Applications

SPECIAL REPORT

Fine-Tuning Spam Filtering

Because the volume of spam has increased from about 10 percent of all e-mail in 2001 to more than 50 percent today, corporations and ISPs have been trying to find ways to keep the junk mail from overwhelming users' inboxes. Filtering products, which rely on several techniques to separate needed mess...

Officials at several U.S. state and federal law enforcement organizations have announced an initiative aimed squarely at use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks for child pornography. More than 1,000 investigations have been opened in the United States involving the distribution and possessi...

Looking to blur business lines the same way that technology has blurred traditional voice and data networks and solutions, MCI and Microsoft have announced a deepening of their relationship to deliver converged communication and collaboration technologies. The companies will codevelop new real-time ...

As video-game makers from around the world gather at the 10th annual Electronic Entertainment Expo -- known in the industry as E3 -- in Los Angeles this week, handheld hardware is expected to garner much of the buzz emanating from the show. "There'll be a lot of looking at the handheld market this y...

IBM has outlined a new Lotus Workplace software environment aimed at joining Web and traditional PC computing to enable more efficient building, deployment and management of applications and data. Big Blue said its new environment and software products will give users a new way to develop, deliver a...

Microsoft has announced plans to tie its next-generation Longhorn client-side operating system to its Longhorn server operating system that is aimed squarely at corporate computing. The Redmond, Washington-based company said it will still be at least another year and a half before any Longhorn relea...

Promising seamless connection of people, information and business processes in real-time, Microsoft has announced that its newest enterprise instant-messaging (IM) solution -- the Office Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005 -- is available through a beta program and will be released later this year...

Microsoft yesterday pulled the wraps off the latest version of its digital rights management (DRM) software, a move awaited with great anticipation in some corners of the online music universe. "We're very excited about it," Richard Bullwinkle, senior product marketing manager at Rio Audio in Santa ...

PayPal yesterday introduced PayPal Web Services, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that the company hopes developers will use to build code that will integrate the PayPal platform into other e-commerce systems. PayPal Web Services, based on open standards and currently in beta, cons...

It may be coming half a decade late, but an independent software seller is now offering a service pack for Windows 98 Second Edition (SE), which Microsoft itself never got around to doing. And just as Alper Coskun released his own "unofficial" service pack for the aging but well-liked Microsoft oper...

Sales growth was slower than expected -- and inflated by the depressed dollar overseas -- at IBM last quarter. So Big Blue is reorganizing a bit. "IBM today is a company ready to focus more on opportunities than on threats," said IBM chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano in a speech earlier today at ...

Mountain View, California-based Stretch, a fabless semiconductor developer, this week debuted a new family of processors that can be configured by software, making this the first design to embed powerful programmable logic in an off-the-shelf processor. The chip family -- the S5000 -- also includes ...

TECHNOLOGY SPECIAL REPORT

Microsoft, Proprietary Code and the Shared Source Initiative

In a move to build better relationships with certain classes of customer, Microsoft in 2001 began allowing them to look at portions of Windows source code. Several programs were set up, serving selected enterprises, "most valuable professionals," OEMs, system integrators, academics and several other...

A memorandum from Microsoft argues against the European Commission's antitrust decision, stating that Brussels is creating legal precedents that inflict long-term damage on the software developer's business model. The memo outlines the legal strategy that the Redmond, Washington, software maker is t...

Early warning last week about increased signs of a possible superworm in the making may have slowed down a new attack on the Internet. But evidence continues to grow, according to a VeriSign security officer, of a major new denial-of-service attack to be mounted from thousands of already-infected co...

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