Articles by Jay Lyman

Authorities in Romania are investigating another suspected writer of a Blaster variant, according to Bucharest-based BitDefender, which reported similarities between the 24-year-old suspect and Jeffrey Lee Parson, the Minnesota teenager accused of authoring a different Blaster variant The U.S. arrest and European investigation involve copycat versi...

With nearly 10 million Americans reporting identity theft that cost banks and other businesses nearly US$48 billion last year, the Federal Trade Commission said the problem is worse than previously estimated The latest FTC survey on identity theft, which revealed more than 27 million victims of this crime in the last five years, did not differentia...

Online and on-demand media services in digital form are likely to make CDs and DVDs obsolete as consumers switch to downloads and streaming media to get their music, movies and other entertainment, according to Forrester Research Providing evidence that downloads cost the music industry US$700 million in lost CD sales last year, Forrester said in i...

Using several new technologies and more than 1,000 dual-processor Power Mac G5 computers, Virginia Tech University is building a supercomputer cluster that is likely to rank among the fastest in the world In addition to the G5 machines, the university said it is using a beta version of the latest release of OS X, new networking hardware from Mellan...

In a bizarre twist to the file-sharing fight in which the Recording Industry Association of America is using copyright law to pursue file traders, search engine Google pulled links to sites hawking unofficial Kazaa alternatives after the popular file-swapping service made its own copyright-infringement claims The RIAA has used the Digital Millenniu...

SoBig.F, Blaster, Nachi and MiMail -- the most frequently occurring viruses in August -- helped make last month the worst in the history of computer security, according to antivirus firm Sophos The business-focused antivirus company, in its monthly virus ranking, pegged the newest viruses as the top four, with SoBig garnering a whopping 37.6 percen...

Federal officials reportedly have closed in on an 18-year-old man believed to be the author of a variant of the Blaster worm, which affected nearly half a million computers earlier this month An announcement of the suspect's arrest was expected Friday in Seattle, Washington, near the headquarters of Microsoft, whose Windows operating system was the...

The Recording Industry Association of America has come under legal fire again, this time from a group of Internet broadcasters that claim the industry group broke federal antitrust law and has kept royalty rates high to hinder independent Webcasters Webcaster Alliance, a trade group of approximately 400 members, is seeking a jury trial to rescind l...

Arming its low-end handheld iPaq with a more efficient processor, expansion slot for Web connectivity and lower price point, Hewlett-Packard's update of the PDA reflects an industry-wide trend of adding features to handhelds while dropping prices to compete HP said it will phase out the predecessors of the revamped iPaq h1935, which is now availabl...

As law enforcement officials continue their search for the origin of the SoBig.F computer worm that clogged servers and networks last week, security experts are watching for the next variant and worrying that antivirus defenses might be flawed The FBI, which subpoenaed an Internet service provider in Arizona, is working on leads in the case while s...

A New Zealand man who bore the brunt of the recent backlash against unwanted e-mail -- known as spam -- has said he is leaving the business that fills e-mail boxes with solicitations and suspect messages After an article in a local newspaper identified him as a major spammer, Shane Atkinson said he was inundated with threatening phone calls and had...

Antivirus giant Symantec is touting features like centralized management and wireless Web updates in its new AntiVirus for Handhelds line that will be available in consumer and corporate versions beginning in September Symantec joins other antivirus and security companies, including Network Associates, Trend Micro and Computer Associates, that have...

At the tail end of what could be called this summer's "Worm Week," antivirus and security experts watched carefully as the spreading SoBig.F variant flooded in-boxes around the Internet with millions of virus-laden e-mails Antivirus researchers said the worm, which was set to activate a barrage of e-mail from infected machines Friday, was not espec...

Lawyers representing a California woman who was targeted by a Recording Industry Association of America subpoena have filed a motion in U.S. federal court challenging the subpoena as an unconstitutional invasion of privacy The woman, whose motion was filed under the name Jane Doe, is an Internet subscriber of Verizon, which is one of two major Inte...

The spread of the latest SoBig computer worm variant, called SoBig.F, now is being called the fastest outbreak ever. The worm marks the continuation of a recent onslaught of attacks that included previous worms Nachi and Blaster Security experts said SoBig.F has spread rapidly across North America, Europe and Asia because users were duped by its ab...

Responding to doubts about its claim that its Unix source code was illegally incorporated into Linux by IBM, SCO put some of the actual code in question on display for Unix conference attendees in Las Vegas this week Lines of the code, which SCO displayed during a slide presentation on its suit against IBM, apparently have served both to bolster th...

Calling its new office package an evolution from stand-alone, desktop applications to a more integrated software system, Microsoft has announced that Office 2003 is priced and ready for manufacturers Aiming to up the stakes in the office software market, the Redmond, Washington-based software company called the release the most powerful iteration o...

In responding to concerns voiced by U.S. Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota), the Recording Industry Association of America has detailed its strategy for pursuing and prosecuting "egregious" infringers of copyright law The recording industry group -- which announced in June its plans to seek out and possibly sue individual file traders who use peer-...

Wireless startup Airgo -- a company that consists of some of the wireless industry's most prominent pioneers -- announced it is sampling a new WiFi chipset that promises to double the range and data throughput rates of wireless local area networks (WLANs) Palo Alto, California-based Airgo said its AGN100 WiFi chipset, for use in 802.11 wireless net...

Apple announced Monday it is shipping the first of the highly anticipated G5 processors in two models of the Power Mac desktop computer Billed by the company as the "world's fastest personal computer," the Power Mac G5 takes advantage of 64-bit processing, new cache technology and increased memory support to deliver what industry observers call a l...