Jim Wagner

The Federal Communications Commission is bent on rewriting the rules established by the Telecom Act of 1996, a necessary change for broadband to move forward, said Michael Powell, the agency’s chairman Tuesday to a group of U.S. businesspeople. Speaking at the broadband technology summit conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Powell earlier this week […]

Level 3 Communications Inc. , officials announced Thursday the $122 million purchase of Software Spectrum Inc., pending shareholder approval. The Level 3 buyout comes just a couple months after it finished the acquisition and integration of another software distribution company, Corporate Software. The two companies, along with (i)Structure, will provide back office services to Level […]

Calling all Bluelight.com shoppers, as of Tuesday you now have 10 MB of e-mail space in your inbox and email access from your computer, thanks to a contract announced Tuesday with Synacor, Inc. The enhanced e-mail offering is just one of several value-added services the San Francisco-based Bluelight.com is launching in the coming weeks to […]

Melissa e-mail virus author David Smith was sentenced to 20 months in a federal penitentiary by the U.S. District Court in New Jersey Wednesday, according to news reports. Smith was apprehended in 1999, after Federal Bureau of Investigations officials found him residing in his brother’s house in Eatontown, N.J. The Associated Press quotes Smith as […]

On paper, it looks like Comcast had a good first quarter in 2002, with a pro forma revenue increase of 12 percent and pro forma operating cash flow growth of 18.3 percent, for a reported $2.673 billion in consolidated revenues, officials announced Wednesday. But the company posted a net loss of $88.9 million for the […]

WorldCom, Inc. saw the end of an era Tuesday with the announcement Bernard Ebbers, president and chief executive officer, is resigning. With the resignation comes a changing of the guard, as the data and Internet arm takes precedence at the executive level, a sign of the changing times for the long-distance and Internet provider. Long-distance […]

Level 3 Communications, Inc. officials announced Monday the expansion of its current contract with a major national Internet service provider (ISP), the second in a week. Building on its current contract with EarthLink, Inc. , in another 18 markets, Level 3 is proving two things: one, that dial-up isn’t dead (however much broadband providers wish […]

Officials at Parisian entertainment and media company Vivendi Universal suspect foul play and have filed a generic criminal claim Monday morning against those responsible for virtually hijacking votes at a recent shareholders meeting. The security breach throws the entire process of online interaction at Vivendi into question and could result in a throwback measure of […]

The DeceptiveDuo, a pair of hackers who made waves in the security world earlier in the week, struck again late Friday, this time breaking into the database at the Defense Department’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). As seems to be the hackers’ modus operandi, two database screenshots were taken and posted on two hacked Office of […]

The European Union wants to throw the book at cyber criminals and is giving its member nations 20 months to get everything in order to accommodate the necessary changes. The proposed framework decision, released April 19, adresses cracking and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Calling for a mandatory jail sentence of “no less than […]

Business is taking a sudden, and horrible, shift at industry giant VeriSign on Friday after most of Wall Street’s biggest investment names downgraded the company after disappointing news Thursday after the bell. In all, 11 firms signaled its lack of faith in VeriSign’s restructuring program, which includes further integration of recent acquisitions and the reduction […]

VeriSign’s newest customers have a hard time believing the registrar’s motto, “The Value of Trust,” after seven months of billing problems that put them out hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole. Add to that rumors on Internet posting sites of a massive round of layoffs at the world’s largest registrar before its first […]