Larry Barrett

CA on Thursday unveiled PC Tune-Up and PC Tune-Up Plus, a pair of cloud-based computer optimization applications that promise to clean up hard drives, identify and repair performance problems and incorporate antivirus and antispyware protection. Company officials said PC Tune-Up lets users performance scans for up to three PCs from a single location. The integrated […]

Total venture capital spending increased 17 percent in the third quarter to more than $4.8 billion, but investments in privately held software companies fell to its lowest level since 1996. Thanks mainly to its relatively low initial startup costs and its home run potential in the equities market, the software sector for years has either […]

An enterprising hacker this week sent an unsolicited and unremovable message to Dutch iPhone users, illustrating how their jailbroken devices were vulnerable to attacks and demanding a small fee in exchange for instructions to remove the hack. “Your iPhone’s been hacked because it’s really insecure!” the message read. “Please visit doiop.com/iHacked and secure your phone […]

McAfee on Wednesday debuted its latest security appliance for small and midsized businesses, a product that promises the highest level of e-mail and Web browsing security in the cloud with minimal system administration responsibilities. McAfee (NYSE: MFE) Email and Web Security Appliance 5.5 is the security software firm’s first appliance that links to global threat […]

Macintosh computers have long been thought to be overlooked by malware and phishing attacks, but they are becoming more and more popular with hackers and other online scam artists, prompting security software vendors to cook up Mac versions of antivirus applications. Kaspersky Lab rolled out Anti-Virus for Mac today, the latest in a string of […]

A trio of tech heavyweights on Tuesday announced an alliance that’s targeting the lucrative corporate datacenter market where enterprise customers are racing to virtualize their data workloads and develop private cloud architecture for disparate applications and business processes. Executives at the three companies said the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition will “help organizations simplify and […]

The long arm of the law finally caught up to a 46-year-old Falls Church, Va., man last week when a U.S. district court judge sentenced the convicted software pirate to 41 months in prison and ordered him to pay more than $743,000 in restitution to Adobe Systems. Gregory William Fair, who pleaded guilty to one […]

Facebook last month was awarded $711.2 million in damages last month by a Northern California judge who found that self-proclaimed “Spam King” Sanford Wallace violated the Federal Trade Commission’s Can-Spam Act. The default judgment, issued on Sept. 18 in a U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., found that Wallace “willfully violated” a temporary restraining […]

VMware shares shed $1.47, or 4 percent, to $39.52 in afternoon trading Friday following a downgrade from Goldman Sachs analyst Derek Bingham. Bingham, a longtime VMware bull, cut the stock from a “buy” recommendation to “neutral,” citing the stock’s high valuation (currently trading at a price-to-earnings ratio of 62.70) and the fact that it was […]

A new Trojan called “W32.Silon” is the latest headache for online banks and their customers, packing a one-two punch that helps it evade security tokens and steal customer log-in information at the same time. The two-headed Trojan, according to online security software vendor Trusteer, uses a “two-pronged payload” to steal log-in information and commit financial […]

As many as 68,000 members of CalOptima, the Medicaid plan for Orange County, California, are contacting their credit agencies and checking their bank accounts this week after several CDs containing their personal information vanished in the mail. The unspecified number of missing discs included patient data including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, medical diagnoses and […]

Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) easily eclipsed analysts’ expectations in its second quarter Wednesday even though its quarterly revenue slipped a little over 3 percent compared to the year-ago quarter. For the quarter, the world’s largest security software vendor earned $150 million, or $0.18 a share, up from $126 million and $0.15 a share in the year-ago […]