Articles by Keith Regan

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched its most comprehensive attack to date on software, music and movie piracy, conducting more than 100 raids in 10 countries and seizing scores of computers Operation Fastlink, as the push is known, involved 120 searches in 27 states as well as nine other countries, ranging from Northern Ireland and Germany ...

Underscoring the long-term potential it sees in applying technology advances to home entertainment, Intel has said it will dip into its US$200 million home-technology fund to back several startups in the space. The company's announcement came at its annual developers forum in Barcelona, Spain Specifically, the chipmaker said its Digital Home Fund h...

Halting in mid-trial the only state-level antitrust case to make it to court, Microsoft and consumers in the state of Minnesota have reached a tentative agreement to settle all claims against the computer software giant. Terms of the settlement will not be announced until details are finalized and approved by the judge in the case, the two sides s...

Saying it wants to help advance the "digital revolution" in the entertainment industry, Hewlett-Packard has announced alliances with DreamWorks and Warner Brothers The deals call for HP to help the studios create and distribute digital content. The company made the announcements at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas....

Dell expanded its market share and grabbed back the title of worldwide sales leader from rival Hewlett-Packard as revived business buying helped boost computer sales in the first quarter, according to two reports Both Gartner and IDC put Dell at the top of the PC heap during the first quarter of 2004, followed by HP, which held the top spot during ...

Just six months after establishing a Silicon Valley spinoff to develop asearch product, Amazon.com has launched A9.com, a tool that allows users to scour both the Amazon store and the Web for products and information. Eventually, it will let users search other merchants' sites as well, according to the company The A9 site, with a stripped-down home...

Intel said its first-quarter revenue hit a record of US$8.1 billion and profit nearly doubled as faster sales of high-end servers augmented its booming mobile-chip business. Even so, the bellwether technology company, whose earnings are scrutinized for hints of how the overall tech sector is faring, failed to provide economy-watchers and investors...

Continuing to refine its business in a changing marketplace, IBM has announced it will sell rights to its PowerPC microprocessors to San Diego, California-based Applied Micro Circuits for US$227 million. The all-cash deal includes intellectual-property licenses as well as the rights to the IBM PowerPC 400 product line. Separately, the company announced an acquisition in the services sector.

Microsoft has settled a long-simmering patent-infringement complaint with InterTrust Technology, agreeing to pay US$440 million to license all of the firm's digital rights management (DRM) technology. Settlement of the patent claims, which were first filed in 2001, is just the latest move by Microsoft to eliminate the phalanx of lawsuits pending a...

In a bid to lure IBM mainframe customers, Microsoft said it would work with Micro Focus International to promote the migration of applications from mainframes to Windows servers The two companies said many organizations recognize the value of legacy applications running on mainframes but also want the added flexibility of using Web services. The co...

Several peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, including Kazaa and eDonkey, are bracing for an anticipated attack by the latest variant of the Netsky-Q worm, the latest example of virus writers taking direct aim at specific companies and Web sites. As of Thursday morning, both networks were still operating, although eDonkey had established a mirror site to ...

Taking another step into the outsourcing fray, IBM has agreed to purchase an India-based business processing company that handles back-office support and call centers for several U.S. firms, including Amazon.com IBM said the 6,000 employees of Daksh eServices will become part of its business-consulting unit. The move greatly expands Big Blue's Indi...

Adding another chapter to the epic debate over the relative value of the open-source Linux operating system, the Yankee Group has released a report stating that switching from Windows to Linux can be up to four times as costly and take three times as long as upgrading from one version of Windows to another. Reductions in total cost of ownership ap...

Aiming to avoid a possible showdown with law-enforcement officials, Yahoo and Google, the two largest search engines -- and online-advertising generators -- have said they will stop taking advertisements in the United States from gambling casinos and related companies. Both search providers reached their decisions independently. The moves could su...

Gateway has said it will close all of its remaining retail stores, putting some 2,500 people out of work and driving the final nail into the coffin of an ambitious but failed approach to selling computers The additional layoffs -- which amount to nearly 40 percent of Gateway's remaining workforce -- are expected to come quickly, with all stores shu...

Greg Stanger knows how difficult it can be to take a company public, even in the best of times. A former Microsoft employee, Stanger became CFO of Expedia when the travel site was spun off and taken public in 1999 Stanger also knows that even with the recent run-up in technology stocks and the prospect of at least one blockbuster IPO in the near fu...

The pesky Netsky worm dogged Web computers during the month of March, accounting for 60 percent of all malicious e-mail tracked by antivirus firm Sophos Five of the top 10 viruses tracked during the month, including all of the top three, were variants of Netsky. Some 15 versions of the worm were active during the period. All told, some 18 variants ...

Google has confirmed to the E-Commerce Times that its newly announced Web mail service is not an April Fool's hoax, despite Thursday morning speculation "It's for real," Google spokesperson David Krane told the E-Commerce Times.

In what may -- or may not -- be its most ambitious foray beyond its core search business to date, Google has announced it will launch a free e-mail service called Gmail. The tone and timing of the press release, dated April 1st, led some to speculate that it could be an elaborate April Fool's Day hoax. But the release pointed to an extensive FAQ (...

The state of Ohio is suing software maker PeopleSoft, seeking up to US$510 million in damages and costs because of what it calls a faulty installation of the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications at Cleveland State University The lawsuit charges PeopleSoft with breach of contract and negligent misrepresentation, among other coun...