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Call it proof that no one's above the common malware attack: NASA's own International Space Station laptops fell victim to an infection attempt, the space agency has revealed. The bug was caught and stopped before any damage was done, but the incident is raising awareness of just how easily harmful code can reach any computer -- and how important is really is to take preventative precautions before your own system is hit...

The moment may have passed way under your media radar, seeing as how it happened on a Sunday night in late August, when TV viewers were just coming down from a Beijing Olympics high. On CNN, anchor Rick Sanchez was previewing the Democratic National Convention about to get under way in Denver, grilling senior political analyst Bill Schneider about the latest poll numbers showing John McCain and Barack Obama in a tight race, when Sanchez turned to his audience for a question...

Why sell somebody else's product line when you can do a better job offering your own? That was the question that ultimately pushed Jan Hichert, CEO of Astaro, and two other cofounders to develop their own Internet security solutions for a market they viewed as needy of attention -- the small- to medium-sized business (SMB) segment Prior to deciding...

Two-year-old Demandbase has planted its own stake in the rapidly emerging next-gen lead generation and lead conversion space with the introduction this week of Demandbase Central. A Software as a Service platform, Demandbase Central consists of sales and marketing applications, as well as a search, scoring and transaction engine that identifies qu...

Part 1 of this two-part feature discusses the oftentimes confusing legal landscape of the Web's intersection with copyright laws. Part 2 looks at who polices the Web to spot and stop incidents of intellectual property abuse The Internet has made it much simpler for companies to reach potential customers. However, this wide open channel has come at ...

Xen.org, the developer of the open source Xen project, on Wednesday announced the release of the Xen 3.3 hypervisor engine. The product is the result of a distributed development effort by senior engineers from more than 50 leading hardware, software and security vendors Xen 3.3 includes enhancements that further advance its position as a fast, sca...

Mozilla Labs launched a new prototype Tuesday aimed at giving Internet users new ways to create mashups of online content. Dubbed "Ubiquity," the technology is Mozilla's solution what it sees as a common and time-consuming problem Web surfers face when they try to compile information from the Web "Most people do not have an easy way to manage the v...

Qik, a company that has developed live video streaming services for certain smartphones, has received a boost in its financial backing from Netscape veterans Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The duo, which have made a "significant investment" in the company, are also joining Qik's board of advisors Bhaskar Roy, cofounder of Qik, declined to tell t...

Microsoft will receive nearly US$21 million from Immersion, a company that develops "tactile-feedback" technology, after the two companies agreed to settle a lawsuit San Jose, Calif.-based Immersion has developed tactile feedback technology, which makes video game controllers vibrate when there is an explosion or some other game action event on scr...

Dell is going after emerging markets with a new line of low-cost computers. The Vostro notebooks and desktops are the company's first models targeted specifically at China, India and a handful of other Asian, African and Latin American nations. The systems will sell for about the equivalent of US$440 to $475 The move marks a distinct shift in strat...

Who would like to bid the highest amount for the exclusive global rights to the new domain suffix, .dubai, under ICANN's latest policy? Such a suffix will create a powerful domain root that will corner some 180 services underneath it, like go.dubai, hotel.dubai, job.dubai, cars.dubai or fly.dubai Who would be the next global cyber-branding leader o...

Congress has become increasingly interested in the privacy implications of behavioral marketing. This summer, the Senate has held hearings, and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has followed the charge by seeking more information from Internet service providers (ISPs) and technology companies regarding their privacy policies and targeted advertising. These developments have led commentators to anticipate omnibus privacy legislation from Congress related to behavioral advertising in the short term.

In a slow news week, Salesforce.com had no trouble attracting our attention with a US$31.5 million acquisition of InStranet. The skinny on this company is that InStranet enables customers to build knowledge bases for service and support applications. It was an area where Salesforce was relatively light, and the addition will strengthen the overa...

As editor for LinuxInsider for more than a year now, I figured the time was right to start walking the walk with my personal machine So I took my Dell Inspiron 1150 to this year's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo with the intention of switching my operating system to one of the many Linux distros....

Over the last decade, mainstream automakers with the right foresight have put their money on technologies like gasoline-electric hybrids in order to offer consumers what they desire more and more with each visit to the gas pump: a more efficient personal vehicle. A little further out, plug-in hybrids that need even less gasoline will perhaps become a more common sight on the road, further reducing users' dependency on fossil fuels...

Mozilla has announced the launch of a new feature for its Firefox Web browser designed to make it perform faster. Called "TraceMonkey," the feature is an evolution of Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine and will be built into Firefox 3.1, according to the company To increase JavaScript speeds by an order of magnitude or more, Mozilla designed ...

Citrix has announced the upcoming availability of XenApp 5, the latest version of its application virtualization software. The new release, formerly dubbed "Presentation Server," is part of the software maker's effort to consolidate its product line around XenServer, which it acquired with the purchase of XenSource in 2007 The software boasts impro...

What should photo imaging software giant Adobe be focusing on in a Web 2.0 world? Judging from some new products, it's not just taking on the likes of Apple's iPhoto and Aperture; it's learning to work and play well with social networks like Facebook and digital media storage Web sites such as Flickr Those could be the chief takeaways from Adobe's ...

Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 8 will offer a new set of privacy features designed to give users more control over personal information, the company has revealed. The "InPrivate" feature will build in options for turning off history and cookie collection and will also allow users to see what external sites could access that data -- and then disable them from doing so...

With the release of its August '08 version, RightNow Technologies continues to shift both its platform and its lineup of products and features to Web 2.0 This latest upgrade includes a customer portal that offers widgets, video, forums and blogs. Its studio development environment now allows users to integrate the application with Adobe Dreamweaver...