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Like the Trojan War, the battle between Oracle Corp. and PeopleSoft, Inc. has languished for a while but soon may reach epic proportions. In this tale, however, the weapons are hostile takeover offers and the soldiers are chief financial officers, technical experts and attorneys. It's not clear yet which side will win, as the U.S. Department of Ju...

Officials at several U.S. state and federal law enforcement organizations have announced an initiative aimed squarely at use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks for child pornography More than 1,000 investigations have been opened in the United States involving the distribution and possession of child pornography. To date, there have been m...

Cisco Systems is investigating whether part of the source code that powers its networking hardware has been revealed on the Internet -- a potentially embarrassing development for a company making a huge push into the network security business. Reports swept the Web last weekend that the code had been published on the Russian site SecurityLab. Howe...

A while back, I wrote a column on how Microsoft had passed Nintendo to become number two in the gaming scene [Rob Enderle, "Xbox v. PlayStation: Microsoft Throws Down the Gauntlet," TechNewsWorld, March 29, 2004]. In that column, I covered what Microsoft was doing to chase the clearly dominant player in the console-gaming market. That dominant player was and is Sony. In handheld gaming, the landscape is very different.

Phishing -- a tactic in which fraudulent email directs users to a malicious Web site that masquerades as a site belonging to a legitimate company, such as a credit card firm or bank, while stealing users' personal data -- is unquestionably on the rise. A recent Gartner report noted that in the past year, approximately 57 million adults received a phishing e-mail. Worse, 11 million of those recipients clicked on the links in that e-mail...

Customer-service managers are always looking for ways to boost agent productivity by shaving seconds off calls and increasing upsell rates. Indeed, if there were a customer-service crystal ball that could search through all customer interactions and spot future trends, visualizing patterns and noting irregularities, the pressures on call managers ...

A manned space rocket program funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen made its way to higher than 211,000 feet Thursday with the SpaceShipOne test flight, which reached about two-thirds of the 63-mile-high requirement for the US$10 million X Prize that is more about feat than finance Piloted by Mike Melvill and released from a companion craft, kno...

Yahoo will unveil an upgrade of its Web-based e-mail service this summer that includes greatly expanded storage capacity for free users and "virtually unlimited" storage for paid customers The upgrade, seen as a direct response to Google's controversial Gmail service, which will offer what is, for all practical purposes, unlimited storage for free,...

In the first installment of this two-part exclusive interview, the E-Commerce Times spoke with Gomez CEO Dr. Alex Stein about the Internet performance management industry -- a field that is booming as more companies see a need for this sort of technology. In today's edition, Stein discusses the nature of competition versus coexistence, the evoluti...

Searching for data on a PC used to be a series of isolated activities. Users needed one or more computer-based software utilities to hunt through the hard drive for specific files containing keywords. Finding information beyond the hard disk meant logging in to a library or university system and entering archaic Boolean search terms into a distant server's query window...

The United States has set its sights on becoming the country with the fastest supercomputer. The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) announced it has been chosen to lead a partnership with the goal of building the most powerful supercomputer by 2007. The Department of Energy awarded the lab a US$25 million contract for the effort...

This week's U.S. congressional hearing on the loosening of DVD and other copying restrictions based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 might signal a change in attitude toward laws that have been the basis of infringement suits against companies and consumers Some, including lawmakers on the U.S. Congressional Subcommittee on Co...

Taking its AdSense program in a new direction that could inject a breath of fresh air a traditional Internet-advertising style, Google has said it will begin testing banner ads. The move comes as a surprise because Google's AdSense, which places ads based on the Web page content with which they appear, has relied exclusively on small text advertis...

The arrest this week of the Japanese author of a popular online file-sharing program appears to be an extreme reaction, at least by American standards, to his alleged abetting of copyright infringers, according to a patent attorney in Chicago In what's been reported as the first arrest of a software developer for helping others to violate copyright...

My server has been getting a lot of hits lately from searches that look like the following: 130.156.9.5 - - [30/Apr/2004:13:44:24 -0400] "GET /article.html HTTP/1.1" 200 35654 "http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=windows+vs+unix+term+paper&FORM=SMCRT""Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"...

In an era when downtime can mean loss of revenue, floods of expensive calls to contact centers and a reduction in customer loyalty, more and more organizations are seeking the expertise of Internet performance management firms. Waltham, Massachusetts-based Gomez is one such company, providing software and services that capture performance data from tens of thousands of collection points behind the corporate firewall, on the backbone and from users' connection sites...

Online music service Napster has announced a distribution deal with a UK independent label group to bolster its catalog of copyright-compliant tracks for Internet users. Roxio-owned Napster also signaled it still plans to enter the competitive UK market as early as late summer, while UK download rival Wippit announced its own distribution deal wit...

Nintendo and Sony took the stage with competing announcements at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. Each game console maker detailed specs of a new portable gaming device, but the proposed gadgets differ in important ways Nintendo said its entrant in this market will debut this year in Japan and North America, and in Eur...

Looking to blur business lines the same way that technology has blurred traditional voice and data networks and solutions, MCI and Microsoft have announced a deepening of their relationship to deliver converged communication and collaboration technologies. The companies will codevelop new real-time applications, such as access to presence-based se...

Powered by a slightly better than expected earnings report and expectations that tech spending will remain strong, Cisco Systems has said it will add 1,000 workers in 2004. The company said the 1,000 jobs will come on top of 200 positions it filled during the first quarter. Although it did not provide a breakdown of onshore versus offshore, Cisco ...