Tech Buzz

Last week was defined largely by two interesting stories. One had Apple bringing some manufacturing back to the U.S., and the other revolved around the outcome of the latest trial between Apple and Samsung. It shows you how hard it is to read a judge, though. I thought Judge Lucy Koh would likely ra...

TECH TREK

China Toughens Smartphone Standards

New smartphone regulations in China have caused concern among technology companies. The regulations, which would add a new layer of licensing and testing for smartphones, reportedly were filed to a WTO database of technical barriers to trade. They were submitted by China's Ministry of Industry and I...

The iTunes store has opened up in Russia and a slew of other countries that were previously left off its coverage map. The 56-country expansion nearly doubles the number of countries in which iTunes is now available. Turkey, India and South Africa were also part of the launch, which Apple says will ...

The UN-sponsored World Conference on International Telecommunications, which will feature government regulators from 193 countries, opened Monday, prompting fears that the meeting could ultimately damage Internet freedom. The UN's International Telecommunications Union reportedly is trying to allay ...

OPINION

How Lenovo Is Resurrecting the PC

I spent much of last week hanging out with Lenovo. Although much of what we chat about in those meetings can't be repeated, one thing I can talk about is how Lenovo almost stands alone in defending the PC. While there seems to be a consensus that the PC is dead and being stomped into its grave by wa...

TECH TREK

Syria's Internet Silence Enters Day 2

Internet and mobile phone service has been cut off throughout war-ravaged Syria. The Syrian government blamed terrorists for the outage. Activists, on the other hand, have warned that Internet and phone blackouts commonly precede military operations in isolated areas. The networking firm Renesys rep...

Germany's parliament on Thursday began discussing legislation that would allow the nation's news publishers to charge search engines for displaying links to, and snippets of, news articles. Before debate began, Google launched a very public campaign on its German site asking the public to oppose the...

TECH TREK

Chinese Media Accuse Cisco of Lax Security

China's state-run media could be in the early stages of a wave of attacks against U.S. telecommunications giant Cisco. A pair of Chinese media outlets -- China Economy and Informatization and the Caijing National Weekly -- reportedly singled out Cisco on the same day, calling for the company to be i...

On Cyber Money -- the Super Bowl, if you will, of online shopping -- U.S. authorities seized some 130 domain names in several countries to prevent them from selling counterfeit merchandise. This is the third straight year authorities have launched a Cyber Monday counterfeit crackdown. Websites selli...

After seeing the new Microsoft offerings, Steve Wozniak recently lamented that Microsoft is now out innovating Apple. Wozniak is the surviving founder of Apple, and his perspective clearly is important, but he was the guy who got the product to work. It was the other Steve who was largely responsib...

The committee reviewing applications for new top-level domains has publicized more than 250 objections to dozens of them, along with the reasons behind the responses. The Internet Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers' Government Advisory Committee, which represents about 50 governments worldwide...

Legendary Australian rock band AC/DC, which had long been queasy about digital formats, has released its music on Apple's iTunes store. AC/DC previously asserted that it wouldn't make individual songs available digitally because each song was part of an album. And the band didn't want to break its...

TECH TREK

Israel Bombarded by Millions of Hack Attempts

More than 44 million hacking attempts have been made on Israel's government websites since last week, when it unleashed 20 air strikes and killed Hamas' top military commander, the Israeli government announced Sunday. Israel's finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, said only one hack was successful, alth...

We've had a couple of weeks to think about the election outcome, and both sides are positioning the results around the issues. This has become so divisive that there is a significant move by Texas to exit the United States and become a country. I've spent some time looking at this, and the real reas...

The plot thickened in the Microsoft saga involving Steven Sinofsky as the former head of Windows took to the blogosphere to set the record straight on rumors he attempted to make a power grab. Among the questions now being debated is whether Sinofsky initiated discussions about merging the Windows a...

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