Articles by Keith Regan

The showdown between Google and the Department of Justice (DoJ) over the search engine's refusal to turn over search records heads to court on Tuesday, with Google planning to argue that the right to privacy outweighs the government's need for the information The two sides were scheduled to make arguments before a U.S. District Court judge in San J...

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has agreed to a US$1.1 million settlement from an interactive marketing firm that he said reused e-mail addresses and other consumer information without authorization Spitzer described the case involving Datran Media as being possibly "the largest breach of privacy in Internet history" with e-mail addresses a...

Japan's Livedoor, the company that took the country's Internet sector by storm only to have its business practices called into question, finds itself facing new threats to the survival of its business this week The Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) said Monday it would delist the stocks of both Livedoor and its subsidiary Livedoor Marketing from its Mothe...

Nortel Networks, which had appeared to be on a strong turnaround course after purging its executive ranks, settling lawsuits and restating past earnings, said it will delay filing its annual report and again restate results after discovering more accounting irregularities Nortel was quick to make a distinction between the planned restatement, which...

Potentially reopening a chapter from the earlier days of the wireless telecommunications boom, the U.S. Justice Department said it intends to pursue a civil fraud case against Wall Street money manager Mario Gabelli The DoJ is seeking permission to directly sue Gabelli, who runs Gamco Investors, claiming he was at the center of a complex scheme to ...

Google is moving to settle a class action lawsuit alleging widespread click fraud on its paid search network, setting aside US$90 million to repay advertisers who can prove they fell victim to the practice during a four-year period starting in 2002 The payouts would take the form of account credits which could be used to purchase advertising space ...

For the second time in as many weeks, Google caused its own stock to fall, with shares sent lower this time by the search company's admission that it inadvertently posted financial projections on the Web before pulling them back Google shares were down as much as US$10 or about 3 percent to $353.56 in morning trading Wednesday, a day after the comp...

Search engine Blinkx unveiled a new search tool Tuesday that it said will deliver search results to users automatically, eliminating the need to stop another activity to begin a query The search, known as Pico, is also being billed as the smallest search program available, taking up just 1MB of space. Blinkx said the tool would bring results to use...

Microsoft said it has been granted its 5,000th U.S. patent, securing protection for a technology that enables multi-player and spectator online gaming and achieving a milestone that underscores a significant shift in strategy for the software giant Microsoft said the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had awarded it patent no. 6,999,083 for technolog...

The telecommunications industry has taken another giant leap toward consolidation, with the new AT&T -- created through a blockbuster merger completed just months ago -- poised to buy regional provider BellSouth in a deal worth US$67 billion in stock The deal would create the largest single telecom company in the United States, one with 317,000 emp...

The telecommunications industry has taken another giant leap toward consolidation, with the new AT&T -- created through a blockbuster merger completed just months ago -- poised to buy regional provider BellSouth in a deal worth US$67 billion in stock The deal would create the largest single telecom company in the United States, one with 317,000 emp...

The telecommunications industry has taken another giant leap toward consolidation, with the new AT&T -- created through a blockbuster merger completed just months ago -- poised to buy regional provider BellSouth in a deal worth US$67 billion in stock The deal would create the largest single telecom company in the United States, one with 317,000 emp...

Research In Motion begins the week with one of the biggest hurdles the company has faced behind it, thanks to a US$612.5 million settlement with patent holder NTP, a deal that averted a possible shutdown of the BlackBerry e-mail service in the U.S With more than nearly six years of legal turmoil put to rest, RIM can now focus on the challenge of de...

A judge has cleared the way for Toys 'R' Us to terminate its e-commerce partnership with Amazon.com, a 10-year dot-com era partnership the toy seller has been seeking to terminate for nearly two years Toys 'R' Us sued Amazon in May of 2004, seeking to terminate an agreement struck in 2000 under which Amazon handled online sales for the retailer. Th...

Intel, the leading chipmaker and one of the most closely watched technology sector bellwethers, cut its revenue forecast for the current quarter Thursday, citing market share erosion and weaker demand Sales will be between US$8.7 billion and $9.1 billion, the company said, substantially below the $9.1 billion to $9.7 billion range it projected in J...

The Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has given its final approval to a settlement that ends legal disputes with VeriSign and anoints that company as the operator of the lucrative dot-com registry through 2012 The deal is now being sent to the U.S. Commerce Department for its OK, which would likel...

A day after Google shares plummeted for the third time in about a month, wiping out around US$13 billion in market value in the process, investors and analysts turned their attention to evaluating the future of the search industry as a whole Google shares lost some 7 percent on Tuesday after Chief Financial Officer George Reyes told an investor con...

The recent US$15 million settlement betweenChoicePoint and theFederal Trade Commission (FTC) signals regulators have cranked up the heat on companies that allow personal customer data in their possession fall victim to breach or exposure ChoicePoint, a broker of consumer data, acknowledged that information on 163,000 consumers was exposed when itsd...

Continuing an aggressive building program aimed at helping it meet increased demand for a variety of its processors, Intel said it would spend US$300 million to build the first semiconductor testing and assembly facility in Vietnam The chip market leader said the Vietnam plant, to be located in Ho Chi Minh City, would employ about 1,200 and be part...

Auction giant eBay is hitting back at a British magazine's assertion that the site has become a hotbed for various types of fraud Computing Which? magazine published a story calling on eBay to do more to protect users of the site from fraud, saying that by its count some 130 eBay-related fraud reports are filed with police in London each month....