Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

The entertainment industry and civil liberties advocates have their dirks leveled at each other's throats again -- this time over a proposed California law aimed at protecting anonymous free speech on the Internet While proponents of the legislation say it's needed to protect employees exercising their First Amendment rights from employer retributi...

FastTrack, once the darling of online file-sharers, appears to be losing its popularity Reports in recent weeks -- as well as data gathered by Internet traffic tracker Alexa -- show a marked decline in files swapped on networks like Kazaa that use the FastTrack protocol....

Microsoft released a "technical beta" of Windows Media Player 10 yesterday, and while the target date for the prime-time version isn't until later this year, there's little doubt now who is in the crosshairs with this incarnation of the software According to Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director at Jupiter Research in New York Ci...

After some friendly negotiations with local authorities, Spamhaus, a volunteer organization fighting the proliferation of unsolicited e-mail across the globe, has established operations in China with the launch of a new Web site, spamhaus.cn The move is seen by some as another positive sign that the Asian giant is waking up to its spam problem. "Th...

It may not be a perfect deterrent to illegal file-swapping on the Internet, but it comes very close to it That's how Loudeye characterized its new high-performance Titanium antipiracy service announced this week by the Seattle-based provider of business-to-business digital media solutions....

A federal court ruling that dismissed a seven-year-old patent infringement lawsuit against PalmOne's Graffiti handwriting recognition system will be appealed by Stamford, Connecticut-based Xerox Corporation "We intend to appeal," Xerox spokesperson Christa Carone told TechNewsWorld. "We've won on appeal twice already, and we believe we will have a ...

The European Commission (EC) has passed a controversial directive that opponents claim will bolster the lot of big companies at the expense of small ones and will stifle innovation The so-called Computer-Implemented Inventions directive, which would harmonize how software patents are issued throughout the European Union, created a furor when it was...

The Australian recording industry's bid to eyeball material gathered in a series of raids at the sites of alleged music pirates -- including Sharman Networks, maker of the popular online file-sharing program Kazaa, and Sharman partners Altnet and Brilliant Digital Entertainment -- was deflated last week in a proceeding in a New South Wales federal court...

The arrest this week of the Japanese author of a popular online file-sharing program appears to be an extreme reaction, at least by American standards, to his alleged abetting of copyright infringers, according to a patent attorney in Chicago In what's been reported as the first arrest of a software developer for helping others to violate copyright...

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 year, with both Sony and Nintendo having new product...

There's yet another pay-per-tune music store on the Net, this time launched by media behemoth Sony through its Sony Connect subsidiary in Santa Monica, California The store has a library of more than half a million tracks from all major labels and some independents, as well as exclusive content from such artists as Avril Lavigne, Yeah Yeah, Snow Pa...

Spam and its evil offshoot, phishing, have become growing problems on the Internet. Not only has spam become a nuisance with its frequently offensive subject matter, but it is consuming increasing amounts of bandwidth. According to a report released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, an estimated 50 percent of all e-mail in 2003 was spam, which may have chewed up US$20.5 billion in technical resources...

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 Clara, California, told TechNewsWorld. "We believe ...

Tired of paying 99 cents a track for your music downloads? Try paying for them by the megabyte An online store based in Moscow is selling music downloads by popular artists like Norah Jones, Usher, Prince, Outkast and scores of others for 1 to 2 cents per megabyte of song....

When Apple raised the curtain on its online digital music store a year ago this week, there were more than a few skeptics in the audience. Why, they asked, would websters buy something they could get for free through numerous file-sharing networks? Well, after selling 50 million songs from its iTunes store, it's apparent that Apple is doing somethi...

A new group committed to evangelizing grid computing formed this week, with its inaugural roster boasting such high-tech heavy hitters as Oracle, Sun Microsystems, EMC, NEC, Fujitsu Siemens and HP. Called the Enterprise Grid Alliance, or EGA, the new consortium seeks to create standards for critical business functions and formulate compliance test...

Joining the ranks of Linux distributors HP, Novell and Red Hat, a companynamed Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) has launched a program to protectlarge and small users from legal entanglements arising from adoption of theopen-source operating system According to OSRM, its move into the indemnification business comes after arigorous six-month evalu...

Google, operator of the most popular search engine on the Internet, tried to avoid fanfare when it quietly notified some 150,000 advertisers through e-mail that it was modifying its policy on selling keywords that contained trademarked material. Instead, it's ignited a controversy Speaking on the policy change, Barry G. Felder, a partner with New Y...

While the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mulls over what to do about services for making phone calls on the Internet, two legislators have decided that the U.S. Congress should get into the act Sen. John Sununu (R-New Hampshire) and Rep. Chip Pickering (R-Mississippi) have filed bills in their respective legislative branches to place regul...

The group empowered with overseeing administration of Internet domain names and addresses has asked a federal court judge to dismiss antitrust and breach-of-contract claims leveled against it by VeriSign, which runs the registry for two of the most popular top-level domain extensions on the Internet -- .com and .net In an acerbic motion filed in U....