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In one swoop, a Justice Department-led group of federal law enforcement agencies seized 150 domain names of commercial websites that it claims have been selling counterfeit goods. The seized domains are now under federal custody. Taking place on Cyber Monday, the timing of this raid was not likely an accident. The federal government has been targe...

In a rare showing of bipartisanship, members of Congress and the White House are trying to breathe new life into the effort to enact national cybersecurity legislation. In a recent flurry of activity, mainly between the Obama administration and the Senate, the issue got back on the legislative track. In addition to putting the legislation at the t...

Henry Chesbrough and Eric von Hippel promoted the idea of open innovation as a new paradigm for corporations to reach beyond their own walls as they develop and bring to market new products and services. The idea covered a number of channels for work and ideas, including customers, users and partners. One of the key hurdles becomes the tension between sharing and protecting the innovation to allow all participants to get a return for their investment. ...

The holiday shopping season is in full swing, even for malicious hackers Cybercriminals are lining up to lay hands on a new exploit that takes advantage of a recently patched critical security flaw in Java, security researcher Brian Krebs warned recently....

AT&T threw in the towel on its planned US$39 billion T-Mobile merger over the holiday weekend. On Thursday, it posted a blog entry saying the deal was off. The announcement came two days after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said he would oppose the deal. This is the first time the FCC has moved to block a deal since 2002. The Department of Justice also filed a suit to block it in August...

AT&T threw in the towel on its planned US$39 billion T-Mobile merger over the holiday weekend. On Thursday, it posted a blog entry saying the deal was off. The announcement came two days after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said he would oppose the deal. This is the first time the FCC has moved to block a deal since 2002. The Department of Justice also filed a suit to block it in August...

The European Union may begin an overhaul of its 1995 Data Protection Directive next year to provide one single unified body of legislation on this issue EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding will propose the reform in January, her spokesperson, Matthew Newman, told TechNewsWorld....

By all accounts, e-commerce exceeded expectations on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday -- and many expect a repeat performance for Cyber Monday. For the holiday season-to-date, US$12.7 billion has been spent online, for a 15-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year, comScore reported. On Black Friday alone, $800 million in online s...

Researchers at Stanford University have used nanoparticles of copper hexacyanoferrate to create electrodes that could lead to large batteries for storing excess power from the electrical grid for future use These might be best used in wind and solar farms, the researchers stated in a paper published in a recent issue of Nature Communications....

EU antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia has done what few in the global patent community are willing to do: He has acknowledged the elephant in the room by questioning the motives of two multinationals -- Samsung and Apple -- as they bloody each other with patent lawsuits. "Standardization and IP rights are two instruments that, in this new IT sector, ...

Choppy Waters Ahead for the Federal IT Market, Part 1 A special congressional panel is facing a deadline of Nov. 23 to propose more than a trillion dollars in federal budget reductions over 10 years. If the panel fails, an automatic budget-cutting mechanism will take effect. Either way, the U.S. government will be launching a major austerity progra...

Well, today is your first day back (if you live in the U.S.) from the long Thanksgiving holiday, and you are likely still suffering through a bit of a food coma hangover and are wondering where your waist went. Trust me, it went on a long vacation and probably won't come out again until summer -- or it may be gone for good. Today is Cyber Monday...

This story was originally published on July 29, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. It appears that scientists at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology proved recently that you can't travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum....

This story was originally published on Aug. 15, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. I've been covering video conferencing (now often called "telepresence") products since the late 80s and saw my first offering in the mid-60s as a child at Disneyland. Over the years, product wave after product wave has come to...

This story was originally published on June 8, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Since few people bother to read Privacy Policies, Terms of Service or Click Wrap Agreements, is it any wonder that social media sites, search engines, and providers of cell services ask for and receive carte blanche rights to ou...

This story was originally published on Aug. 24, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Rewards for Recycling: Q&A With Gazelle CEO Israel Ganot, Part 1...

This story was originally published on Aug. 24, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Rewards for Recycling: Q&A With Gazelle CEO Israel Ganot, Part 1...

This story was originally published on Sept. 15, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series Social CRM has been contemplated and debated, defined and refined, cussed and discussed. These many years of excited conversation about what SCRM could do for businesses and what businesses need to do to make it a reality have ...

This story was originally published on Aug. 24, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Mikko Hypponen has spent the past 20-plus years studying malicious software, including everything from "Brain" -- the first PC virus, dating back to 1986 -- all the way up to Stuxnet and today's most sophisticated global malwar...

This story was originally published on Aug. 23, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Gazelle takes your old cellphones, laptops, digital cameras, camcorders, GPS devices, game systems, calculators, e-readers, LCD monitors, tablets, and any other out-of-date electronic equipment cluttering up your home or office...