Internet

THIS WEEK IN TECH

The E-Book Empire Strikes

Apple held most of the music industry virtually at knifepoint for years, and that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if you were a consumer who wanted a legal way to get popular music at a fairly reasonable price. It was only about a year ago that iTunes let go of its dollar-store policy and...

Twitter users have come under attack from scammers once again, and the microblogging site has asked several users to reset their passwords. This latest attempt came through torrent file-sharing sites that contained hidden security exploits and backdoors. Opinion is divided as to whether these securi...

Google promoted its Social Search experiment to beta status on Wednesday. Social Search adds information and images from users' public pages to the results of online searches conducted by members of their social network. Users need a Google profile to get results from Social Search. Social has been ...

The Chinese government issued a series of statements defending the country's Internet censorship policies and accusing the U.S. of having a "double standard" when it comes to online surveillance. The comments, made through the state news agency Xinhua, were in part a reaction to statements made by ...

OPINION

The Rise of Digital Maoism

One might guess that a computer scientist who is touted as a pioneer of virtual reality would be a fan of that whole social media thing. After all, Jaron Lanier works as a genius-in-residence of sorts at Microsoft, which is one of several big companies pushing cloud computing, the technological inno...

People who use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are not known for their reticence -- many put just about any personal information imaginable out there. The risks to such openness are clear -- from inviting tailored phishing attacks to appalling potential employers with one's late...

WEEK IN REVIEW

Google to China: Tear Down This Wall

For lots of U.S. Internet companies, doing business in China is virtually a no-brainer -- the market opens up well over a billion new potential customers. The only downside is the Chinese government's pet peeve regarding public dissent. It sponsors what has to be the biggest censorship operation on ...

In 13 years of covering technology, I've evolved into the journalistic equivalent of Blanche DuBois; I've always depended on the kindness of analysts. Whether they were securities analysts working for the big Wall Street firms or technology analysts toiling for the major research companies targeting...

Following a hack attempt on Google originating in China, the Web search powerhouse stood up to the country's government and declared it would no longer cooperate with its censorship laws. In fact, it may stop doing business in China altogether. Doing that would cost Google hundreds of millions of do...

Social media is changing the expectations of consumers in the digital channel. Consumers now demand more transparency from companies. They want more than just the one-way conversation of traditional advertising. Consumers are no longer visitors to sites; they are active users of the Web. They expect...

Facebook has partnered with McAfee to improve the social network's security measures. The arrangement will have McAfee remotely clean up Facebook subscribers' PCs if the social networking site detects that the computer is infected. These subscribers will also see an ad for a six-month free subscript...

Google is continuing its march to put the desktop on the Web, with its offer to store files as large as 250 MB in Google Docs. Google is offering 1 GB of free storage for files that are not converted into one of the Google Docs formats -- such as Google documents, spreadsheets or presentation. If mo...

Just a month ago, Facebook overhauled the privacy settings for its 350 million or so users and was targeted in an FTC complaint as a result -- yet company CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday suggested that online privacy has faded in importance in recent years. "When we got started in my dorm room at Harv...

Twitter, Pandora Internet radio and other popular smartphone apps are hitting the road, thanks to Ford Motor Company's Thursday announcement of forthcoming dashboard technologies that will soon be available in a wider, more affordable range of its cars. Ford CEO Alan Mulally, along with other compan...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Wednesday took the stage to deliver a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Ballmer showcased products from several partners at the event, including a tablet device made by HP. He also announced a tie-in with HP to promote the Bing search engin...

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