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Some five months after Facebook began testing a series of changes to its privacy controls, CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced that the popular social network has now decided to make them official for its 350 million users worldwide The company will soon eliminate regional networks as a way of connecting users, and it will also add settings th...

Did someone just blink in the great Google vs. News Corp. paid content smackdown? The latest round of digital brinksmanship involving how the search giant aggregates news stories behind paywalls got more interesting Tuesday when Google announced a couple of measures to placate publishers, including a new five-pages-free addition to its First Click Free indexing feature...

In the 1956 Oscar-winning short film "The Red Balloon," it was the balloon that did all the chasing of a little French boy. This weekend, you can turn the tables on the helium-filled children's playthings as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and its Network Challenge -- a race to be the first to find the locations of 10 red balloons somewhere in the continental U.S

As we approach the end of 2009, the hands-down winner of the hot IT trends award continues to be cloud computing. Yet the reality is that for many, cloud deployment strategies remain somewhat ethereal -- part theoretical, part vendor/marketing hype, and part vaguely defined future model. At the same time, the intensity of interest in the cloud a...

This just in: Females outnumber males on social networking sites. The site Pingdom did a survey and concluded that 16 out of 19 (84 percent) of the most popular social sites have more women populating them than men. The super geek sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have more men on them, but the more popular sites including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, all have more women visiting them. ...

Sun Microsystems this week released VirtualBox 3.1, including several key enterprise features aimed at maintaining minimal downtime on virtualservers ...

In wanting to give peace a chance, the Dalai Lama and John Lennon don't have much company; fighting and causing trouble seem to be the preference of most of the world The conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan, to name the most prominent, are taking their toll on human life and limb. However, the escalatingcyberconflict among nations is far m...

What do Michael Jackson, Twitter and Swine Flu have in common? Answer: They were all among the most common search terms this year, according to reports released by the big search engines Google, for example, published its year-end Zeitgeist report on Tuesday, including a list of the fastest-rising Google searches, or those that reflected the greate...

Online sales were up almost 14 percent year over year for 2009's Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving and traditionally a big selling day for online retailers. Shoppers spent over 38 percent more per order compared to 2008's figures, and they bought nearly 10 percent more items per order, according to market research firm Coremetrics.

Millions of Windows users could potentially be affected by a computer glitch that results in a "black screen of death" after a security update is made, UK security firm Prevx reported in a blog post Users that are affected log on to find there is no desktop, task bar, system tray or side bar. "Instead you are left with a totally black screen and a ...

IBM's recent Connect 2009 analyst conference provided fascinating insights into one of the company's most valuable assets -- its software group (SWG) organization. IBM has long been recognized as a purveyor of enterprise-class computing systems, but during the past decade, the company's global services organization (IGS) has become its prime driver of revenue and profit.

Earlier in my career, I covered the telecommunications industry. Nothing better prepared me for a career examining CRM than the sight of enormous corporations with immense customer bases failing to build any kind of relationship with their users and instead resorting to price as their major differentiator. Worse yet was the service aspect of these...

Less than a week after Google released the code for its Chrome OS, Dell announced that it has succeeded in getting the operating system up and running on its Mini 10v netbook "Without a network connection, ChromiumOS is not very interesting," company blogger and technology strategist Doug Anson wrote on the Direct2Dell blog last week. "With a netwo...

As the decades-old "sustainability" movement goes mainstream, many businesses are looking to software to make the eco-cause concept functional -- and profitable -- for them. Companies are facing accountability and responsibility demands regarding their roles in rescuing humanity and saving planet Earth from global warming, climate change, environ...

Online shoppers took to their computers in droves on Black Friday, spending 11 percent more than they did a year ago and buoying e-tailers' hopes for a bountiful holiday season That's according to a report released Sunday by market research firm comScore, which counted US$595 million in online sales on Friday, making it the second-heaviest e-commer...

Looking to turn your Android smartphone into a (truly) handy stimulation device? There's an app for that, thanks to a Seattle-based startup that's offering developers and consumers an X-rated version of a smartphone app store MiKandi launched a developer's portal last week with the express purpose of using the Open Handset Alliance to crack open th...

The Large Hadron Collider created by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, officially became the world's highest-energy particle accelerator on Monday The enormous facility has sent two beams of protons shooting through its ring at 1.18 teraelectronvolts (TeV). It happened 10 days after scientists started up the collider again follo...

Amazon's e-reader device, the Kindle, experienced its best sales month ever in November, according to the company, which made the announcement even before Cyber Monday purchases were tallied. Amazon did not release any actual numbers to back up its claim, however, and it did not return a call from the E-Commerce Times by press time.

Ask any IT organization to identify the No. 1 cause of network performance problems, and they'll probably point to high-profile events: denial-of-service attacks, computer viruses, fiber cuts, power outages or hardware failures. However, studies show that more than two-thirds of network issues are actually tied to a simple everyday activity: The ungoverned process of IT staff making network configuration changes.

It's clear the way we work is rapidly changing. Organizations and teams are becoming more geographically dispersed with the increased globalization of business. Networks of employees, partners, and customers are spanning the globe as industry becomes more interdependent This means information exchange must keep pace as organizations facilitate sear...