw as a desire by the portal to build a cus...

Chipmaker AMD is taking its "50x15" plan to India in a partnership with telecommunications company Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (VSNL) in a move analysts said blurred the lines between consumer and computing devices. VSNL will market AMD's Personal Internet Communicator (PIC) to Tata Indicom Broadband customers as part of a bundled Internet service, beginning in five Indian cities...

Linux could be poised to take another big step into the public sector overseas, thanks to a new report from the UK Office of Government Commerce (OCG). The OCG study concluded that open-source operating systems such as Linux are "viable" and could "generate significant savings." The UK joins other European and Asian nations in their open-source exp...

Online and offline, consumers are at a disadvantage when entering into a contract for services or the purchase of goods because, in most cases, a customer is not in a position to negotiate the terms of the item being purchased or the service being provided. Moreover, in the event of a dispute, the user might be held to these non-negotiated terms that almost always favor the vendor or service provider...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a commentary on electronic voting for the Washington Dispatch in which I argued that what makes it possible for conspiracy theorists to use e-voting as the basis of an attack on the legitimacy of an expected Bush victory on November 2 is the client-server architecture, not the specific failures of the technologies used within it...

Companies large and small now rely on digital content. They download brochures to salespersons, ship video clips to employees, and plaster their logos in front of consumers. As more information takes digital formats, corporations need tools to monitor the use of their assets, which freely move in and out of their networks A number of vendors are tr...

In a move that gives Linux greater play in the data center, Dell has reached an agreement with Novell to certify Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on Dell PowerEdge servers The companies said the deal would give customers more choices for fully-supported Linux platform developments. Dell Services will also assist customers throughout the lifec...