Government

The Federal Trade Commission has updated a longstanding rule governing mail- and phone-based retailers to explicitly include e-commerce vendors as well, meaning that online retailers now must abide by a 30-day shipping requirement or refund customers' payments if they can't. Since 1975, buyers from ...

The FCC on Tuesday hosted a roundtable discussion on the possibility of Net neutrality rules being applied to mobile networks. Participants in the talk included representatives from The Center for Media Justice, Consumers Union and CTIA. The diverse group voiced a range of nuanced opinions on the su...

DoD is committed to pursuing cloud-based services and steadily has been improving its capabilities to utilize the technology. The latest evidence of its embracing the cloud is approval of a protocol that will facilitate the use of the technology at higher security levels. The department's Defense In...

Despite the growing momentum behind cloud computing in recent times, security concerns have been a drag on adoption. IBM sought to reduce that resistance by announcing on Monday that it would start using Intel chip technology to better secure its SoftLayer cloud platform. When combined with hardware...

The U.S. government spends tens of billions of dollars each year on information technology -- by some estimates more than $100 billion. As a result, IT is a highly visible target when the overall federal budget comes under scrutiny. Problems associated with IT operations -- such as the botched launc...

More than 99 percent of the 800,000 or so comments on Net neutrality the FCC released last month were in favor of an open Internet, according to the Sunlight Foundation's analysis of the comments. At least 60 percent of the comments, or more than 484,000, were form letters written by organized campa...

The U.S. government soon will be operating in the 2015 fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1. For information technology vendors, marketing to federal agencies will remain challenging during 2015 and succeeding years, as agencies work within a constrained budget environment. In the short term, overa...

Google on Thursday introduced Project Wing, a drone-based delivery project it has been working on quietly for the past two years. Members of the Google[x] team - aka "Moonshots" -- recently held field tests of the technology in Australia. They were able use drones to deliver a first aid kit, candy b...

Hackers appear to have stolen data from JPMorgan Chase and at least one other U.S. bank in retaliation for economic sanctions against Russia. The raid on the banks' computer systems reportedly resulted in the theft of gigabytes of sensitive data. JPMorgan did not confirm the incident. However, the F...

Time Warner Cable suffered a massive service outage in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, leaving an unknown number of its nearly 12 million customers nationwide without service for hours. "As of 6 a.m. ET, services were largely restored ... . As of 8 a.m., all services were back to normal," said T...

Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday signed into law a bill requiring that anti-theft measures be incorporated into all smartphones sold within California. The measure applies to phones manufactured after July 1, 2015. Though it doesn't specify the particular technologies used to enable that capability -- bot...

China is developing a homegrown operating system that could be ready as soon as October as part of an effort to wean itself from Western-made software, according to a Sunday report from the Xinhua government news agency. Following hard on the heels of China's announcement last month that it had laun...

The banking industry is up in arms over the United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's plan to publish consumer complaint narratives about financial institutions on the Web. Consumers would have to opt in to have their complaints published. The CFPB would strip out all personally identifia...

Google is planning to allow kids under 13 to have their own personal accounts on services such as YouTube and Gmail, according to reports. Under the new system, parents would be able to set up accounts for their children, control their use of those accounts, and regulate the information collected ab...

The perception that the United States lags behind other countries, especially Asian nations, in exporting information technology deserves another look, according to a recent market report. The U.S. actually recorded a trade surplus in IT in 2011, partly as the result of international trade agreement...