Articles by Renay San Miguel

The promise of digital photography is that it can help any amateur develop into a backyard Ansel Adams, given the right camera, software and dedication. Imaging software company Adobe Systems has known this since 1990, when it rolled out version 1.0 of its trailblazing Photoshop software; it has followed that with a host of related products aimed at different segments -- and expertise levels -- of the digital imaging market...

Reports continue to circulate that the Federal Communications Commission has enough votes to rule that Comcast illegally blocked traffic between peer-to-peer Internet applications and that the government will soon set down guidelines for the Internet service provider that could serve as a precedent regarding the hotly debated topic of Net neutrality...

Hasbro, maker of the word game Scrabble, has issued the ultimate double challenge to social network Facebook and its wildly popular Scrabble-like application Scrabulous: a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement The suit, filed Thursday in a New York district court, claims the application violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Hasbro has as...

British parents who don't know what their kids are downloading on the family computer may want to start paying more attention, thanks to a new antipiracy agreement among the six largest Internet service providers in the United Kingdom The U.S. music industry will no doubt track developments in the UK. That's because the effort, announced by BT, Vir...

Usually, it's a mayor who hands out the key to his or her city to residents deserving special recognition. In San Francisco's case, it was Mayor Gavin Newsom who took back the key to his city's computer network from the man who held it hostage for more than a week The only positive recognition system administrator Terry Childs is likely to get from...

Facebook's new look is all about the Wall, the blank space on a profile page that the social network's users can fill in with stories, photos, links and the ever-popular Status Updates. In turn, Facebook executives hope a less-cluttered Web site will eventually fill in their bank accounts with more advertising revenue The second-ranked social netwo...

Americans are tiring of US$4.50-a-gallon gasoline, dire warnings from Iran and nasty political rhetoric. So they seem to be taking our their frustrations by blasting alien invaders and enemy soldiers and playing tennis with their TV sets Video games seem to be providing consumers a better entertainment bang for their buck this summer, as a dour eco...

During the recent Hollywood writers' strike, Joss Whedon found the cure for all his sudden downtime. The man who gave us "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Firefly" created a genre-busting musical about a mad doctor with a bad case of evil-mastermind-wannabe inferiority complex And the only place to fill this prescription for cult horror-comedy? The I...

In the case of Tiffany vs. eBay, a U.S. district judge has presented the e-commerce giant with the best gift it could get in this litigious, digital age: a victory in a four-year-old trademark protection lawsuit Judge Richard Sullivan of New York found that eBay's process of vetting suspected counterfeit items is sufficient and that Tiffany bears m...

Adeona may have been the goddess of safe returns, but if a group of computer science professors and graduate students get their wish, they'll be viewed as the patron saints of secure laptop computer data, thanks to their new open source software service named after the Roman deity Also, for those who worship at the altar of bargains, Adeona may ind...

Advocates of Net neutrality are preparing to chalk up their first victory following press reports that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin has recommended prohibiting cable giant Comcast from blocking Web traffic between peer-to-peer networks The recommendation, which still requires action from the full commission, could be prec...

Its stock price is in free fall and it still faces a potential takeover led by rogue investor Carl Icahn. However, Yahoo can still fire shots across the digital bows of Google and Microsoft; it is inviting third-party developers to use its search technology so they can build their own search engines Yahoo calls the new strategy "BOSS," which stands...

If you already thought it was a Google world and we're all just living in it -- well, now you can with the introduction of Lively, Google's free 3-D virtual world application that brings game-like qualities to the concept of Internet chat "The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the Web," Niniane Wang, a Google engineer...

If you use Google's Gmail and like to access your account from several locations -- work, office, your smartphone, Internet cafes, etc. -- you can now remotely check the status of that account from all your log-in locations. Google announced a new remote signout and monitoring feature designed to enhance security for those who use several computers or connected devices in the course of a day...

Google and privacy advocates will continue to fight a war over the search giant's use and retention of personal information, but it appears the two sides declared an end to hostilities over the July Fourth holiday weekend regarding the company's privacy policy. Google now will directly link to its privacy information and policy from its homepage "G...

If the food industry ran its business like the Internet browsing software industry, then consumers would be hurling lawsuits like bad tomatoes at the companies that give us Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari The comparison is existent in a wide-ranging new study showing that approximately 40 percent of the Internet surfing public -- 576 million ...

I am an unrepentant gaming enthusiast, and there are lengths I will go for my hobby that might puzzle normal people with normal lives. I'll stand in the rain outside a Best Buy for a Nintendo Wii on launch day; I'll surf the Web at all hours for the latest gaming reviews or demos; I'll scream creative obscenities -- if I do say so myself -- at hordes of Covenant aliens and grotesque Flood monsters who keep me from advancing to the next level of "Halo 3."

The universe of Internet domains will soon experience a Big Bang, thanks to Thursday's vote by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approving a new system for handing out Web addresses Corporations and other public and private entities will no longer be limited to Web extensions like .com, .net or .org; for a fee that wil...

Sony's Blu-ray won the battle of high-definition DVD formats, but its PlayStation 3 gaming console has been losing the war over networked home entertainment. That will change this summer, promised Kaz Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, during a Tokyo press conference announcing new PS3 services for the U.S. market Sony will roll out o...

An election looms, and the candidates' talking points are being set: war, the economy, the environment. Now a new advocacy group wants the next president and lawmakers to add one more item to their to-do list: a national broadband policy that ensures high-speed Internet access for all Americans The group, InternetForEveryone.org, features an array ...