Articles by Jay Lyman

Faced with a far more urgent need to support more Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, the Asian nations of Japan, South Korea and China are looking to lead the move to IPv6, considered by many to be the next-generation Internet Unlike the United States -- which still has a bountiful supply of the Internet addresses that connect separate networks and ...

Topping other popular culture icons including Harry Potter, American Idol and Britney Spears among Web searches by millions of Yahoo users worldwide, the Kazaa file-trading music tool was the number one search subject of 2003, Yahoo reported this week "Music and multimedia continue to dominate America's online mindshare as Kazaa, the world's most p...

A New York technology industry research firm confirmed the complaints of consumers, analysts, office workers and lawmakers by blaming the unsolicited e-mail known as spam for nearly US$20 billion in lost time and expenses worldwide On the basis of several factors, such as productivity and bandwidth losses, New York consulting firm Basex reported th...

Apple has responded to a series of security threats, including a vulnerability that might have granted would-be attackers root access and total control over systems running Mac OS X 10.3.2 and earlier versions. That Directory Services vulnerability, patched along with other holes in a security update available from Apple, is mitigated by the fact ...

The rate at which Americans are adopting cable and DSL high-speed Internet connections and going online slowed at the end of the year. But this slowing rate of growth is balanced by U.S. subscribers using the Internet for more types of activities, such as online banking and financial transactions, which grew more than any other genre of activity Tw...

Not to be left out of lawsuits being launched by rivals AOL and Amazon, Microsoft has announced that after a six-month investigation and collaboration with New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, it has filed parallel lawsuits against a New York spamming ring accused of sending billions of "illegal and deceptive e-mail messages." Microsoft a...

A Norwegian court has upheld a lower court exoneration of the man charged with cracking Hollywood's copy-protection technology for DVD movies. The software crack, known as DeCSS, earned then 15-year-old Jon Johansen the nickname 'DVD Jon.' Now 20 years old, Johansen was cleared when a three-judge panel rejected charges that he had accessed DVD movi...

All of the thousands of subpoenas filed by the Recording Industry Association of America in its legal pursuit of accused illegal Internet file traders have been invalidated by a court ruling against the industry association Since September, the RIAA has launched three waves of lawsuits against individual computer users alleged to have traded copyri...

A lawsuit over riches and arms achieved while playing an online video game might sound bizarre, but the Chinese court that heard the case has ordered the video game company to return the virtual booty to the 24-year-old who filed the suit According to Chinese news service Xinhuanet, The Beijing Chaoyang District People's Court ordered the maker of...

Adding to its arsenal to launch an offensive in the growing market for enterprise content-management software, IBM announced another acquisition this week, this time of document-management specialist Green Pasture Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the move represents IBM's third content-management acquisition since 2002. The other two acqui...

The Canadian equivalent of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has signaled that it might follow the U.S. model of launching lawsuits against individuals accused of illegal music trading, which the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) blames for CAN$425 million in lost sales annually Although the Canadian Copyright Board ...

Backing up its declarations that it will refocus on core competencies and protect and grow its communication strength, mobile phone maker Motorola has selected former Sun Microsystems president Edward Zander as its new chairman and chief executive officer Zander, 56, will take the helm of a 75-year-old company that grew into a top communications an...

Claiming that industry-accepted, association-endorsed CD burning technology in use by several hardware and software companies is infringing on its own 1997 patent, Optima Technology has sued rival Roxio in an attempt to enforce its patent protections The suit, filed in federal court in Orange County, California, late last week, could have implicati...

It may have been a long time coming, but Microsoft's newest Service Pack 2 for Windows XP -- soon to be released for beta testing -- represents several significant changes to the software Many of the updates and new features, which analysts have said could amount to an entirely different operating system altogether, center on security: default fire...

In clarifying what is legal for Canadian online music fans, the Canadian Copyright Board ruled that downloading music files from peer-to-peer networks is acceptable. However, the board declared that uploading music files is illegal and also approved a levy on digital music players based on their storage capacity The government fees -- charged to ma...

In a move that falls in line with analyst predictions about offshore outsourcing, IBM plans to move nearly 5,000 software programming jobs to India and other foreign nations beginning next year, according to a published report Yankee Group program manager Andy Efstathiou told TechNewsWorld that in addition to the cost-savings advantages of offshori...

An alleged sender of unsolicited e-mail whose success earned him the title of "spam king" has been arrested in Virginia in what is being called the first felony prosecution of a spammer in the United States Virginia officials, who announced the arrest with AOL, MCI and UUNet -- charged that Jeremy Jaynes, 29, also known as Jeremy James and Gaven St...

Portability and price have combined to fuel consumer thirst for personal computers, according to IDC findings on worldwide PC shipments -- a trend the company says will be matched by more corporate spending through 2004 Updating its Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, IDC forecast "record levels" for 2003 and 2004, with the total number of PC shipments...

At the same time that a judge's call for evidence sent SCO Group's stock price lower, the Lindon, Utah-based company was taking a hit on its Web site, against which attackers launched a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that also knocked some of the company's internal operations offline SCO, hit by a similar Web site attack earlier this summer, has be...

Microsoft's new monthly-patching policy is getting put to the test as several vulnerabilities, such as another Internet Explorer hole disclosed this week, present attackers with opportunity The latest IE hole -- announced by Secunia, the same Danish security company that disclosed a separate, critical hole in Internet Explorer late last month -- co...