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In the wake of a series of high profile denial-of-service attacks that have heightened public fears about the Internet and e-commerce, the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) has announced E-Shield, a campaign that is intended to counter online security breaches and attacks Working with a base of international direct and corporate ...

Online Visa card provider NextCard, Inc. has lent some legitimacy to the often-maligned world of "electronic currency" by entering into a strategic partnership with Flooz.com, a company that provides "gift currency" that can now be used at more than 60 Internet stores NextCard, which claims to be the largest provider of credit cards on the Internet...

At a summit meeting in Washington, D.C. this week, the three largest commercial insurance trade associations in the United States called upon the government to refrain from erecting regulatory barriers to insurance e-commerce and recommended 12 principles to be followed in its regulation of the industry Despite having accepted the fact that regulat...

Earlier this week, when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it is promoting mediation over lawsuits as a means to resolve online disputes between e-tailers and consumers, I welcomed the news The agency contends that if measures are not put in place to keep the already sluggish legal system from bogging down e-commerce, it could s...

The six electronic commerce business members on the Advisory Commission on Electronic Commerce (ACEC) tried yesterday to strike a compromise between deadlocked groups by urging the U.S. Congress to extend the current tax moratorium on Internet sales for five more years The businesses making the new proposal are MCI WorldCom, Gateway, Inc., Time War...

The Internet and e-commerce fell victim to a third full-scale hacker assault in as many days Wednesday, as online broker E*Trade and a number of other sites had traffic disrupted by a coordinated stream of data requests from multiple Internet addresses These incidents came on the heels of Monday and Tuesday's orchestrated cyber-assaults on Yahoo!, ...

Just one day after a hacker attack on Yahoo! shut the giant portal down for several hours, several leading e-tail sites were similarly affected by what appears to be an orchestrated, Web-wide act of sabotage At last count Tuesday, Amazon.com, Buy.com and online auctioneer eBay had joined CNN.com as victims of the cyber-assault, bringing the total o...

Open-source solutions provider VA Linux Systems announced this week that the Linux-based KDE (K desktop environment) graphical user interface and CMU Sphinx speech recognition system projects have migrated their development efforts to its SourceForge resource site KDE and CMU Sphinx will join more than 1,750 other open-source projects that have acc...

As evidence that e-commerce has come to even the most old-fashioned of trading industries, Seattle-Washington-based Fishmonger.com launched a business-to-business (B2B) portal for the $352 billion (US$) global seafood industry today Fishmonger.com includes in-depth industry news, daily market reports and hourly updates on weather statistics. The co...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that it wants to promote mediation over lawsuits as a means to resolve disputes about basic consumer transactions conducted over the Internet In an effort to prevent the slow legal system from bogging down the lightning fast growth of the nation's largest new market, the FTC plans to hold a work...

According to a report released this week by Forrester Research, a vast majority of U.S. corporations will move aggressively to e-commerce in the next two years, drawn by emerging "e-marketplaces" where goods are sold through auctions, bid systems and exchanges The study -- one of several on business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce issued recently by m...

Banking behemoth Bank of America has finalized a record $3 million (US$) auction bid for the domain name Loans.com Domain name auctioneer GreatDomains.com, which hosted the auction, said that the site was sold by a San Jose, California computer consultant. The company claimed that the figure was the highest price ever paid at auction for a domain n...

With less than a week until Valentine's Day -- the second most popular U.S. gift-giving holiday behind Christmas -- researchers are already predicting how many people will shop online and what they will buy One study by Ernst & Young predicts that 29 percent of online shoppers -- 11.3 million Americans -- will make a Valentine's Day purchase online...

As the U.S. government's antitrust case against software giant Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) wends its way through the legal system, the European Union (EU) announced today that it will launch its own antitrust probe The European probe will focus on potentially illegal bundling of server software with the Windows 2000 operating system, while the U.S. De...

The National Governors' Association (NGA) has issued a stern call to action for U.S. states to help grow e-commerce by eliminating "the horse-and-buggy tax systems that are unsuited to the exploding telecommunications market." In a report issued Tuesday, the NGA -- citing statistics from the U.S. Department of Commerce -- said the Internet economy ...

Reports earlier this week that online powerhouse Amazon.com is being sued by individual consumers as well as being investigated by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for privacy issues are the culmination of suspicions that have been coming to a boil since late last year Late Monday, Amazon.com revealed that the FTC is investigating its Alexa ...

Entrust Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: ENTU), a provider of wireline and wireless e-commerce security solutions, announced a strategic agreement this week with database titan Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) to integrate their technologies for increased levels of available e-business security The agreement, which builds upon a previously established relati...

The governments of Canada and Australia have jointly signed a statement of common principles on the treatment of electronic commerce, which includes joint commitments to improving international protections for intellectual property, personal privacy and consumer rights in an era of electronic transactions and Internet use "Canada shares Australia's...

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced Monday that it has launched Component Knowledge, an online business-to-business (B2B) procurement service for the electronic components industry The service is designed to substantially improve communications during the new product development cycle amongst components manufacturers, their independent sales representatives ...

If you are interested in playing 18 holes with Tiger Woods or taking batting practice with New York Yankee Derek Jeter, a new company called Ultimatebid.com has made a deal to auction off such "experiences" to the highest bidder via the Internet Not a sports fan? Not to worry. You can also bid to go backstage with supermodel Heidi Klum at a fashion...