Business

Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer is facing extradition to California on charges his company earned millions of dollars by promoting adult and child prostitution through escort advertisements run on the site. Ferrer's arrest took place in Houston upon his return from the Netherlands to the headquarters of hi...

There is a generational shift occurring in the TV industry. Traditional cable TV, which dominated the last several decades, is going away. Companies like Comcast, Charter and Cox are facing something new: new technological innovation and competition. Which companies will survive, and which will not?...

In a bid to help bolster trust in its customer ratings, Amazon on Monday announced that it no longer would allow most incentivized reviews -- that is, reviews written in exchange for receiving products free or at a discount. Such reviews comprise only a small percentage of the tens of millions of re...

Apple last week faced renewed scrutiny for its data-sharing practices, following a report that it retains iMessage metadata and shares it with law enforcement when presented with a court order. The company for months has insisted that it would not share data that would jeopardize the privacy and tr...

McLaren Technology Group, which manufactures Formula One and luxury supercars, last week denied rumors that it was engaging in discussions with Apple regarding a possible purchase or strategic investment. Apple has been pursing a highly secretive project to develop its own venture in the electric an...

Microsoft on Monday announced a series of major enhancements to its enterprise cloud platform, as well as a new strategic partnership with Adobe, advancing its drive to attract new business from core competitors like Salesforce and Amazon. Microsoft has entered a strategic partnership to make Azure ...

Germany's data protection regulator has ordered Facebook to stop collecting and storing data from WhatsApp users in the country. Facebook also must delete any data it already may have harvested from German WhatsApp users, according to Johannes Caspar, Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Fre...

Yahoo on Thursday disclosed that a data breach in late 2014 resulted in the theft of information from at least 500 million customer accounts. Based on a recent investigation, it appears that state-sponsored hackers carried out the attack, the company said. Account information compromised includes na...

CEO Brian Roberts on Tuesday announced that Comcast will enter the wireless phone market by mid-2017 as a mobile virtual network operator. A 150-strong Comcast Wireless team, headed by Greg Butz, is "getting ready next year ... to launch a WiFi and MVNO-integrated product," Roberts said at the Goldm...

Oracle has agreed to acquire cloud access security broker Palerra, whose LORIC software manages security and compliance for applications, workloads, and sensitive data stored across cloud services, the companies announced Sunday. Palerra "offers a unique combination of visibility into cloud usage, d...

The Consumer Product Safety Commission and Samsung last week announced a formal voluntary recall of about 1 million Galaxy Note7 smartphones, after the high-end flagship device was found to have overheated or caught fire in at least 92 incidents. Samsung was notified of 26 cases of people being burn...

Google Fiber this week began reaching its tentacles into North Carolina's Research Triangle, a move that seems to contradict the gloom-and-doom rumors of layoffs and low consumer interest. The Triangle is Google Fiber's eighth incursion. It's already available in Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Charlotte, N...

The disruption of the IT and software industry by the rapid rise of cloud and SaaS continues to take a toll on the biggest players in the business. In their latest round of desperate moves to reposition themselves in the radically changing marketplace, the major companies of the past have been willi...

Comcast tried to give wireless a go several years ago. It failed. It pulled out of wireless, sold its spectrum and was done. Now, wireless has expanded and changed, and competitors like AT&T's U-verse and DirecTV are using wireless to deliver television programming. I'll bet Comcast now wishes i...