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Hiring a professional penetration tester is often a humbling experience. Using a mix of simple social engineering and technology savvy, a professional is often able to expose dangerous security holes in an organization's IT infrastructure with ease. In a few days, a penetration tester can identify security vulnerabilities overlooked by the IT staff. ...

Egged on by the chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, the Federal Trade Commission may be considering an effort to block Google's US$750 million purchase of mobile advertising firm AdMob The FTC is assembling a team of attorneys to handle a possible antitrust action against the acquisition an...

Advocates of free and open source software were on the warpath Wednesday following the eruption of a bitter legal battle between IBM and a tiny French firm IBM has asserted that Hercules -- an open source mainframe emulator from Paris-based TurboHercules -- infringes on numerous IBM patents, and it sent an accusatory letter to the company last mont...

People can easily fold towels, but getting robots to do that has been a real challenge That's because the robot requires a complex combination of artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning in order to make an orderly stack from a jumbled pile of towels, doctoral student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard told TechNewsWorld....

The expected spinoff of subscription music service Rhapsody from parent company RealNetworks has arrived, and it could be a good thing for both parent and child The formal decoupling, announced in February, was completed March 31 but announced in a regulatory filing released on Tuesday....

Companies have often focused on projects that save costs -- both operational and capital -- across a wide range of IT functions. The one area where companies have generally shied away from making any drastic changes has been in the area of data center buildout and operations. This area, in most cases, has been handled in a traditional manner, in that it is generally a sunk cost necessary to keep things running.

There's a huge discussion raging on the Internet started by a provocative question from Bob Thompson: Can you do social CRM without social media/networks? The question came to me via Paul Greenberg's blog, and I find it curious that I am not in agreement with much of the discussion or, more to the point, I might agree with the conclusion but not t...

Text editors are becoming more essential in today's Web-basedcomputing world. Gone are the days when users need hard-copy versionsof their documents. Also gone are the days when documents need to begussied up with fancy fonts and fanciful page formatting Now HTML handles the visual tune ups for online document displaysconverted from text documents....

By now, those who toil in the information security industry must be thinking, "another day in cyberspace, another China-related hacking incident." The latest case, revealed by researchers in the U.S. and Canada, was announced late Monday. Eight months of investigation have dragged a Web spy ring known as "Shadow" into the sunlight, but not before e...

A group of 47 companies and organizations, including Google and AT&p;T, on Monday sent a letter to President Obama urging him to help provide consumers with more information about their energy use "Studies and experience show that when people have access to direct feedback on their electricity use, they can achieve significant savings through si...

Microsoft will hold a press conference on June 12, and expectations are high that it will use the event to launch two smartphones from its secretive "Pink" project Among those working on the Pink project are staff who joined Microsoft when it acquired Danger in 2008. Danger used to make the T-Mobile Sidekick, and the new devices are rumored to look...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has issued a ruling that could spell the end of Net neutrality -- or merely redefine the battle terms a little. It's a matter of perspective The court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission did not tie its assertion of "ancillary" authority to order Comcast to change it network manage...

HP is trying to steal some of the limelight from the iPad Less than 48 hours after customers lined up to get their hands on Apple's newly released tablet computer, HP unveiled a highly produced video of its yet-to-be released Slate tablet....

I haven't even had the chance to lay one finger on an Apple iPad yet, and it's already reached out and touched me -- or rather, touched a new business opportunity Full disclosure: as of last month, I became the host/managing editor for spark360.tv, a Web-based business television program. We produce network news-style stories on small/medium-sizes ...

For many years, a clear line has separated the capabilities of servers based on Intel's x86 microprocessor architecture and "enterprise class" systems leveraging RISC, EPIC and mainframe technologies. People may argue over the length and width of that line, but the traditional reliability, availability and security (RAS) of enterprise systems gave them a clear technological edge.

Part 1 of this series on getting started with CRM addresses factors to consider when deciding whether the time is right to take the plunge.Part 2 offers advice on how to choose the right CRM tool.Part 3 provides some guidance on preparing for contract negotiations.Part 4 tackles the all-important step of embarking on an implementation.Part 5 considers how to rescue a project at risk of failure.Part 6 suggests some effective ways to get your sales staff enthusiastic about CRM.Part 7 explores the pros and cons of entrusting system maintenance to the cloud...

The much-anticipated "Google TV" may be in the works, but a Swedish company has already won the race to the proverbial finish line with the world's first Android-based TV ...

Part 1 of this series discusses the different approaches being taken to design more efficient urban landscapes.Part 2 addresses the need for designers to take moral and ethical issues into account Cities, like other large organizations, will move increasingly toward virtualization and the cloud in order to save money on infrastructure.

In one of its biggest blunders ever, Google whipped up a storm of customer privacy complaints earlier this year when it launched its social networking service, Buzz. After making a series of changes to the profile set-up procedure during ensuing weeks, Google now is asking all of the earliest Buzz users to revisit their settings and confirm them. ...

The Asus U30Jc isn't going to generate long lines at retailers. It won't touch off a best-ever/wouldn't touch it war a la that *other* recently released computing device What the US$899 machine does do, though, it seems to do pretty well, if initial reviews are to be trusted.