Articles by Staff Writer

Over the last several months the U.S. economy has shown signs of improvement. John Challenger, CEO of outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told the E-Commerce Times that there has been a 50 percent drop in high tech job cuts from last year However, the IT job terrain has changed irreversibly from its high point of a few years ...

Considering that e-business as a concept was not part of most people's vocabularies before the 1990s, the number of technologies and processes that have been developed since then is staggering. Some, such as Amazon.com's "1-Click" checkout procedure, have revolutionized the way people buy products, while others, such as smart cards, have changed both enterprise and e-commerce transactions...

Now that Apple's iTunes Music Store (iTMS) does Windows and Napster has been rehabilitated, more people are starting to change their music-buying focus, moving from old-school CDs to new-generation digital formats like AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) and WMA (Windows Media Audio) However, the onset of legal music download services has brought a new iss...

Just in time for Halloween, a new spam relay worm has begun to circulate via e-mail attachments, aiming to turn PCs into e-mail-spewing zombies The worm, dubbed "Mimail.C," is yet another iteration of the hearty W32 malware strain. It affects PCs running Windows 95 through Windows XP and was first discovered spreading through Europe and the United ...

Perhaps the most significant event at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, which ran from Sunday through Thursday in Los Angeles, was the company's release of a developers version of its upcoming Windows OS, also known as Longhorn In his keynote address Monday, Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates introduced Longhorn, which is slate...

On Friday evening, Apple will launch the latest versions of both its desktop and server operating systems, version 10.3, nicknamed Panther. The desktop version will retail for US$129, while Panther Server, which can run on any Apple G4, including the Xserve, as well as the new Power Mac G5 towers, will cost $499 for 10 users or $999 for an unlimited number of seats...

Now that Bill Gates and company have vacated Manhattan's Millennium Hotel after their much-publicized launch of Office 2003, many people are asking whether Microsoft's venerable productivity suite is indeed the Office of the new millennium -- or whether they will stick with their present version of the software (or a competing product) until Microsoft's Windows overhaul, nicknamed "Longhorn," is released in late 2005 or early 2006...

Following a spate of civil suits filed against music consumers in September, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has launched the next phase of its war on digital piracy. The organization has sent a total of 204 letters to individuals, each of whom, it claims, has made at least 1,000 songs available for upload on peer-to-peer file-trading services such as Kazaa...

VeriSign has announced it plans to sell its Network Solutions business unit to Pivotal Private Equity, a Phoenix, Arizona-based firm known for acquiring underperforming companies, for approximately US$100 million According to VeriSign, $60 million of the deal will be in cash, with the remaining $40 million in a senior subordinated note. VeriSign, w...

To say the SCO Group has been making headlines frequently is an understatement. Since March, when the company filed suit against IBM for allegedly using SCO-owned Unix code in its Linux systems, SCO has gotten an unheard-of amount of press for a company that, according to its third-quarter results, posted only US$20.1 million in revenue In the last...

Napster, the onetime file-swapping nexus that sparked fear in the hearts -- and bottom lines -- of record labels, has officially been tamed and will relaunch as a legitimate online music service, parent company Roxio announced Thursday Napster 2.0 will be available to U.S. residents on October 29th. Users who register for the service before the lau...

Last month at the International Business Law Services (IBLS) Strategic Global Summit for E-Commerce, Pauline Reich, an associate professor at Waseda University School of Law in Tokyo, Japan, gave a speech entitled "Legal Issues: Internet and E-mail in the Workplace." Reich is also a well-known expert in the areas of cyberlaw and Internet-based legal, business and government research...

Cisco Systems has been synonymous with routers for nearly 20 years. With more than 90 percent of the enterprise market, according to Yankee Group vice president Zeus Kerravala, the company is the incumbent vendor -- and a smart one as well "The only way for [another vendor] to overtake them is for them to falter, and I just don't see them making th...

In conjunction with WebEx, Yahoo is now taking orders for its Business Messenger service. The company will host a demonstration of the service during the Instant Messaging Planet Conference October 15th and 16th at the San Jose Convention Center Yahoo also announced that two clients already have started using the service, which combines Yahoo's ins...

In mid-September, International Business Law Services (IBLS), a privately held company that provides global Internet legal services and acts as a clearinghouse for e-commerce-related legal information and resources, held its Strategic Global Summit for E-Commerce. The two-day conference featured legal experts from the United States, Japan, Latin A...

In Part 1 of this story, "Apple's New Bid for Insane Greatness," we looked at the iTunes Music Store's (iTMS) potential in the digital music marketplace. The Mac Observer publisher Bryan Chaffin told the E-Commerce Times that Apple's coveted iPod will play a critical role in determining the degree of iTMS' success In fact, Chaffin said Apple's posi...

Before the year is out, Apple Computer plans to launch a Windows version of its well-received iTunes Music Store (iTMS). The store's success thus far -- Apple has sold 10 million songs through the Mac-only version -- has renewed enthusiasm about the ability of legitimate digital music sellers to make inroads against the Kazaa juggernaut, especially in light of the RIAA's lawsuit campaign against users of the free file-sharing service...

The chief technology officer of @stake, an IT security company with close ties to Microsoft, was reportedly sacked by his company just after he released a report critical of the Redmond, Washington-based software vendor Daniel Geer, also one of the founders of the company, is principal author of the paper "Cyberinsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly," wh...

Amid all the publicity WiFi has received in the last year, another high-speed mobile networking technology, known as 3G, appears to have been overlooked as a viable means for transmitting data wirelessly over the same types of air interfaces used in cell phones Yet 3G was once an industry darling -- and the center of a bandwidth feeding frenzy that...

IBM and GE Interlogix, a division of General Electric that designs, develops and manufactures physical security devices, such as digital video systems and access control boxes, have announced they are teaming up to provide integrated security solutions to their customers Juan Cabezas, senior vice president of global management and strategic relatio...