Jim Wagner

Microsoft , feeling the heat from one open standard for Office documents, is championing another. The company is submitting its Microsoft Office Open XML file format to Ecma International as an open-standard submission with the hope it will one day become an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard. The file format is the underlying document […]

UPDATED: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against Sony BMG on Monday. Two other legal firms, Green Welling and Lerach, Coughlin, Stoia, Geller, Rudman and Robbins, joined the digital consumer advocacy group in the suit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The lawsuit is the EFF’s response to the music giant’s […]

Security software vendor McAfee is pooling quarantine queues from its appliances to make them more manageable for administrators. The McAfee Quarantine Manager is a free add-on component to the Secure Messaging Gateway and Secure Internet Gateway appliances. It provides a central repository for questionable e-mails that hit a corporate network — spam, viruses, potentially unwanted […]

People are making a lot of fuss over application program interfaces (APIs) . Nowhere is this more prevalent than the buzz generated earlier this week by auction giant eBay’s intention to eliminate the membership fee to its developer program and any charges for API calls made through its unified schema. EBay has allowed access to […]

Microsoft has high expectations for its upcoming line of Dynamics software. It announced today a chairman of the division by promoting Doug Burgum, senior vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) business group, to fill the role. Burgum is slated to spearhead Redmond’s transition of its disparate line of software within MBS — Great Plains, […]

If you want to catch more fish, bring a bigger net. Microsoft is applying that adage to its anti-phishing efforts by signing up with three data providers to cast a wider net on known phishing Web sites. Cyota, Internet Identity and MarkMonitor will each deliver regular updates of known phishing Web sites to use with […]

On a 423-0 vote Wednesday the U.S. House of Representatives approved a “Sense of the Congress” resolution to keep the Internet in U.S. control. The resolution carries no weight of law and only expresses the House’s opinion. Rep. John Doolittle of California’s 4th District introduced the resolution Oct. 18 to stress his position that the […]

Sun Microsystem’s latest development tool catering to high-performance computing (HPC) environments is now available as a free download. Sun Studio 11, available on the company’s Web site, takes advantage of 32-bit and 64-bit applications and multi-core processors. Registration to the free-to-join Sun Developer Network (SDN) is required for the download. The developer tool is one […]

After months of rhetoric, noise and backroom lobbying over an international body assuming oversight of the Internet domain naming system from the U.S., the debate ended with an anti-climactic 11th hour agreement. The U.N. agreed Tuesday to leave the role of Internet governance in the hands of the United States. “We recognize that the existing […]

Sony BMG is recalling the copyright-protected music CDs that have been causing no end of grief to the company. The recall comes in the wake of a large number of security issues surrounding the use of Extended Copyright Protection (XCP), a digital rights management (DRM) application created by U.K.-based First 4 Internet, and the applications […]

The U.S. House of Representatives plans to ease any doubt the United Nations may have regarding Internet governance. The House Tuesday will look at a resolution to keep the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) under U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) control. The “Sense of the Congress “resolution also wants to keep the […]

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) group is throwing the doors open to its software patent library today. But you won’t have to worry about late fees or need a library card. The organization’s repository of all the public software patent pledges made by tech companies to the open source community went live Tuesday at […]