Articles by Susan B. Shor

An alleged "botmaster" who authorities say had 400,000 machines under his control was arrested in Los Angeles yesterday Jeanson Ancheta, 20, installed pop-up adware on the commandeered computers and rented his "botnet" -- or network of computers compromised by Trojan horses that allow remote control of the infected machine -- to other hackers for p...

A fruitless prosecution against a teenager in English court highlights the inadequacy of that nation's cyberlaws to cope with denial of service attacks The youth was accused of sending 5 million e-mails to a former employer, thereby shutting down the company's servers. The case did not fail because it could not be proved that the teen was the attac...

Hewlett-Packard announced today that it has added an HP-UX blade server to its Itanium arsenal, a move that gives it a slight edge over IBM, one analyst said "When you compare where they were Monday vs. where they are today, this does give HP salespeople something in their kit bag which not only didn't they have before, but something IBM can't coun...

Samsung plans to enter the nascent online music market and although there's a vast pool of consumers who have not yet made the leap to downloading songs, it will take "an incredibly compelling proposition" to make a dent in Apple's hold on the segment, one analyst said Speaking to South Korean media Friday, Samsung's digital media business head, Ch...

Computer ownership and home Internet access were still rising through 2003, a U.S. Census Bureau report released yesterday found, but the study also noted that regional, racial and socioeconomic factors still play a big role in who does and does not have access to and interest in the Web Overall, 61.8 percent of U.S. households owned a computer in ...

The U.S. government has finalized plans to implant RFID tags in all newly issued or renewed passports beginning October 2006. The State Department issued new regulations earlier this week, despite concerns from privacy advocates that the chips will pose threats on several different fronts, including the ability to track citizens' movements via the chip in their passports...

Gamers who dream of developing products for Sony's soon-to-be-released PlayStation 3 (PS3) and its PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld will soon get their chance. The electronics giant will launch Sony Game Yaroze! -- which means "Let's Play Games" -- 2006 on Nov. 15 and accept entries from amateur and professional gamers through February Sony will...

Boo! Lurking behind that spooky haunted house -- whether it be next door or at the local amusement park -- are embedded computing devices and other bits of engineering magic that, while not the highest tech gadgets on the market, sure come in handy when the Jedis, ninjas, princesses and witches come around on All Hallow's Eve, a.k.a. Halloween....

The U.S. government has finalized plans to implant RFID tags in all newly issued or renewed passports beginning October 2006. The State Department issued new regulations yesterday, despite concerns from privacy advocates that the chips will pose threats on several different fronts, including the ability to track citizens' movements via the chip in their passports...

Hong Kong officials have successfully prosecuted a BitTorrent user for sharing three copyrighted movies on the file-sharing network Chan Nai-Ming, 38, was arrested in January by the Hong Kong Customs Services and will be sentenced Nov. 7. He faces up to four years in jail and a fine of up to about US$6,400. Chan had pleaded not guilty to copyright ...

IBM announced yesterday that it has bought DataPower, a private maker of devices that speed the processing of XML (extensible markup language). The move is a good one for IBM, because "it's one of those acquisitions that stretches across the breadth of the company," Frank Dzubeck, president, Communication Network Architects, told TechNewsWorld Data...

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before an information tool such as a search engine grew into a source of information on its own. Yahoo last month took that leap, announcing Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, a multimedia effort to bring online news to life Yahoo says that it is not looking to duplicate the efforts of other journalists, but instead w...

A California law banning the sale or rental of violent video games to anyone under 17 is being challenged by two industry trade groups 10 days after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA) have filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., on...

Oracle announced Friday what seems to be a squeeze play on MySQL -- the purchase of Innobase, a Finnish developer of open-source database technology. Terms of the agreement were not released Innobase's most prominent product is InnoDB, a transaction engine that ships as an add-on to MySQL, the most popular open-source database. Although there are f...

Owners of PlayStation Portables (PSPs) who may be inclined to alter their devices so they can play unauthorized games should beware of the software they use to do so. Anti-malware company Symantec reports that one of the programs that claims it allows gamers to circumvent PSP security measures is actually a piece of malware that will wipe out the gaming handheld completely...

T-Mobile claims its Web'n'walk service, already available in Germany and now expanded to the UK, breaks down the walls of mobile Web surfing. Users are able to access almost any Web site -- with some exceptions -- and view it just as it would look on a computer, according to company representatives The telecommunications giant is not the first to e...

When Oracle agreed early in September to buy former rival Siebel Systems for US$5.85 billion, some questioned how long Siebel would continue its CRM OnDemand service. That question came to light because Oracle rival IBM plays a big role in the on-demand service. Yesterday, Siebel responded with the announcement of the latest edition of its CRM Professional Edition software, which contains tight integration to CRM OnDemand...

Hewlett-Packard today swooped in to pick up what's left of blade pioneer RLX Technologies, which had been reduced to a licenser of its blade management software, the RLX Control Tower for Linux. Terms of the deal were not announced RLX had been first in the market with blades, or thin servers meant to be stacked and networked, but the startup was u...

Among a business's greatest assets is the information it collects, but only if it can sort through and present that information in a timely fashion Enterprises collect millions if not billions of bits of data on customers, products and suppliers. Beyond merely storing the data, they must decide which information is important and how to organize it ...

Yahoo has put its money behind a team effort to bulk up the amount of valuable content available on the Web. The search engine company will foster the Open Content Alliance, a consortium set up to digitize materials in the public domain, such as classic books, and those published under the less-restrictive Creative Commons license Yahoo also said i...