Realizing there are more professional vocations in the world than just medicine, the law, and two others, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is easing its earlier restrictions on the .PRO top-level domain.

The .PRO domain, which is maintained by RegistryPro, was launched in 2004 for exclusive use by certain industry professionals: accounting, law, medicine, and engineering. Up to now, qualified professionals seeking a domain name ending in .PRO also had to live in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, or Germany. Now, the lifting of those restrictions by ICANN will open .PRO to such far-fetched possibilities as attorneys in Japan or engineers in Australia.

Continue reading →

After US Sec. of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez returned from a visit to China in December, his department's IT infrastructure suffered a rash of attempted break-ins. A probe is now under way to find out if the two events are related.

The main questions seem to be whether data had been copied off of the laptop the former Kellogg's CEO took on his frequent trips to China. Sec. Gutierrez declined comment to the press, and declined to speculate how a compromise to his system could have happened.

Continue reading →

Must every spreadsheet you ever use until the end of recorded time be an "Excel spreadsheet?" A protocol for making functional data more versatile for Web portals, so users can choose their own tools, is taking its next evolutionary step.

The definition of "portal" with regard to the Web changes by the year; and while sites such as Yahoo would like for it to still be somewhat synonymous with "home page," today, Web services engineers use the term to mean some central location where Web services can be used collectively. And though sites such as Google have tried to instantiate that vision by making JavaScript widgets collectible together through pages such as iGoogle, Web engineers today have a more functional vision in mind: They see the next "portal" as the network-empowered equivalent of yesterday's "desktop."

Continue reading →

Led by a 43 percent boom in PC notebooks, Dell's sales of products and services climbed to $16.08 billion over the company's most recent quarter.

At this time last year, analysts were talking about the greatness of Dell, Inc. in the past tense. Yesterday, what's past is present again, as the company's sales growth has exceeded industry averages across servers, storage and PC desktops, according to Dell CEO Michael Dell.

Continue reading →

auctionPAL.com, an online retail "middleman" , has set up a program where users auction off their goods with the proceeds going to relief efforts in Myanmar and China.

The site joins the efforts of Web giants like Google, which offers its eponymous checkouts linked to UNICEF and Direct Relief International aid programs for the Myanmar cyclone.

Continue reading →

Since last November, NBC has been developing a service separate from its Hulu venture for downloading shows after they've aired, and watching them offline. But the initial beta suffered setbacks, so now it's gearing up for a second try.

NBC is expected to launch its NBC Direct online download service sometime in the next two months, in an effort to iron out as many problems it can before launching the service publicly this summer.

Continue reading →

Giving credit to industry deals with Microsoft, SAP, and Hewlett-Packard, Novell reported a year-over-year sales jump of 31 percent for its Linux software in its quarterly financial results yesterday.

"Overall, product revenue was up 7 percent year over year, driven by our three growth businesses: Linux, identity, and systems management," said Novell CEO Ronald Hovsepian, in a conference call held with financial analysts to discuss Novell's results for its second fiscal quarter of 2008, which ended on April 30.

Continue reading →

During Memorial Day weekend, Internet TV network Revision3 was brought down by a denial-of-service attack traced back to anti-P2P company MediaDefender.

Revision3 CEO and former PC Magazine editor-in-chief Jim Louderback provided a detailed report about the DoS attack on his P2P streaming program service, and the distinct trail of packets leading back to MediaDefender.

Continue reading →

In one more demonstration that it's taking a different stance with regard to the intellectual property it uses, Microsoft has dropped its objection to an IEEE working group making use of a Web services protocol it developed for Vista.

Removing a roadblock that might have continued to prevent an alliance of printer and tools manufacturers from implementing a Web services-based specification for document scanning devices, Microsoft announced yesterday it will go ahead and provide its Scan Service Definition 1.0 for Web Services on Devices, to the IEEE's Printer Working Group.

Continue reading →

After South Africa voiced its objections to how the Open XML standards ratification proceedings were conducted, the standards bodies of both India and Brazil are registering similar complaints.

The IEC has confirmed that it received two additional appeals from India and Brazil before the deadline. A fourth country is said to have considered filing an appeal, but the standards body has not confirmed this, and declined to say how many appeals it had received.

Continue reading →

Can the recent plague of technical problems affecting text communications service Twitter be blamed on the language on which its platform was designed? Earlier, the company said no...but some within the company are hinting otherwise.

Two weeks ago, following the rapid spread of rumors that the Twitter service -- recently besieged with technical troubles -- may be abandoning the Ruby on Rails development platform in building a replacement platform for itself, the company's co-founder Biz Stone flat out refuted those rumors in a comment to BetaNews.

Continue reading →

The update to Apple's operating system fixes a multitude of its security vulnerabilities, but some users are reporting issues with graphics and Adobe CS3 after upgrading.

Along with fixing issues with incorrect fonts, video and audio playback, and wireless network connectivity, at least two dozen security issues were patched.

Continue reading →

Members of Google's Android team leveraged Google's I/O conference this week as a launch platform for demos of new Android features, ranging from an application launcher called Notifications to a compass-based StreetView application.

The Android mobile development will probably become available in the second half of this year, said members of Google's Android team at the company's I/O conference in San Francisco this week, who gave a first-time demo of an Android prototype device.

Continue reading →

As the Beijing Olympics approach, the testing deadline draws nearer for a technology infrastructure which has been built exclusively for the games by Lenovo. So the company is staging a dress rehearsal.

Lenovo reports over 30,000 pieces of its equipment will be used (desktop and notebook systems, servers, monitors, etc.) during the 2008 Summer Olympics, with some 580 of its engineers working on site.

Continue reading →

An effort to effectively benchmark the relative speed of OpenOffice applications has turned up evidence that its applications have become slower with each new version.

Users wanting to break away from Microsoft Windows and Office have had little viable alternatives when looking for competing products. Many of those interested in something other than Microsoft Office have chosen the OpenOffice suite of software, which offers programs and services similar to Microsoft's software suite.

Continue reading →