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Red Hat's new Linux product, Fedora Core 2, has been playing well with cutting-edge enthusiasts and adventurous developers since its release on Tuesday. But some in this target audience wonder whether the company's strategy of providing different products for personal and enterprise use is a sound one The new release, which is free, includes the Li...

Napster UK, a subsidiary of Roxio, has announced that the Napster 2.0 online music service went live to music fans across the United Kingdom today with what the company is calling "the UK's largest online music catalog." UK residents can download the new Napster 2.0 music service for free at www.napster.co.uk. Napster 2.0 provides both a subscript...

Symantec has announced it will buy spam-filtering company Brightmail in a deal worth US$370 million, adding spam-stopping capabilities to its antivirus and security gateway. The all-cash deal is expected to close in July, and Symantec said it is "too early to estimate" the impact of the acquisition on its revenue and earnings.

The European Commission (EC) has passed a controversial directive that opponents claim will bolster the lot of big companies at the expense of small ones and will stifle innovation The so-called Computer-Implemented Inventions directive, which would harmonize how software patents are issued throughout the European Union, created a furor when it was...

What would your answer be if a selection team charged with hiring a new CIO to develop and implement an organization-wide "strategic systems architecture" were to ask you what management considerations most differentiate use of Windows from use of Linux? The right answer, I think, is that the more fully the organization implements the Unix Business...

Internet giant Yahoo has released an e-mail encryption scheme to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) aimed at wide adoption and avoidance of the unwanted and increasing volume of commercial and gimmicky e-mail known as spam However, the submission of Yahoo's DomainKeys antispam proposal comes in the wake of other recent proposals supported b...

CRM software revenues are expected to reach US$30 billion in the next several years, according to research firm Cahners In-Stat. Even so, CRM implementation projects are often cited for high failure rates. One point of failure that is hard to measure, even with the best monitoring software, is the unhappy customer who just goes away You may have be...

The dynamic duo of IBM and PeopleSoft has launched an initiative that the two companies say will expand their existing alliance, allowing them to focus more sharply on small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) worldwide. The alliance calls for joint hardware and software development of vertical applications, joint marketing efforts, cooperative Linux development and industry-specific solutions for resellers...

Taiwanese chipmaker VIA has released details of its next-generation C5J Esther processor core, which is intended to bring security in addition to low heat and power consumption to small, low-priced embedded devices VIA, which unveiled the new power-efficient processor core at the Embedded Processor Forum in San Jose, California, this week, said the...

Hewlett-Packard posted its best sales figures in company history during the second quarter, exceeding analysts' revenue expectations and matching profit forecasts as demand for printers, servers and outsourcing services remained strong. Offering more evidence that its 2002 merger with Compaq was a good idea, HP posted record sales of US$20.1 billi...

Q: What's the difference between Chi-Hi, a high school, and a 12-year-old named Brianna LaHara? A: 500 CDs It's now routine for the Big Five record labels to sue innocent people for allegedly sharing music online without permission, and 12-year-old Brianna LaHara was one such person sued by Big Music....

The author of a study accusing Linus Torvalds and others in the open-source movement of "stealing code" and of taking credit where it wasn't due nevertheless says he is pro-open source and is calling for a US$5 billion government initiative to develop more of it The study, written by Kenneth Brown, president of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, ...

Thanks to eBay and its competitors, online auctions have become a common way for individuals and companies to sell goods. More recently, nonprofit organizations have begun to see the light as well, supplementing their fundraising efforts by auctioning big-ticket items and services online The move toward Internet auctions has been aided in large par...

Even before the ink has dried on the US$47 billion merger of Cingular and AT&T Wireless, the cellular company spun off by AT&T in 2001, AT&T has announced a new deal with Sprint to provide AT&T-branded voice and data services to AT&T's 30 million customers over Sprint's wireless networks The five-year deal is AT&T's first step in reentering the wir...

In a somewhat surprising answer to U.S. counterparts Yahoo and Google, which recently have revealed plans to offer high volumes of storage space as part of their Web-based e-mail services, European Internet company Lycos Europe has upped the stakes in the e-mail-storage race by offering its own 1-GB e-mail service Lycos announced it will offer the ...

The Australian recording industry's bid to eyeball material gathered in a series of raids at the sites of alleged music pirates -- including Sharman Networks, maker of the popular online file-sharing program Kazaa, and Sharman partners Altnet and Brilliant Digital Entertainment -- was deflated last week in a proceeding in a New South Wales federal court...

Saying the market for sending voice, video and other communications over the Internet is enormous but largely untapped, IBM and Cisco have announced they will work together to help companies make use of the money-saving option. IBM will market its consulting and integration services and will support a range of Cisco's voice, video and conference h...

Because the volume of spam has increased from about 10 percent of all e-mail in 2001 to more than 50 percent today, corporations and ISPs have been trying to find ways to keep the junk mail from overwhelming users' inboxes. Filtering products, which rely on several techniques to separate needed messages from unwanted solicitations, have helped cut down on the bulk-mail deluge.

If I write a novel about a boy wizard attending a wizarding school, and I never read or heard about someone else's copyrighted novel about a boy wizard attending a wizarding school, does my novel infringe on the copyright of that other novel? Not if I can prove that somehow I missed the Harry Potter books and movies It's unlikely, I admit. But copy...

SAP's Sapphire user conference in New Orleans kicked off last week with a keynote by SAP chief executive Henning Kagermann, who called for more efforts to streamline the company's applications and bolster Web services adoption Those twin themes were echoed frequently throughout the week in conference sessions and product releases. Indeed, much of t...