News

Microsoft touts research projects in search, privacy

Microsoft Research emphasizes efforts in multiple areas, including concurrent programming and language translation

Craigslist tops U.S. mobile browsing

eBay was the second most popular destination with mobile Web surfers, followed closely by social networking sites Myspace and Facebook

MSI’s Atom-based laptop to debut in June at $549

Ultra-low cost Wind laptop running Windows XP will have a larger screen size, a six-cell battery that gives six hours of power, and an 80GB hard disk drive

Microsoft Surface developer turns his attention to LaserTouch

LaserTouch technology could turn virtually any flat display into a touch-sensitive monitor

You don’t know tech: The InfoWorld news quiz

Match your weekly tech news wits against our snarky quiz master

EMC’s bold solid-state bet

Update: Yahoo postpones board meeting, director resigns

Edward Kozell has resigned from Yahoo's board, and the company has pushed back its board meeting as it deals with Carl Icahn's threatened proxy fight

All eyes on how Microsoft pulls off ODF support

Microsoft has declared that it will start supporting the ODF format, but observers wonder how that support will take shape

Enterprise 2.0 apps seen as useful but confusing to business

A recent survey found that 44 percent of businesses see Enterprise 2.0 apps as 'imperative,' but 74 percent find them confusing

EMC’s forecast: cloud storage and flash drives

At EMC World, the company said that the future of its industry lies in flash drives and cloud storage, which offer faster, more efficient, and scalable storage options

Coverity buying software build management vendor Codefast

The acquisition, Coverity's first, is intended to help developers with build process

HP puts green labels on black-and-white printers

Company introduces Eco Highlights labeling plan along with other measures to help consumers in comparison shopping with environmental benefits in mind

Google steals search share from rivals

Google's share of U.S. search queries went up to 61.6 percent in April, from 59.8 percent in March, as it took market share from rivals like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.com

Pushback on SOA and mashups

Vendor goes after SMBs with BSM offering

FireScope seeks to provide companies with low-cost way to map performance of their IT assets, such as servers and applications, against day-to-day processes of a business

Daily news beat for May 22, 2008

Update: Microsoft’s embrace of ODF cautiously welcomed

Of concern is whether Microsoft's implementation of ODF within Office will handle documents with the same or better performance as competing suites

Open source needs an attitude adjustment

Facebook provides redesign details

Latest plans in Facebook's redesign call for profile pages to evolve from a single repository of content and applications into a tabbed interface

Why Web 2.0 won’t kill the software engineer

Mozilla targets Firefox 3.1 release for later this year

Company exec reveals in blog that features held back from Firefox 3 are being hammered out for the next edition, which could come as soon as late 2008

U.S. trade agency to investigate semiconductor complaint

Semiconductor vendor Tessera claims 11 companies have infringed its patent for semiconductor chips

Anti-malware group scolds Apple over Safari ‘carpet bomb’

Stopbadware.org asks Apple to reconsider its refusal to address the flaw in its browser as a security problem

MySpace hit by application spam

MySpace takes steps to curb spam from applications built by external developers using its new application development platform

Lawmakers see cyberthreats to electrical grid

The organization responsible for regulating electrical suppliers doesn't appear to be serious about fixing vulnerabilities, lawmakers say

Cisco patches router flaw ahead of rootkit talk

Cisco issues three security patches ahead of slated talk by a security researcher who has developed malicious rootkit software for its routers

Gates: Microsoft fights back from underdog status on search

At Microsoft's annual advertisers' conference, Bill Gates laid out the company's upcoming technologies and future plans for its search business

AT&T to complete 3G network by next month

AT&T will be the first carrier to fully deploy HSPA technology over its network, and many believe that the network is being completed to make way for a 3G iPhone

Qualcomm invests in femtocell vendor ip.access

Qualcomm sees femtocells, small base stations for wireless home broadband, as a major future growth market

Yahoo’s shadow overhangs Microsoft ad conference

Microsoft largely avoided even mentioning Yahoo as it discussed its strategy of R&D-aided growth and acquisition of smaller companies

The 10 dirtiest domain registrars

Daily news beat for May 21, 2008

‘PatentGate’ one year later: MS against open-source world

Microsoft has played the 'good cop, bad cop' routine with the open source camp since claiming a year ago that users of open source software were violating its patents

Chambers banks Cisco’s future on Web 2.0

Cisco's CEO says the first two years of collaboration in Cisco were 'miserable'

Update: Aetna chief downplays Google Health’s potential

Medical insurance exec says with the software companies' services, data is static and cannot compare to Aetna's in-house customer records portal

Update: Microsoft to support ODF, PDF in Office next year

Support for ODF and PDF will be included through Microsoft Office Service Pack 2, expected to be out in the first half of 2009

What system buyers care about most

Update: Microsoft unwraps search engine reward program

Comparative shopping feature in Microsoft's Live Search engine offers consumers a rebate on purchases made through the site

China shows off Olympics tech … sort of

Exhibition may be raising expectations for the use of IT at the Beijing Games, even though few if any new technologies or innovations will be implemented

IBM Rational IDE tops survey

Other players, including Visual Studio, rated highest in other categories, but the Evans Data survey found that IBM's RAD was tops in overall user satisfaction

The problem with ‘sandbox’ security clients

AMD to use Qimonda’s GDDR5 memory with upcoming GPU

The upcoming ATI Radeon R700 is the first AMD graphics chip to support GDDR5 memory

Red Hat updates enterprise Linux platform

Virtualization, clustering, and hardware support improved in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2

Phishers aim scam at Apple’s iTunes

Phishers target Apple for the first time with a sophisticated identity theft attack that tells users they must correct a problem with their iTunes account

Microsoft loses Alcatel-Lucent unified comms patent lawsuit

Long-running patent battle with Microsoft takes another turn as the ITC overturns its earlier decision against Alcatel

SugarCRM launches datacenter edition

SugarCRM courts big enterprises and provides the basis for a broader open source business software platform

Codie awards go to Red Hat, Adobe, Salesforce.com

Smaller companies also take home prizes from the Software & Information Industry Association

Xserve review correction: RAID price is $799, not $999

Citrix makes the desktop virtual with XenDesktop

The XenDesktop desktop virtualization product line is Citrix's attempt to stay ahead of rival VMware

Microsoft releases Hyper-V RC1

The latest version of Microsoft's virtualization add-on for Windows Server 2008 is feature complete and will be the last version before release to manufacturing