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The Chinese government is establishing a committee that will review online games and censor them if it finds questionable content. The review will take place before the games are made available, so subscriptions will never be sold if the committee does not render approval Objectionable material, according to the country's Ministry of Culture, inclu...

The tension in the room is as thick as quicksand. The smoke gets heavier by the hour, and with each poker hand, the players wonder how long they can hold out. Who will hold? Who will fold? Who is just bluffing? One by one, they drop. The ongoing legal wrangling between SCO, IBM, Novell, AutoZone, DaimlerChrysler, Red Hat and parties-to-be-named-later has much in common with a poker game...

Microsoft has three major annual conferences: the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC), Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) and TechEd. Although each conference is important and has set record attendance in the past couple of years, providing a solid counterpoint to the view that Microsoft is in decline, TechEd is about users of Microsoft's technology while the other two shows are focused on those that sell the technology. At TechEd, you'll find the technology buyers. Microsoft touches more of those buyers than any other single vendor.

The dust from CA World is settling down as end users, analysts and true believers try to come to terms with Computer Associates' sudden interest in the open-source development model. The company has created its own CA Trusted Open Source License (CA-TOSL), not as a rival to the GPL but as a way to protect itself and its customers from SCO-IBM type lawsuits...

After some friendly negotiations with local authorities, Spamhaus, a volunteer organization fighting the proliferation of unsolicited e-mail across the globe, has established operations in China with the launch of a new Web site, spamhaus.cn The move is seen by some as another positive sign that the Asian giant is waking up to its spam problem. "Th...

The early-morning sunshine that lit up the outskirts of Los Angeles on March 13, 2004, revealed a strange and wonderful collection of vehicles gathered in the dusty landscape. A variety of four-wheel-drive trucks and SUVs bristling with electronic gear contrasted with custom-built models resembling lunar rovers. There were vehicles with two, four ...

In a terse, one-sentence press release, Siebel Systems today confirmed it has closed 175 new transactions for its hosted product, CRM OnDemand, since the start of Q2 2004 and that the number includes 62 new OnDemand customers Siebel and IBM first announced the hosted CRM cooperative product, which the two companies jointly developed, distribute and...

Symantec has reported it has analyzed a virus capable of attacking 64-bit Windows files. The virus, W64.Rugrat.3344, is the first known threat to 64-bit systems According to Symantec, Rugrat is simply a proof-of-concept virus -- the kind usually written by "white hat" hackers and given to security companies as an example of potential danger.

Security attacks on IT systems have more than doubled since last year. That's what 100 IT chief security officers at financial institutions around the globe reported in a global survey compiled by Deloitte & Touche LLP. External security attacks on information technology systems at a sampling of the world's leading financial institutions more than doubled from a year ago, according to those who responded to the rigorous global survey. Deloitte & Touche LLP is one of the nation's leading professional services firms...

Police in Taiwan have arrested Wang An-ping, a 30-year-old man who reportedly admitted to authoring Trojan code later used to steal and destroy information on government-owned computers Wang reportedly told police that he developed the software as a commercial venture but eventually posted the code for free on the Web, including to some Chinese-lan...

For the fourth time, Pleasanton, California-based PeopleSoft has responded to Oracle's latest takeover offer of US$21 per share with a resounding "no." Previously, the company's board had rejected three other escalating offers of $16, $19.50 and $26 per share PeopleSoft spokesperson Steve Swasey told CRM Buyer that the board rejected the new, lower...

President Bush has called for ubiquitous broadband rollout by 2007, but to reach that goal, Americans must win the fight against the Axis of Old -- entrenched interests in government and industry that are fighting the progress that comes with new technologies The first member of the Axis of Old is the Federal Communications Commission. For the last...

At the Web's inception, its genius founders doodled on a napkin, came up with the big six suffixes -- .com, .net, .gov, .edu, .mil and .org -- and declared "www" as the one and only key to cyberspace, changing business forever. In the beginning, this weird and strange thing called a domain name, costing pennies in comparison with a trademark regis...

Cingular, with help from Lucent Technologies, will use its own employees to test a third-generation (3G), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) wireless network and evaluate services beyond voice, including high-speed data and multimedia The companies said that with an end-to-end UMTS network from Lucent operating in Cingular's 1,900-MH...

Yahoo has announced it will add a feature to its Web browser toolbar that allows users to easily remove spyware programs from their computers. Called Anti-Spy, the feature is currently in beta. Yahoo will be collecting feedback from beta users and intends to utilize that information to produce the final version of Anti-Spy. The current beta versio...

GNU Project founder Richard Stallman has told LinuxInsider that a recent report's use of interviews with Stallman is a "deliberate" attempt to confuse people about the origins of the Linux kernel, the GNU system and software developed as part of the free-software and open-source movements "The purpose of this report is to confuse, to cause fear, un...

It may not be a perfect deterrent to illegal file-swapping on the Internet, but it comes very close to it That's how Loudeye characterized its new high-performance Titanium antipiracy service announced this week by the Seattle-based provider of business-to-business digital media solutions....

Database sales posted strong gains in 2003, with IBM and Microsoft winning market share but Oracle benefiting the most from the rise of Linux, according to a new report from Gartner Dataquest. Gartner said the worldwide market for relational database management systems grew 5.1 percent last year to nearly US$7.1 billion, a dramatic improvement ove...

Is it possible to end the investigations and prosecutions that the RIAA, the music download police and similar entities use to prosecute users of file-sharing networks? The answer depends, say online security experts, on which next-generation technology proves to be more successful. So far, enforcement investigators hold the upper hand "Everybody n...

Your broadband connection is down, and you can't get online to download the necessary patches to fix it. Frustrated, you turn to the telephone, trying to connect with the right vendor. Who you call depends on what you think the problem is -- hardware, software, a virus, connectivity or something else. Once you find someone who can help, you have t...