Articles by Renay San Miguel

Before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, can begin to unlock the mysteries of the universe -- as physicists around the world hope it will -- it has to be taken for a series of test drives. Scientists on Monday did just that, driving protons into each other at energies approaching 550 billion electron volts, and the resulting successful collision is being hailed as an important first step to realizing the LHC's ultimate capabilities...

Call it the "New Moon" strategy at Microsoft. Team Google and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are having a lovers' quarrel over search aggregation of news content; Murdoch claims Team Google is nothing but a bloodthirsty vampire draining potential ad revenue So like a hunky werewolf in a certain blockbuster movie, here comes Team Bing to try and steal ...

Many companies would give up their right to right-click to be able to duplicate Apple's success with iTunes. However, only one actually has the pieces already in place to do that, and its executives announced their intentions Thursday to take on Steve Jobs' company with its own online content service Sony executives used a management meeting in Tok...

What the hell happened to the sort of man who reads Playboy? How could he let the Internet develop into the world's strip club -- and worse -- without taking Hugh Hefner's company along for the ride? There's no long tail for the Playboy bunny, judging from the rumored impending sale of Hefner's company for around US$300 million to Iconix, collector...

From high-flying Internet pioneer to movie punchline: AOL's nadir may have come when Nicole Kidman's character in the 2004 remake of "The Stepford Wives" asks a group of husbands of robotic spouses where they work. "AOL," answers one man....

If Activision is to be believed, then its new "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" video game has blown away all competition with the lethality of a Javelin missile plowing through Russian terrorists. Included in the smoking wreckage: not just previous gaming bestsellers like "Grand Theft Auto IV" and "Halo 3," but also the mangled corpses of Batman and Harry Potter...

After more than two years of crowing about "software plus service" rather than Software as a Service (SaaS) for its cloud computing strategy, the finish line is finally in sight for Microsoft's Azure. The company announced Tuesday at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles that Azure will officially be available for all customers on Jan. 1, 2010...

The Information Security Forum may bill itself as the world's leading independent authority on IT security, but the companies and agencies that its members work for are finding themselves more dependent than ever on its computer security expertise. Current trends that are expanding access to networks for companies and consumers are also providing ...

News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch is threatening to divorce Google over the issue of unpaid news content. However, Google's YouTube division still wants the marriage of technology and traditional journalism to work; hence the Tuesday launch of YouTube Direct, a tool designed to bring together media organizations and citizen journalists ...

Palm had its hands full over the weekend. The company's Sunday launch of its new US$99 Pixi smartphone had to compete with fresh rumors begun Friday that the company was a possible target of a takeover by Finnish telecommunications giant Nokia Those rumors sent Palm stock soaring by 8 percent on Friday, although Monday's trading was back within nor...

Google's purchase of VoIP company Gizmo5, announced Thursday, accomplishes two things for the search giant: It brings new levels of potential business-class service to Google Voice, and it gives AT&T ammunition in its regulatory fight with Mountain View Google isn't providing much detail regarding how Gizmo5's technology will fit into Voice. "While...

There's a very good reason why we call Internet memes and themes "viral." Good and bad information spreads on the Web in much the same way those nasty bundles of nucleic acid and proteins do when they attack your body's cells and make you sick Some of the Internet news items I've seen related to the H1N1 swine flu virus are making me feel a little ...

The Xbox Live community forums are buzzing loudly, but it has nothing to do with online gamers fragging each other in the much-anticipated new video game "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2." Some Xbox 360 users are ready to stage their own military coup against Microsoft after they were told this week that their Live accounts had been banned from the service...

Two federal agencies are charged with disbursing broadband expansion stimulus money, but critics say they've been stuck at dial-up speed since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was passed by Congress earlier this year. So on Tuesday the agencies announced they would streamline the approval process and try to get funding to worthy projects in December...

The scales of justice definitely don't tip in grayscale's favor when it comes to the overall e-reader device experience for consumers. Whether it's an Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader or Barnes & Noble Nook, 16-level grayscale means nothing more than a digital version of the weather in Seattle between November and April: different shades of gray I realiz...

It's not so much a war of words, but a war over words, between News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and search giant Google. Murdoch fired another broadside over the weekend by announcing his intention to eventually close off News Corp. content to Google's search technologies. In an interview with Sky News Australia, Murdoch said his company would b...

The FBI official in charge of major cybercrime investigations told a international gathering of computer security experts last week that financial services companies have suffered massive thefts due to hackers "The financial services sector has seen losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars in actual cash removed through the infrastructure," FB...

If I had my way, I would encourage Verizon Wireless to invest in both hologram technology and more "Star Wars" film rights. That would allow the carrier to hire an Alec Guinness lookalike who could pop up in 3-D visions in Verizon stores across the country, wave his hand over racks full of Motorola's new smartphone, and in full Obi-Wan Kenobi drag intone the words, "these are the Droids you're looking for."

It started as an act of Web site defacement by some anti-capitalist zealots, attacking one of Canada's largest multinational corporations. You know the kind -- they've got their fingers in all kinds of business pies, from airplane parts to media content to their own very popular brand of hand sanitizer. So they were ripe for some cyber-sabotage, judging from the overheated invective that appeared scrawled all over the corporate Web site...

White space replaces the sky-blue color scheme in MSN.com's new redesign, which Microsoft began previewing Wednesday before it becomes an official re-launch sometime in early 2010 ...