Jim Wagner

The Recording Industry Association of America was the victim of a hack Wednesday, forcing network administrators to shut down the site and look for the hole in its Web server. The RIAA has drawn the scorn of legions of Internet denizens in recent years for its stance on Internet radio broadcast fees and peer-to-peer networking. […]

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) called on telecom regulators Tuesday night to drop their plans to reclassify high-speed Internet service as an “information service with a telecommunications component,” saying the proposed rule would wipe out independent Internet service providers (ISPs) around the nation. Instead, the Office of Advocacy proposes digital subscriber line (DSL) service […]

Americans need a place to go online, and most go to one of three places, according to a recent survey by research firm IDC Monday. According to the survey, 84 percent of U.S. online households go to either AOL , MSN or Yahoo! to check out the latest news, chat with friends or read their […]

That crashing sound you hear is the sound of an entire niche industry collapsing. VeriSign’s controversial call for a waiting list service was passed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) late last week, despite objections raised earlier by one of its supporting organizations. After a six-month grace period on expired domain […]

District Judge Colleen McMahon ruled Friday against British Telecommunication’s claim it had developed and patented what is today known as the hyperlink, saying Prodigy is not liable for retroactive licensing fees for using the service. Prodigy, a dial up Internet service provider based out of Texas, was a test case for the U.K. telecom giant, […]

The Internet Society (ISOC) Thursday fired back at charges that it wasn’t qualified to take over the .org domain registry, after an interim evaluation by a team of experts from the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) placed it at the top of a heap of bidders Tuesday. ISOC was the only one […]

Almost every national Internet service provider in the U.S. has had a comprehensive broadband policy in place for years; that is, except for the largest one in the world. America Online, the AOL Time Warner unit with more than 33 million dial-up subscribers in the U.S. and abroad, has been surprisingly reticent to date about […]

SBC Communications officials announced Wednesday the launch this fall of digital subscriber line (DSL) service aimed at both dial-up Internet users and high-end consumer needs. The goal, SBC officials said, is to provide a “personalized” DSL experience for all types of consumers and small businesses. That experience will “meet virtually every need, every budget and […]

After a month-long delay, an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) team selected Tuesday its choice for ownership of the .org domain extension. The domain was on the block as part of a deal between ICANN and registry VeriSign, which agreed to let go of .org to keep control over .com and extend […]

A new encryption mode joins 16 others Tuesday for consideration by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a security mode using the advanced encryption standard (AES). RSA Security, Inc. , Hifn and MacFergus BV teamed up to create Counter with CBC (cipher block chaining) MAC (message authentication code), a packet technology that […]

A practice used by many telecom carriers — bandwidth swapping –has come under the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) gun, and any company that participated in the practice may be force to restate its revenues. According to a report in the Washington Post, the SEC sent the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants a memo […]

As digital wireless phone carriers look for ways to bring on new customers, and keep the ones they have, Cingular Wireless has found one that gives customers real value: rolling over unused minutes to the next month. The strategy’s twofold for the subsidiary of BellSouth Corp. and SBC Communications ; one, it differentiates its service […]