Articles by Alexandra DeFelice

Microsoft announced Tuesday that that it has acquired Winternals Software and plans to appoint the company's co-founder a technical fellow Privately held Winternals provides systems recovery and data protection solutions to Windows-based enterprises and offers free software tools called Sysinternals. The acquisition advances Microsoft's promise to ...

Walt Disney is adding steam to Sony's Blu-ray Disc push with its plan to release nine films in that format Beginning Sept. 19, Buena Vista Home Entertainment will start releasing select titles, including Walt Disney Pictures' "Dinosaur" and "Eight Below," on Blu-ray. Those two movies will feature exclusive high-definition short films, called Blu-Sc...

Dell on Tuesday unveiled a wireless card that the company says can provide up to five times the speed and twice the range of the industry's widely used 802.11g WiFi technology standard The greatest productivity comes when connected to a wireless Draft 802.11n network router featuring Broadcom's Intensi-fi technology. When achieving optimum performa...

Online advertisers beware. Click fraud is on the rise, according to numbers released Monday by the Click Fraud Index, an independent click fraud reporting service Pay-per-click fraud reached 14.1 percent of all clicks tallied in the second quarter of 2006, slightly higher than the average of 13.7 percent for the first quarter, according to the Inde...

Hewlett-Packard on Monday revealed a miniature wireless high-storage data chip that potentially could compete with RFID technology in the enterprise space and with Bluetooth in the consumer arena The Memory Spot chip is roughly the size of a grain of rice with a built-in antenna and is based on CMOs -- a widely used, low-power integrated circuit de...

eBay's recent decision to ban Google Checkout as an acceptable payment method raised the eyebrows of some in the online community who cried that the restriction is unfair to consumers. Yet the move opens up a debate as to how online merchants should balance the risks and benefits of accepting alternative payment methods On July 6, Rob Chesnut, seni...

Sony is giving PlayStation customers a trip to the movies This week the company announced its Memory Stick Entertainment Packs, "designed for people who want to experience the full range of multi-functional features" on their PlayStation Portable systems....

The summer is heating up for Intel as it prepares to propel three new products into the market in upcoming weeks Intel's latest offerings include the Core 2 Duo chip for desktop PCs, Montecito chip for high-end servers and Merom chip for mobile notebooks. Shipment of the processors has already begun, and Intel is preparing to release several other ...

Mozilla's beta version of Firefox 2.0 is drawing applause from reviewers for its new anti-phishing features, which are likely to become increasingly important in consumers' constant battle against data theft The built-in phishing protection in the latest version, which debuted Wednesday, warns users when they encounter suspected Web forgeries and o...

Consumers who love to chat will have more people to talk to now that Yahoo and Microsoft have bridged their instant messaging services On Thursday, the companies began limited public beta testing of interoperability between Yahoo Messenger with Voice and Windows Live Messenger, an updated version of MSN Messenger....

Mozilla's open source Firefox browser continues to creep up on Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Firefox's share of the global browser market grew to 12.93 percent in July, according to a new report Although that number is still small, compared to the whopping 83.05 percent enjoyed by IE, Firefox's total usage share increased by 1.14 percent since May...

Mozilla's open source Firefox browser continues to creep up on Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Firefox's share of the global browser market grew to 12.93 percent in July, according to a new report Although that number is still small, compared to the whopping 83.05 percent enjoyed by IE, Firefox's total usage share increased by 1.14 percent since May...

Hackers have once again targeted the government, forcing theU.S. Department of State to scramble to ensure its data is protected Large-scale computer break-ins have occurred over the past several weeks, according to published reports, but the department is confident no sensitive data has been compromised, spokesperson Edgar Vasquez told TechNewsWor...

Microsoft is moving out with the old and in with the new As of Tuesday, the company has ended public support, including security updates, for Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows Millennium Edition. However, Tuesday also marked Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Boston, where the company provided an optimistic view of its new ...

In an attempt to push ahead in the competitive server market, Sun Microsystems on Tuesday unveiled three high-end products for use in data centers as part of its x86 server platform Included in the announcement are a 16-way x64 server, a hybrid data server and a blade platform. The three new x64 servers all are powered by AMD Opteron processors wit...

Microsoft's recent release of anti-piracy tools to detect authentic versions of its software have some customers crying foul about the company's collection of personal information, but the lines are blurry when it comes to customer privacy laws in the U.S The Redmond, Wash., software giant was hit with two lawsuits in one week, alleging that the to...

Anxious Firefox users may have to wait a few more days for the official early beta release of Firefox 2.0, Alex Guerra, a spokesperson for the Mozilla Foundation, told LinuxInsider, but the public already is getting a taste of what's to come The browser's debut was scheduled for release on Tuesday but is being postponed until later this week....

Although the Department of Veterans Affairs may be able to relax slightly now that the laptop containing sensitive information on millions of veterans and military personnel has been recovered, the incident highlights the role government plays in ensuring data security "It is a hot political issue because the lawmakers want to be seen as protecting...

Disaster recovery planning is becoming a core part of business, and there are many steps a company can take to reduce the impact of a catastrophic event, asPart 1 of this two-part series points out Yet even when companies prepare for the worst, unexpected circumstances are bound to occur when a disaster actually hits. After such an incident, compan...

Last year, in the path of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, thousands of businesses realized too late how vulnerable their data was. Many businesses found themselves down for days, and some never recovered from the data loss With the 2006 hurricane season under way, company executives who remember the devastation from last year's storms are taking steps...