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Can the courts make you open your computer? They can certainly confiscate your computer and search it for evidence of criminal activity; they can compel you to open encrypted files if you're a suspected terrorist (The Patriot Act); but if you plead the Fifth, they may not be able to order you to fork over passwords A woman in Colorado, Ramona ...

Executives of BlackBerry handheld device maker Research In Motion went into its annual shareholder meeting in Toronto Tuesday expecting a mauling, but ended up with a gumming instead Company co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis apparently faced relatively mild questioning and comments about their strategy going forward....

Netflix announced a reshuffling of its prices Tuesday, separating its DVD and streaming plans into two separate subscription packages and angering a large part of its customer base. New customers will need to pick from the company's new offerings immediately; existing members will be transitioned to the new plans starting Sept. 1 The company is tou...

In 2010, Google admitted that when collecting Street View photos around the world it also collected data from unsecured wireless networks. That led to a bunch of lawsuits. Recently, U.S. Federal Judge James Ware refused to dismiss a class action lawsuit based on allegations that Google violated the U.S. Federal Wiretap Act by collecting unsecure...

As Washington hunkers down for an era of tight federal budgets, information technology vendors can take some comfort in a projected modest rate of growth in federal IT investments. Between 2011 and 2016, federal spending for IT should grow by 12 percent, in total, for an average compound annual rate of growth of about 1.7 percent. Even with those ...

For years, a staple tool I have relied on is a clipboard manager to keep tabs on reusable text snippets. The Linux desktop has several noteworthy clipboard managers. Some are much handier than others for working with parcels of text that I can easily swap from a clipping queue to a document or Web page form....

Search History: Google and Germany, Part 1 Following Germany's reunification, victims and villains alike wanted to forget the country's past, observed Konrad H. Jarausch, a historian and professor living in Berlin. And this, for everyone, required privacy....

The Antisec hacker movement, which targets the websites of governments and their agencies worldwide, on Monday hacked into the website of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton The group posted a 130 MB file of data stolen from Booz Allen's servers on the Pirate Bay BitTorrent website....

Cisco may shed as many as 10,000 jobs, or about 14 percent of its workforce, according to Bloomberg, which cited two sources familiar with the matter. The cuts are meant to revive profit growth; as many as 7,000 jobs could be eliminated by August. Cisco is also providing early retirement packages to about 3,000 workers who accepted buyouts Eliminat...

Google's Street View cars have been spotted all over the world capturing ground-level photos of cities for the company's unique mapping technology. But now that tech is being put to a new use: The cars are shooting pictures of the devastation in Japan left from the powerful earthquake the nation suffered last March. The goal is to help spread information about the extent of the remaining damage and help relief workers coordinate their efforts...

When the first EMC-sponsored study aimed at determining the size, scope and implications of digital information growth appeared five years ago, its IDC and University of California, Berkeley, authors employed restraint with the title, "The Expanding Digital Universe." In the follow-up study two years later, "Expanding" morphed into "Diverse and Exploding." The newest iteration, published last month, stretches the guiding concept even further with the notion of "Extracting Order from Chaos." ...

Avaya is delivering multimedia capabilities to the front line with its Tuesday announcement of two new contact center products designed to bring agent-assisted and automated customer service up to speed with the social networking world. ...

From the clothing ads that dance around in epileptic flashes to the constant requests for your credit card number, email service from the German website GMX.net has some shortcomings. You can get 1 GB of memory, but you'll need a credit card for anything more -- a 5 GB allowance runs about US$4.50 per month, and for 10 GB, you pay about $7.50 per month.

Consumers are clearly intrigued by Google+. Following closely on their heels are companies, eager to tap what looks to be the next big trend in social media. Indeed, companies are waiting with bated breath for more details about what Google+ means for them -- that is, what advertising vehicles will be available.

The Iriver Story HD, the first e-reader to be fully integrated with the Google eBooks platform will be available exclusively at the Target retail chain Sunday ...

Facebook users may soon be able to stream, download and share music via the social networking site with a partnership with Spotify, a Swedish music service, according to codes found by software blogger Jeff Rose The software engineer examined a code possibly in development that users could use to download what was called "Facebook Vibes," presumabl...

The music and movie industries have obtained the consent of major U.S. ISPs to take steps to curb online content theft through establishing a common framework for so-called Copyright Alerts This is a system that the innocuously named Center for Copyright Information (CCI) -- made up of members of the industries named above and major ISPs -- says is...

Ever wonder what the opposite of CRM would be? I have. In my ruminations it's not as simple as matter and antimatter, up and down, left and right -- though few of us would consider antimatter very simple. If I gave you written directions to my house, you couldn't get home simply by turning the sheet upside down. Opposite isn't simply backward W...

Last week, Facebook launched its video chat, and it once again reminded me that CEOs really should read the book Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, because Zuckerberg was really boring. Saying that this was going to be an "awesome" announcement and showcasing basic video chat and group text chat was, and I'm being kind, disappointing. Still, Facebook does have something amazing here -- I just don't think it's worked out yet. But I do think this is the beginning of something big. ...

To borrow from Shakespeare, many companies find themselves asking "to VDI or not to VDI?" The first step to determine if Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is the right solution for your company is to identify exactly what VDI means for your organization. VDI actually encompasses several types of delivery, but it is most commonly associated wit...