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While U.S. legislators and e-mail users are hoping a new national anti-spam law will stem the flow of unwanted electronic solicitations, companies engaged in legitimate marketing are concerned they will pay a higher price than spammers who skirt legislative requirements or conduct their business from offshore However, analysts say the federal law t...

As Apple Computer's annual gathering of loyal fans at Macworld approaches, a growing number of users of one of the company's most popular products, the iBook notebook computer, are threatening protests and mulling class-action lawsuits These vocal Apple critics say the company has not done enough to address, or even acknowledge, serious flaws in th...

The debate about whether peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, which were first made popular with the Napster file-sharing network, should be legitimate or illegitimate continues to rage On one side are applications like Morpheus and Kazaa, whose makers say their products have many uses -- adding that they promote the legitimate ones and are not respons...

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by America Online against a group of Florida computer technicians, whom AOL had accused of maintaining computer networks that were used to batter its e-mail servers with spam targeting its millions of users. The suit, one of many legal and other approaches AOL and others have tried to use to gain an ...

Faced with a far more urgent need to support more Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, the Asian nations of Japan, South Korea and China are looking to lead the move to IPv6, considered by many to be the next-generation Internet Unlike the United States -- which still has a bountiful supply of the Internet addresses that connect separate networks and ...

Topping other popular culture icons including Harry Potter, American Idol and Britney Spears among Web searches by millions of Yahoo users worldwide, the Kazaa file-trading music tool was the number one search subject of 2003, Yahoo reported this week "Music and multimedia continue to dominate America's online mindshare as Kazaa, the world's most p...

Early reports suggest holiday e-commerce sales grew well over 30 percent from 2002 levels, helping the e-tail industry record its best-ever season, even without the type of must-have gift items that have driven sales in past years. Total holiday season spending online -- measured from November 1st through December 19th -- reached US$15.8 billion, ...

The past year was a good year for bad guys on the Web. Fraud complaints surged 60 percent to 120,000 from 75,000 a year ago, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center in Fairmont, West Virginia The Center, which changed its name last week from the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, maintains a database on Internet crime and acts as a clearingh...

When the E-Commerce Times asked industry experts what tops the typical CIO's wish list, Scott Tiazkun, research manager for enterprise applications at IDC, joked: "Relief from the nightmare of being pulled from a dank, small hiding place by enemy software vendor sales personnel!" Tiazkun's response turned out not to be an anomaly. Others voiced sim...

A new Internet scam, which arrived in the last two months, has proven to be especially nasty during the online holiday shopping peak. Called phishing, the tactic is utilized to get credit card and account information from consumers who believe they are visiting legitimate bank and credit card sites The newest attack occurred last week when users be...

Making a set of New Year's resolutions for myself is certainly helpful but generally not nearly as much fun as making them for others. The year 2003 has been a time of change. It has brought a lot of exciting new experiences for me, and, frankly, I'd like fewer of them in 2004. It is at this time of year that corporations often reflect on strategi...

A New York technology industry research firm confirmed the complaints of consumers, analysts, office workers and lawmakers by blaming the unsolicited e-mail known as spam for nearly US$20 billion in lost time and expenses worldwide On the basis of several factors, such as productivity and bandwidth losses, New York consulting firm Basex reported th...

Microsoft has agreed to settle a patent infringement lawsuit filed by software firm SPX, which already has convinced a jury that Microsoft infringed its patents related to online meeting software, which SPX sells under the NetMeeting name. The settlement between Microsoft and SPX came not long after the jury publicly awarded SPX and its subsidiary...

It seemed like a no-brainer for Microsoft: Use its massive software market share to win over game players to its Xbox console. It could sell a powerful, graphics-enhanced computer for about US$180 and sit back as the dollars rolled in from royalties paid by its partners for every Xbox game sold According to Microsoft's vision, the plan to practical...

Although worms can create media furor and disrupt business, to date they have adhered to a strange dichotomy: A given worm may spread rapidly or deliver a destructive payload -- but no worm has accomplished both tasks with equal aplomb SQL Slammer and SoBig.F, for example, tunneled voraciously through the Internet. On the other hand, the Magistr wo...

What's in a name? Not much, according to Shakespeare. But today, the answer is "plenty" -- especially when you're talking about the intersection of domain names with trademarks The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- most commonly known as ICANN -- is a nonprofit corporation that was set up in California to administer several cor...

For many online shoppers, Overstock.com has become a favorite bargain-hunting destination. The e-tailer offers up to 80 percent off the sticker price of items ranging from dresses to computers, and it has dedicated staffers in its customer service and warehousing departments to keep the operation running at Internet speed Yet the road was not alway...

Apple has responded to a series of security threats, including a vulnerability that might have granted would-be attackers root access and total control over systems running Mac OS X 10.3.2 and earlier versions. That Directory Services vulnerability, patched along with other holes in a security update available from Apple, is mitigated by the fact ...

The rate at which Americans are adopting cable and DSL high-speed Internet connections and going online slowed at the end of the year. But this slowing rate of growth is balanced by U.S. subscribers using the Internet for more types of activities, such as online banking and financial transactions, which grew more than any other genre of activity Tw...

Distributing software for sharing files on the Internet is legal even if the application is being used for illegal activity, the Supreme Court of The Netherlands ruled last Friday In upholding a lower court ruling, the high court found that Sharman Networks, maker of the Kazaa file-sharing application, did not infringe on the rights of music and mo...