Jim Wagner

Telecom carrier Alltel has made a move to become a pure-play wireless phone provider, shedding its wireline operations to Valor Communications Group for approximately $9.1 billion. The deal, subject to approvals from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Internal Revenue Service, affected state Public Utilities Commissions (PUC) and shareholders, was struck in a concession to […]

The infamous Sober worm is set to rear its ugly head again in a New Year’s activity that has security officials expecting the worst. Security experts at iDefense reverse-engineered the latest Sober variant and discovered the code will automatically download some unknown code on Jan. 5, 2006, the anniversary of the founding of the Nazi […]

The database holding the contact information for registered domain names is still plagued with inaccurate entries, a problem that’s the root cause for much of the Web-based trickery on the Internet. A November report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), published Wednesday, shows 5 percent of all domain names ending in .com, .net and […]

What does software vendor Palamida and a box of cereal have in common? Both list their ingredients so its consumers aren’t left guessing what went into the product. While it may lag well behind Corn Flakes in the disclosure race, Palamida is leading the rest of the commercial software industry with the disclosure Wednesday of […]

UPDATED: Microsoft said it will appeal an antitrust decision reached by the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) Wednesday. The consumer protection agency found the Redmond, Wash., software giant and Microsoft Korea abused its dominant market position when it bundled Windows Media Player (WMP) and MSN Messenger to the Windows operating system, as well as Windows […]

Customers are a little closer to having a shiny new CD with Windows Server 2003 R2 in their hands. Microsoft released its updated server software to manufacturing Tuesday, six months after public beta tests began on the updated technology. A public beta of the software was released in May showing off the new additions to […]

Anyone expecting a lot of progress at last week’s International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meeting in Vancouver, Canada, last week likely came away disappointed. But that doesn’t mean ICANN didn’t accomplish something at its third of three meetings in 2005. The ICANN board of directors gave a provisional thumbs-up for .asia during […]

Device discovery vendor nLayers is giving administrators a whole new view of its network with the built-in ability to find network and storage devices. The San Jose, Calif.-based company launched the capability in its point update to nLayers InSight, version 4.5, Monday. InSight is an agent-less — meaning administrators don’t have to install a file […]

Two years in the making, Microsoft is hoping to bridge the CRM gap with its competitors in its latest production. Microsoft hopes to bridge the gap between its former CRM product, version 1.2 launched in December 2003, and what’s been available for some time among its competitors, including SAP , Oracle , Siebel and Salesforce.com […]

Identity and access management experts RSA Security got a little more secure with the $145 million purchase of anti-fraud and anti-phishing software vendor Cyota. The deal, the combination of a cash and stock purchase buyout, is expected to close within 30 days, according to RSA Security officials Monday. RSA Security officials also announced an engineering […]

Product lifecycle management (PLM) vendor Arena Solutions is making a play for the big leagues, expanding its hosted software past the mid-market. Officials at the Menlo Park, Calif., software developer launched its third update for the year, Arena PLM Fall ’05, with an enterprise edition to join its workgroup and professional versions. “On demand has […]

Professional open source vendor JBoss continues its climb up the middlware stack with the purchase of a distributed transaction manager critical for mission-critical Web services environments. The organization acquired for an undisclosed amount the Arjuna Transaction Service Suite (ArjunaTS) from U.K.-based Arjuna Technologies and Hewlett-Packard Monday. The technology is a high-end component in the middleware […]