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The battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley over copyright issues heated up recently as two bills in Congress generated attention. Each side has a point, but consumers would be better off if the battleground were the marketplace, not the political stage How to protect intellectual property in a digital age is a question many are trying to answe...

Investor worry that the oil supply to the United States could be disrupted heading into the long holiday weekend reverberated on Wall Street Thursday, when stocks went sharply lower. Oil prices were up more than 3 percent Thursday after gaining 4 percent on Wednesday when the U.S. announced a surprising drop in stockpiles.

In the second ruling to limit the legal ammunition of Canadian copyright holders looking to sue file-sharers and hold ISPs accountable for peer-to-peer (P2P) piracy, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that ISPs are not subject to royalty fees Canada's high court ruled that the creation of a cache copy by Internet providers is part of their business t...

Novell has announced availability of the first full-point release of Mono, an open-source development platform based on Microsoft's .NET framework. The software is designed to help developers build cross-platform applications that are compatible with .NET services "Even as Linux grows on enterprise desktops, developing applications for the Linux de...

Microsoft's long-rumored push deeper into the search-engine business officially kicked off Thursday when the company unveiled an upgraded search "portal" it says will return better results. The company also did away with paid inclusion and suggested that sweeping technology improvements to the overall search experience were coming soon The upgrade ...

Two weeks ago I looked at IBM's forthcoming cell processor architecture [Paul Murphy, "Fast, Faster and IBM's PlayStation 3 Processor," LinuxInsider, June 17, 2004] and last week speculated about the impact it might have on the x86 desktop [Paul Murphy, "Linux on Intel: Think Dead Man Walking," LinuxInsider, June 24, 2004]. This week, I want to go beyond that and look at the impact the cell architecture will have on the battle for server dominance over the next five years. IBM isn't the only company coming out with a new CPU technology. Sun's throughput computing is as revolutionary and as little understood, despite being closer to realization...

As part of its "Patent Busting Project," the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) yesterday released its "Ten Most Wanted" patents -- patents it claims pose the greatest threat to the public domain At its web site, the EFF has posted a "wanted poster" that mimics those found on post office walls. "Wanted," the poster declares, "by EFF Marshals" for...

What do the most successful CRM implementations have in common? In a global survey designed to find out, IBM Business Consulting Services (BCS) learned that the factors that most impact a project's success are not necessarily the obvious, big-ticket items. IBM's Institute for Business Value, a unit of IBM's Business Consulting Services, in partner...

In one of the last settlements with states that sued it over antitrust allegations, Microsoft settled with Arizona, agreeing to US$104.6 million in vouchers for the state's consumers, who will each get up to $15 for purchasing Microsoft's operating system or applications The Arizona settlement, which coincides with settlements with North Dakota and...

Stock markets reacted favorably after the Federal Open Market Committee boosted interest rates by a quarter point and issued a statement that seemed to indicate gradual future increases were in the offing The Fed did what most were expecting when it raised its target rate to 1.25 percent, the first hike in four years.

Panasonic has released a DVD recorder based on Blu-Ray, a new laser that can read and store data at much higher densities than first-generation DVD technologies. According to some analyst estimates, the move should give Panasonic an edge in the battle against a rival technology supported by fellow Japanese electronics makers NEC and Toshiba....

Hoping a narrow focus on product development and customer service will help it turn itself around, Nortel sold most of its major manufacturing plants to Flextronics, which will make Nortel's hardware on an outsourcing basis. Nortel said the sale, which involves plants in Canada and Brazil, will net the struggling company as much as US$725 million ...

For the second time in as many years, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has slapped a violation for Regulation FD, short for "fair disclosure," on CRM vendor Siebel Systems. The June 29th charge also says that the company violated an SEC cease-and-desist order placed on it for an earlier breach of the same regulation Two of the company's ...

Security advisories and reports typically include preventive measures that computer users can take to avoid malicious Internet attacks, but one piece of advice is on the rise: Use a Web browser other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Security experts themselves have indicated that their own use of Mozilla, Netscape or Opera -- some of the most popular alternative Web browsers -- suggests that non-Microsoft browsers are more safe than IE...

Known to some in the space community as "the last battlestar," the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft this week is on the verge of finishing its 2.2-billion-mile trip to Saturn as it prepares to get closer to the ringed planet than any other craft in history Cassini-Huygens is set to slip between two of Saturn's rings and then thrust into the planet's fiel...

Because they offer users network-access flexibility as they move from place to place, wireless LANs -- often called WLANs -- have gained significant acceptance. While the technology has proven to be a boon to maintenance technicians, salespersons and programmers, it has been a sometimes vexing security problem for IT managers Starting with the firs...

Companies jostling for top billing in the crowded Internet search space are spending more and more money on pay-per-click sites. In addition to investing in search engine advertising, many companies are delving into search engine optimization to build the volume of traffic to their sites By 2005, about 35 percent of all online advertising spending ...

Microsoft chief software architect Bill Gates claimed this week that his company has made great security strides, responding quickly enough to the increasing threat of attackers who are now using automated techniques to strike more quickly at exposed Windows systems Gates pointed to improvements in the time it has taken Microsoft to respond to sign...

Microsoft unveiled plans Tuesday to release stripped-down versions of its Visual Studio developer's tools and SQL Server database in an attempt to appeal to nonprofessional programmers The inexpensive, lightweight "Express" versions are intended for people who write programs but do not work as software developers. This audience, which has been esti...

All economy watchers have turned their gaze to the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee today and tomorrow as the central bank weighs how much to boost interest rates in an effort to stem inflation without squelching the economic recovery Most economists expect the Fed to hike the overnight lending rate by a quarter point when it issues its decisi...