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Comcast's pending acquisition of General Electric's NBC Universal was put under the microscope again Thursday as the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and The Internet of the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a field hearing to investigate the proposed deal The Federal Communications Commission is expec...

The federal government is launching a program to detect cyberattacks on America's critical infrastructure installations, such as the nationwide electricity grid and nuclear power plants, according to The Wall Street Journal. The National Security Agency will allegedly run the program, dubbed "Perfect Citizen."

YouTube's decision to make its mobile Web site compatible with HTML5 may one day be viewed as a turning point in what is shaping up as an epic battle for control of the mobile device landscape In unveiling the new site on Wednesday, YouTube said its goal is to give mobile device users the same video viewing experience they get on desktop computers....

In May, TheFind reached a notable milestone: It overtook Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) Shopping to become the No. 2 search engine for retail queries, according to comScore. Google holds the No. 1 slot. A relative newcomer, TheFind has posted remarkable growth in a short period of time. In April, for example, it grew 175 percent year over year, noted founde...

Microblogging service Twitter has announced its second major attempt to monetize -- the @earlybird service This will let advertisers pay a fee to promote exclusive events, tout time-sensitive special deals and offer sneak peeks at products to Twitter users....

Borders is expanding its reach into the e-book market with the launch of its e-bookstore, a site that holds 1.5 million titles and is powered by Canadian company Kobo. Borders acquired a stake in the firm last year and sells the Kobo eReader at the online store, as well as the Sony Reader Pocket Edition and Sony Reader Touch Edition. The Kobo eRea...

A manned solar-powered airplane took off in the early hours of Wednesday morning for a 24-hour trip that will include its first nighttime flight After being postponed last week, the flight began at 6:51 a.m. local time, when the Solar Impulse HB-SIA aircraft took off from the Payerne airbase in Switzerland with Andre Borscherg, CEO and cofounder of...

With corporate America driving down costs and expenses in every department on a year-by-year basis, it's no wonder that data center consolidations are at the top of almost every IT agenda. Whether it's due to past growth, acquisitions or delays in consolidating for various reasons, the benefits of taking a large number of isolated and segmented data centers and consolidating them into a much smaller number is quite staggering. ...

Social media can be wonderful tools for sales and marketing, but so far most companies and most anecdotal evidence that I have seen point to practices that are mired in old-think, with the result that social media is being questioned as a strategy. Here are some ideas that I give my clients when they are trying to figure out an approach involving social media...

The drawback with using most note-taking applications on any platformis that they are limited in the type of data you can put into them.For instance, simple text editors ignore Internet and content links.Plus, you cannot import graphics. Even word-processing programs, whichovercome the links and graphics deficiencies, lack the tree structurethat makes storing and viewing notes quick and useful...

As part of an overhaul of its public-facing front-door website, USA.gov, the U.S. federal government has released the first in a long list of planned mobile phone applications for citizens. Some have downloadable modules optimized for specific mobile phone platforms; others come in the form of websites optimized for access through Web browsers running on mobile devices...

Hackers hit YouTube over the weekend, injecting pop-ups, disabling comments and redirecting viewers to porn sites when they tried to access videos Google clamped down on the problem swiftly and is attempting to figure out who was behind the attack....

Netflix has expanded its library of streaming movie titles -- and will be making them available to customers much faster -- through a new agreement it has inked with distribution house Relativity Media As part of the deal, Relativity's movies can be streamed to Netflix's customer base months after they are released in theaters. This is a radical de...

"Disruptive" technologies do not destroy industries -- they may, however, create new ones. Whether we like it or not, we are in a constant state of flux. The technology industry, just like any industry, is incredibly dynamic and changing -- and with change, comes opportunity. PC World's Dan Tynan gets it. He called out "The 10 Most Disruptive Tech...

Windows OS High Availability (HA) is a tricky part of your disaster recovery (DR) planning. Many Microsoft and third-Party server tools and platforms come with some form of native HA toolset, and for the larger portion of these, Microsoft Cluster or Failover Clustering (Server 2003 and 2008, respectively) are the tool of choice. Enterprises may be surprised to find, though, that clustering alone is not sufficient to meet the needs of enterprise DR when you really look at it. ...

This story was originally published on April 23, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. If you're low on cash it doesn't mean you can't get what you want or need.

One of the things that bothers me about technology companies -- and I could start with Apple and end up with Google -- is that freedom is often part of what we give up when we buy their products. This can range from having to manage too many things, to being locked into a platform, to having no say about how our valuable personal information is used. We live in a world of increasing technology slavery, and since many of us are celebrating a day off to remember the establishment of freedom in the U.S., I thought this topic would be interesting. ...

With the introduction of advanced smartphones, e-readers and tablets, it's hardly surprising that consumption of online content has grown exponentially. This has caused turmoil within the media industry. Traditional advertising revenues are declining as new marketing options are emerging. Print media and newspaper subscriber bases and readership are eroding, while the competition for online viewership is increasing. The need for adoption of social media and delivery to multiple mobile devices is increasingly becoming essential for retaining and attracting new customers...

Google has announced plans to buy ITA Software, a major provider of airline travel software, for US$700 million. ITA is a prominent player in its space -- it counts among its clients virtually all of the major Web travel information and booking providers, including such airlines as American and Continental as well as several aggregators like Hotwi...

Amazon.com has let loose the latest salvo in the rapidly escalating e-book reader war. The online book retailer will ship the latest version of its high-end Kindle, the DX, on July 7. The new units will sport a range of new features and a substantially lowered price: US$379. Amazon already has lowered the price of its more popular, standard version of the Kindle to $189 after competitor Barnes & Noble dropped the price of its Nook reader to $199...