Articles by Keith Regan

Just two days after President Bush signed national antispam legislation, Microsoft has announced that a six-month investigation it conducted with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer led to a slew of lawsuits against an e-mail marketing ring believed to be responsible for sending billions of spam messages. Microsoft and Spitzer said their legal...

Continuing its transformation into a network security and services provider, VeriSign agreed Tuesday to buy privately held network security firm Guardent in a deal valued at US$140 million. The stock-and-cash agreement calls for VeriSign to take over all 150 of Guardent's full-time employees and to maintain Guardent's Security Operations Center in...

Check Point Software Technologies has announced it will bolster its security product portfolio by buying privately held Zone Labs, the market leader in personal firewalls, in a deal worth about US$205 million in stock and cash Zone Labs specializes in so-called endpoint security, with a focus on desktop firewalls for home and business users. The co...

In a move designed to prevent its ever-growing range of products from drawing attention away from its core operating system, Microsoft has announced it will form a division solely focused on improving the Windows OS software. In a widely circulated memo to employees, Microsoft said the division will become "a center of gravity for advancing engine...

In a bid to break into the market for alternative online payments, in which several companies already have failed, Yahoo said it will launch an international version of its PayDirect service, using disposable ATM cards as the method of transferring payments Billed as a lower-cost alternative to money transfers, especially for international transact...

Seeking to retain its edge in the fiercely competitive search engine world by expanding its pool of engineering talent, Google has said it plans to open a research and development facility in India next year. The company has settled on Bangalore, a city often referred to as India's Silicon Valley, as the location for its first non-sales office out...

Seeking to retain its edge in the fiercely competitive search engine world by expanding its pool of engineering talent, Google has said it plans to open a research and development facility in India next year. The company has settled on Bangalore, a city often referred to as India's Silicon Valley, as the location for its first non-sales office out...

Seeking to retain its edge in the fiercely competitive search engine world by expanding its pool of engineering talent, Google has said it plans to open a research and development facility in India next year. The company has settled on Bangalore, a city often referred to as India's Silicon Valley, as the location for its first non-sales office out...

The National Football League and e-commerce have a lot in common. Sure, one has a lot more 300-pound linemen and guys who can run 40 yards in less than five seconds, but in both cases, it almost always comes down to the last five weeks of the year Sure, each NFL team plays 16 games, and e-commerce stores are open for business 24/7/365. But, in foot...

Intel has said it will combine two unprofitable business groups in its communications industry segment in a bid to repair one of the few glaring flaws in the company's performance in recent quarters. Specifically, the chipmaker plans to meld its wireless communications business with the Intel Communications Group. The move is intended to help Inte...

As part of an ongoing effort to trim costs, America Online has laid off 350 workers in its California offices and has offered another 100 the choice to relocate to the East Coast or be fired. AOL said most of the affected employees work in software creation for the core online service product in shops in San Diego, San Francisco and Mountain View,...

The U.S. Congress has passed the most sweeping anti-spam legislation to date, authorizing creation of a do-not-e-mail list that allows consumers to opt out of all unwanted messages. President Bush has indicated he would sign the so-called CAN SPAM legislation, which could become law as soon as next week. The bill authorizes the Federal Trade Commi...

A federal judge in Utah has given The SCO Group 30 days to respond to demands that it reveal more information about the proprietary Unix source code it claims IBM infringed when Big Blue contributed Unix code to the Linux platform The judge ruled in favor of motions filed by IBM, which is seeking to force SCO to offer additional information about h...

In a legal move that ultimately could affect the size of search engines' revenue stream, Google has asked a court to clarify whether or not its keyword-based advertising program is infringing on company trademarks. Google filed the request to be heard in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, following complaints from American Blind & Wallpa...

In its latest attempt to stem the flood of membership losses that has besieged it for more than a year, giant Internet service provider America Online has partnered with Systemax, which markets PC systems from various hardware makers, to offer a complete personal computer for just US$299. The PC package, billed as the AOL Optimized PC, comes compl...

Some of the biggest retailers' Web sites reacted sluggishly during the post-Thanksgiving e-tail rush, with as many as one in five potential transactions failing at peak times, but overall the e-commerce sector held up under intense shopping activity, according to tracking data from two firms. Keynote Systems said poor performance by a small number...

A couple of weeks ago, my neighbor had a yard sale. Like others in the same position, she was glad to take any offer for no-longer-wanted stuff. So what if she paid $100 for that lamp a few years ago? She now considered it junk, and $5 was better than the nothing she would get if the trash collector took it away. In fact, the 5 percent recovery sh...

Hewlett-Packard plans to launch a music download service and to attack the consumer electronics market with its own music player and a line of high-end flat-panel televisions HP executives indicated the company plans to use the January Consumer Electronics trade show in Las Vegas as a venue for launching the new initiatives, though they said that t...

In a move designed to enable the company to better serve emerging markets and changing industries, IBM said it will reorganize its software business to enable it to target vertical industry segments more effectively Big Blue plans to retain around half of its 13,000 sales employees around the world in industry-specific products and configurations a...

Online shoppers joined their real-world counterparts in roaring out of the gate as the official holiday shopping season began in the days after Thanksgiving, setting up e-commerce to exceed already lofty estimates for growth, according to reports. Nielsen//NetRatings reported that online retail sites saw traffic jump 28 percent on Friday compared ...