The federal privacy commissioner in Canada is now investigating allegations that Facebook may be illegally collecting personal information such as telephone numbers, birthdays, and instant messaging addresses without authorization.
Entered by law students at the University of Ottawa, the complaint charges that Facebook is committing a total of 22 infractions of Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).
Joining the ranks of heavyweights Google, Facebook, and MySpace, social widget startup Gigya has opened the beta of its social sharing platform Gigya Socialize.
Promptly following the $9.5 million investment the company received in March, Gigya Socialize falls in line with Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, and MySpace Data Availability.
Time Warner Cable -- an entity now being completely spun off from Time Warner Inc. -- is readying a new wireless cable modem aimed at offering Internet-based video as one of its "channels."
"Right now, it's pretty hard to get Internet stuff on your TV," said Time Warner Cable President and CEO Glenn Britt, during the Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York on Friday.
RedOffice, the suite of Office products based upon OpenOffice.org and optimized for Chinese users has received a new UI in its 4.0 beta.
Harkening to the famed Office 2007 ribbon interface, RedOffice's new UI has been designed to, as the group says, "provide a work area with a simple graphic interface, so that use is more concise and efficient."
Dish Network says their new software no longer infringes on TiVo's patents, but the DVR maker disagrees.
Last week, TiVo CEO Tom Rogers said his company believes Dish Network's new software still infringes on its patents, and was asking for an injunction to block DISH from using it immediately. On Friday, EchoStar responded by launching a new suit, essentially asking the court to validate its software as legal and non-infringing.
For years, Microsoft hasn't really had serious competition in the general-purpose applications space. But if Adobe succeeds in transplanting its Acrobat brand into word processing and online services, Microsoft could have a fight on its hands.
Originally, "Adobe Acrobat" described its reader for Portable Document Format files, and the software used to create them. As "PDF" evolved to become a brand in its own right, Adobe shifted the "Acrobat" moniker to refer more exclusively to the software used to generate PDF files.
Are you in the market for a really good deal on a computer cart, a wooden office desk, or a living room couch? How about a 30-foot patrol boat, or your very own weather station? Nassau County, New York may have a deal for you.
Even if you're on a very low budget, you might find something to your liking in an online auction now being held by New York State's Nassau County. As of Friday afternoon, $1,700 was the top bid for a patrol boat once used by police officers to chase criminals in the waterways in and around Nassau County's Long Island turf.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.