Articles by Tim Gray

Internet search leader Google unveiled its latest set of online business tools Thursday, aiming to snare a bigger piece of the enterprise market dominated by Microsoft. Google already has at least one player onboard: IP and telephony firm Avaya Avaya, a top provider of Internet phone switchboards for businesses, says it plans to link its IP Office ...

Google, hoping to fend off ongoing criticism and potential legal battles, has decided to tackle copyright issues head on and will soon offer antipiracy technologies to halt unauthorized video-sharing, the company announced this week YouTube, which Google acquired late last year in a US$1.6 billion stock deal, will soon provide tools to help media c...

A new vulnerability in Snort, an open source intrusion-detection system (IDS), enables hackers to inject hostile code into exposed systems Sourcefire, the company behind the Snort package, said hackers could remotely gain control of systems running the software and execute malicious code, as well as gain access to confidential data....

New software is now making it possible to remove Advanced Access Content System (AACS) encryption from HD DVDs, enabling users to play discs on non-HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) compliant graphics cards and displays SlySoft, a DVD-authoring software firm based in Antigua, has released the first version of its AnyDVD HD, a program...

Microsoft has released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for SQL Server 2005, making the software giant's flagship database system compatible with its newest operating system and Office 2007 The release is the second major update the company has issued for its enterprise grade database....

Open source solutions provider Red Hat has joined the Interop Vendor Alliance in an effort to make its products more interoperable with Microsoft's extensive environment The move makes Red Hat the latest in a growing line of Linux distributors cozying up with Redmond by joining the alliance -- a group of tech companies working together to make thei...

Sharp has introduced a new Blu-ray disc player that is the first such device capable of recording high-definition content directly from television The new BD-HP1, a standalone device set to go on sale in Japan next month, allows the transfer of content from the company's Aquos digital tuner or Aquos HD Recorder to the Blu-ray Disc without losing th...

IBM unveiled three new offerings this week designed to consolidate Web-tier Linux servers in increasingly complicated IT environments The new offerings, a trio of machines running Linux or IBM's AIX Unix operating system, will help businesses consolidate more than 1.6 million Linux servers that are present in both heterogeneous and open source IT e...

Hewlett-Packard is taking a new approach to smartphones with the launch of a slim new handset with 3G Internet connectivity, moving away from the clunky styling of its previous series of powerful PDA (personal digital assistant) phones The iPaq 500 smartphone, unveiled this week at the 3GSM World Congress 2007 in Barcelona, will run on the new Wind...

Microsoft unveiled three new Windows Live services in conjunction with the official launch of the latest version of its operating system for smartphones, in an effort to cut deeper inroads into the mobile device market Although details of Windows Mobile 6 were leaked to the press last week, the OS upgrade made its official debut at the 3GSM World C...

Korean electronics maker Samsung has unveiled a new mobile phone with sleek features and functions that are similar to Apple's recently announced iPhone The company delivered the new Ultra Smart F700 at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The handset, which even looks a lot like the iPhone, has touch-screen capabilities and plays audio and...

Nokia, the world's top cell phone maker, says it will begin offering free maps and routing to its customers in more than 150 countries, as well as users of Window Mobile devices Nokia's "smart2go" will allow users to focus localized search and route-finding services into mobile handsets for free....

Sun Microsystems is releasing, a plug-in for Microsoft Office 2003 that will provide a translation between the file format and OpenDocument Format (ODF) for Office Applications, according to the company The early access version of the ODF plug-in allows for the seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Office documents to ODF for people who use comp...

Vodafone has signed an exclusive partnership deal with social networking Web site MySpace, allowing its customers to access and update their MySpace pages from their mobile phones, according to the telecom giant The deal is expected to help Vodafone, Europe's biggest mobile operator, boost mobile usage and data revenues, while at the same time laun...

Sony Ericsson unveiled its slimmest Walkman phone ever on Tuesday. It's only 0.38 inches thick and has several new music features The matchbook thin device, called the "W880," packs music features into its ultra-thin design with a handset preloaded with Walkman Player 2.0, Disc2Phone music management and TrackID music recognition applications, the ...

In recent years, smaller businesses have often struggled between managing costs and finding tailored services suited to help efficiently manage their information technology systems, but a recent surge in vendors targeting the small to medium-size business (SMB) market has virtualization right around the corner VMware, a provider of virtualization s...

Sony executives received surprising sales results last month. After crunching numbers coming in across Japan, they learned their 7-year-old PlayStation 2 outsold the brand new PlayStation 3 in Japan in late January for the first time During the week of Jan. 22-28, sales of the PlayStation 2 consoles reached 20,995 units while PlayStation 3 clocked...

The number of kids viewing online pornography is increasing, with one in four reporting they've at least caught a glimpse of X-rated material on the Internet, and two-thirds of those said the images were uninvited, according to a University of New Hampshire (UNH) study published Monday Forty-two percent of Internet users, aged 10 to 17, say they ca...

Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that created the open source Firefox browser -- the chief competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- is setting up shop in China in the hope of claiming a sizable chunk of the world's second-largest Internet market Firefox, a popular browser among techies, is used by roughly 11 percent of U.S. Web surfers, ha...

Verizon Wireless this week pushed out its first deployments of a speedier mobile broadband service that increases Internet upload speeds by up to six times faster than the company's existing broadband network The New York-based telecom is upgrading its third-generation wireless network using a CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access)-based technology c...