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Consumer electronics retailing giant Best Buy is coming to an airport near you With 965 stores in the U.S. alone, Best Buy is already one of the most ubiquitous retail chains in America....

An attempt to stop a group of MIT computer engineers from exposing a security flaw in Boston's transportation system may be backfiring. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority filed a suit to prevent the students from discussing their findings at Defcon 16, an annual hackers' conference taking place in Las Vegas over the weekend. A judge ended up issuing a temporary restraining order that forced the students to cancel their presentation...

The leading edge of online corporate outreach once was the executive blog. Carefully crafted messages on a range of topics, closely vetted by PR firms, were posted every few weeks, calculated to appear spontaneous and thoughtful. Not surprisingly, many companies learned that customers didn't find those missives authentic, and they moved toward more dialogue-based tools...

Does your business bear legal responsibility to police the infringement of one of your organization's most valuable assets, the company brand, on widely used Internet auction sites like eBay? That all depends on where the electronic commerce is being conducted, based on recently issued, conflicting court opinions from the United States and France.

Every interaction an enterprise has with customers, partners or suppliers instigates a new trail of data which over a short period of time can create a deluge effect. Experts predict that within a few years it won't be uncommon to see enterprises with networks and databases storing over 100 TB (terabytes) of information One key area that has contri...

Last week I thought it would be interesting -- given that both the Wall Street Journal and TechNewsWorld had covered my professional relationship with Dell regarding its new MP3 service -- to chat about what it would take to beat Apple. But in my analysis I left out one important thing: Apple is tricky. Already there are rumors of a redesigned iPod nano that would position well against this new Dell offering, and the Apple-funded sites seem to be aggressively trying to disparage this as-yet unborn product. Someone seems scared to death of this as-yet unborn product. (Note: I have not used the words "iPod Killer" myself, but Apple folks tend to be a little paranoid)...

IBM has rolled out a mobile software and service offering that builds upon several announcements it made earlier this year at the annual RIM Wireless Enterprise Conference The offering, called "Mobility@Work," is a package of new software tools that allow developers to run existing desktop applications on a mobile device, together with new mobile c...

The 2008 Summer Olympics kicked off in Beijing Friday, and this year's Summer Games will serve up highlights outside of athletic prowess and national pride. China's hosting of this year's Games has made them a flash point for a wide range of issues having to do with China and international relations, from freedom of the press, human rights, Tibet and terrorism to pollution and climate change.

New technologies in Verizon's future and its contentious past with telecommunications unions are set to collide this weekend as the company faces a new deadline for talks regarding compensation issues for some 65,000 of its workers The Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) on Friday i...

Rackspace Hosting, a provider of enterprise-level managed hosting services, went to market with the tech industry's first initial public offering in six months, winning, at the very least, karmic points for its bravery in forging into a dismal equity environment. The company, which began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "RAX...

A trio of French journalists from Global Security Magazine were reportedly kicked out of the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas for targeting fellow reporters in the press room with a WiFi hack The offending journalists/hackers may have used a network-sniffing tool called "Cain" to capture username and password information sent out in the c...

Search engine giant Google could see a significant write-down in its US$1 billion investment in AOL, the company revealed in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Jon Murchison, a Google spokesperson, declined to comment on how much Google's investment in AOL is now worth....

Researchers have announced a technological development they say will improve the functionality of digital cameras and other imaging products. Yonggang Huang, a professor at Northwestern University, and John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created a lens they said was inspired by the human eye In addition to enhancing d...

A machine poised to make science history is now ready to launch. The Large Hadron Collider -- a giant machine built 330 feet below the France-Switzerland border -- is scheduled to fire up for the first time next month, on Sept. 10 The LHC, as its name suggests, works by smashing tiny particles called "hadrons" together at extremely high energies --...

Part 1 of this two-part series explores how industries employ supercomputers and the cost of using these extremely powerful systems. Part 2 examines alternatives for companies that can't afford custom-designed supercomputers Despite the declining cost of supercomputing, the technology still remains out of reach for many businesses and universities,...

In a recent article for the E-Commerce Times entitled "Getting Serious About Energy Independence," I outlined what I thought was the general direction the country should take in order to conserve energy and ultimately become energy independent. I was pleasantly surprised to receive an e-mail from the President of National Energy Services Company John Grillo offering still more suggestions on how we as a nation can become energy independent. (National Energy provides specialized equipment and gate-keeping services to a variety of industries, assisting them in reducing their energy costs.)

The U.S. economy is in a funk, but that doesn't mean opportunities for venture investors have dried up. E-commerce is one sector that will see continued growth opportunities even in an economic downturn In fact, industry observers say growth and revenue opportunities for e-commerce ventures -- such as alternative payment options, next-generation ad...

When Jeffrey Spencer prepared for his college exams, he would tape his notes to the handlebars of his bike and ride to school, studying all the while To him, it made perfect sense. "I am a kinetic learner, which means I learn and mentally perform best when I am moving," he told LinuxInsider....

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) came under fire for making a ruling that many consider outside its authority. Without levying a fine, it charged that Comcast violated federal policy when it interfered with a file-sharing application used by consumers. This new plot twist in the Net neutrality story should remind everyone that when it comes to new technologies, government failure is a bigger menace than market failure...

Following a nearly six-month delay from its original target release date, Microsoft announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of its SQL Server 2008 Wednesday. The software maker had initially planned to launch the database application in February, but in January said it would have to move the date back to the third quarter With the software's c...