Articles by Jay Lyman

Research In Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry mobile e-mail device, has gained access to the world's largest handset maker with a licensing deal between Nokia and RIM-rival NTP, which is facing off with the BlackBerry maker in court over a patent dispute The matter has become even more complex as the death of an NTP shareholder has fueled specu...

Akamai Technologies confirmed Wednesday that its distributed network and servers -- which help serve major Web sites including those of Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others -- came under attack Tuesday, calling the denial of service (DoS) "a sophisticated, large-scale attack." Akamai -- which also said the attack was targeted at specific customer si...

Looking to quell fears of delay and signaling it is in the final stages of its newest upgrade to Windows XP, Microsoft released a new beta version of its Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, a long-awaited security and reliability effort that will probably be released within the next two to three months, according to analysts While there have been the us...

Yahoo took its turn this week at raising its level of e-mail storage space, announcing that paying customers would get 2 GB of storage -- double what Google's beta Gmail service provides. Users of Yahoo's free e-mail service will also get a boost -- up to a whopping 100 MB of free storage The move to the 2-GB limit follows Google's announcement of ...

Great Britain's On Demand Distribution (OD2) might be the biggest online music downloader in the region right now, but the company is preparing for battle with the likes of Apple's iTunes and the reborn Napster, unveiling this week its own digital jukebox that will provide pay-as-you-go music for about a dollar per track OD2 said its SonicSelector ...

Among the first to realize the potential of a computer that could be used by individuals and learning students, Alan Kay has been awarded the 2004 Kyoto Prize for his life's work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and elsewhere, which laid the groundwork for today's PC As the winner of the 20th annual award, Kay is being recognized for h...

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has become an increasingly hot market, with new players such as Vonage touting the ability to deliver voice communications for less cost. While there are technical, regulatory and other issues that remain ahead for VoIP, security was highlighted as a chief concern at the VON conference in the UK this week Speaker...

VeriSign's quarterly domain name report indicates that with more than 63 million registered domain names, the Internet's .com and .net top level domain (TLD) names are at an all-time high At the same time, the number of domain names that are actually connected to working Web sites is also on the upswing, with domain registration businesses benefiti...

Microsoft probably does not mind that its monthly round of security patches for June are causing much less of a ruckus than previous months when the company was caught in the middle of a worm war that targeted its Windows systems and forced the company to play catch-up with vulnerabilities that were giving virus writers an edge This month's set of ...

Computer chip challenger AMD unveiled a new family of value processors this week, named Sempron, aiming for the budget desktop and notebook markets that are growing worldwide, and also to allow its Athlon processors to serve higher-end markets The Sunnyvale, California, company said the processors are being made for "day-to-day needs of home and bu...

Networking giant Cisco and server-level antivirus specialist Trend Micro have announced an extension of their existing collaboration to provide worm and virus detection-and-prevention services for businesses A rough year of worm outbreaks and other security issues, such as a source-code leak and a significant vulnerability in Cisco's widely used IO...

In an effort to change the fact that it is often easier to use an Internet search from Google to track down information than it is to find the same kind of content or data lying somewhere on a corporate network, IBM has unveiled a technology called DB2 Information Integrator Big Blue said its new software -- code-named Masala -- delivers faster, be...

Could it be that all of that pornographic spam is working, or is it just that Internet users are quietly peeking at porn behind all of those other browser windows for research, news, shopping and searches? An analysis of the percentage of porn site visits versus search engines, including top portals Google, Yahoo and MSN, and other less provocative...

With funding from Microsoft cofounder and billionaire Paul Allen, the first nongovernment manned rocket ship is set to propel 62 miles from the Earth's surface to reach space in a launch scheduled for June 21st SpaceShipOne, which soared two-thirds of the way to the 100-km, out-of-atmosphere point designated as space for the Ansari X Prize competit...

Intel is moving Pentium 4 and Celeron processor technology and capabilities into the mobile space with four new chips aimed at the desktop-replacement and value-mobile markets The newest mobile chips from Intel -- three Mobile Pentium 4s and a Celeron M -- are not cutting edge and not intended for the mainstream mobile market, but rather take some ...

ATI kicked off the official transition to the faster PCI Express graphics-connection standard this week as it unveiled graphics chips aimed at breaking open the computing bottleneck that can be caused by existing technology, such as AGP and the older PCI format Markham, Ontario-based ATI touted its introduction of the Radeon X800, X600 and X300 Vis...

In a move that keeps it competitive with rival Intel, chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices announced four new desktop processors based on a new 939-pin package that the company said will bolster memory support and boost performance AMD said its four new Athlon 64 processors, which now have memory capabilities similar to its successful Opteron server pr...

Cingular, with help from Lucent Technologies, will use its own employees to test a third-generation (3G), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) wireless network and evaluate services beyond voice, including high-speed data and multimedia The companies said that with an end-to-end UMTS network from Lucent operating in Cingular's 1,900-MH...

Microsoft's Service Pack 2 (SP2) update to the Windows XP operating system is nearing its release, but repeated warnings from the software giant and a bug that bit some users of 64-bit hardware are highlighting the potential negative impact of the service pack, which analysts have called a whole new operating system in its size and scope The bug, w...

Was the term "windows" used in the computing world before Microsoft's Windows operating system first hit the scene in 1985? A U.S. Court of Appeals ruled this week that Microsoft will not be able to make that case to the judge in the Microsoft-Lindows trademark conflict before trial, which now will be held later this year The two companies have bee...