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Following the lead of their American counterparts, the leading music industry groups in the UK and Europe have launched a barrage of private lawsuits against dozens of individuals they say illegally swapped copyrighted music The British Phonographic Industry filed 28 lawsuits in Great Britain and the International Federation of the Phonographic Ind...

Google announced it is adding the text of books to its searchable database, furthering its bold mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Analysts say that other search engines will follow suit, but they don't expect online book-buying to change much in the short term....

A court decision that civil libertarians argue could have a far-reachingeffect on the privacy of Internet communications in the United States willbe reviewed again by federal judges in Boston The ruling, handed down by a panel of three federal judges in June, foundthat e-mail service providers may divert and read their customers' messageswithout re...

Like many organizations, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers noticed an ever-increasing volume of traffic on its frame relay network, which connects 42 field offices in the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. "We had to find a way to continue to provide our users with adequate response time without dramatically increasing our telecommunications costs," said Al Canfield, network administrator at the government agency...

Nowadays, e-mail and intranet are the most common methods of internal group communication for most companies. Specifically, many companies use mass e-mails and/or posting to their intranet to inform employees of a host of things, including changes to their employee benefit plans An example would be a company sending out a mass e-mail informing empl...

On the road Tom he told me all about how it was reckoned I was murdered, and how pap disappeared, pretty soon, and didn't come back no more, and what a stir there was when Jim run away; and I told Tom all about our Royal Nonesuch rapscallions, and as much of the raft-voyage as I had time to; and as we struck into the town and up through the middle of it -- it was as much as half-after eight, then -- here comes a raging rush of people, with torches, and an awful whooping and yelling, and banging tin pans and blowing horns; and we jumped to one side to let them go by; and as they went by, I see they had the king and the duke astraddle of a rail -- that is, I knowed it was the king and the duke, though they was all over tar and feathers, and didn't look like nothing in the world that was human -- just looked like a couple of monstrous big soldier-plumes. Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn't ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another...

In its first major search-related move since its blockbuster IPO, Google has launched a book-search tool designed to help publishers sell books online, a move some see as a challenge to dominant bookseller Amazon.com, which itself has made inroads into the Web-search industry with its A9.com subsidiary Meanwhile, both companies -- and the myriad ot...

A new report on the loyalty of companies to their IT suppliers might change what goes on inside some of the world's IT innovators From its survey of 51 brands, Walker Information of Indianapolis, Indiana, concluded that customer satisfaction does not equal customer loyalty. Suppliers' interactions with clients in the past do not predict the strengt...

Advanced Micro Devices' dual-core Opteron processor will boost performance 30 to 55 percent over single-core Opterons, the company said at the Fall Processor Forum yesterday. AMD also said it is on target to release the chips for one- to eight-way servers in mid-2005, beating Intel to market Analysts, however, question whether first-to-market will ...

A number of high-powered tech companies have banded together to create a "common antipiracy language." Ignoring the reality that if you can hear it, you can copy it, members of the Coral Consortium want to come up with a set of technology specifications "that will let different kinds of copy protection be translated into other varieties," CNET News...

E-commerce is causing a global turmoil in trade and competition. Those on the frontlines know exactly who is winning and who is losing. According to Reuters, Bill Gates said: "We have to go into the risky areas. That's what's going to allow the United States at the forefront." He further added, "We're at the start of a process where the whole world...

IBM has launched an aggressive bid to grab an even bigger share of the midlevel market for Unix-based servers, where Big Blue has recently made huge gains on competitors IBM launched a family of products built around its Power5 microprocessor and made no bones about its desires to use them and their relatively low price tags -- the line starts at l...

AT&T acknowledged today that it is testing alternative operating systems to the Windows platform it now uses, but said the review is not specifically related to security concerns Mike Dickman, AT&T spokesperson, said reports suggesting AT&T might be considering scrapping Microsoft Windows for Linux are "Fiction. Out of context." He said that AT&T h...

Oracle will enter a Delaware court this week to request an order for dissolution of PeopleSoft's customer assurance program and poison pill "The poison pill is designed to make it more difficult for Oracle to take over the organization. The customer assurance program is designed to compensate customers should there be a takeover. It's a financial l...

The integration of a fingerprint scanner into IBM's new ThinkPad T42 series of notebooks opens the door for a whole host of secure transactions, but some analysts suggest that there are still flaws in the system The new ThinkPad incorporates a finger scanner directly into the notebook. The scan is required to gain log-on access to the portable comp...

It's still at least a year from being available to consumers, but already questions are being raised about whether some parts of Microsoft's Longhorn might actually make the operating system more vulnerable to some relatively primitive kinds of viruses A Symantec security researcher first sounded the alarm at the Virus Bulletin International Confer...

When was the last time you updated your anti-virus software? Even if you update your AV software frequently, there's still a gap between the time a virus is released into the wild on "day zero" and when virus fighters can update their programs to squash the malware....

A new tax rule for U.S. businesses that have moved software development, customer service, and research and development work to India was issued by the Finance Ministry of India (GOI) on September 28. The circular, titled "Circular 5/2004," replaces a circular issued by the Finance Ministry's Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) in January It is im...

For companies that don't rank among the Fortune 500, an incremental approach to CRM often feels most comfortable These smaller companies get their feet wet with sales force automation software or call center and customer care solutions. They build or buy these applications to handle discrete parts of their businesses, the parts in which problems po...

Sun Microsystems faces the prospect of being forced to pay more than US$1 billion in damages now that a federal court jury has found the computer giant's popular Java languages infringed on a patent held by Eastman Kodak After a three-week trial, a jury found that Sun violated a patent that Kodak acquired when it bought Wang Laboratories in 1997....