Roy Mark

UPDATED: WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) delayed a vote on the AT&T and BellSouth merger today and rescheduled the issue for Nov. 3. After delaying the vote from Thursday to Friday at 11 a.m., the commissioners remained sequestered until after 1 p.m., when FCC Chairman Kevin Martin finally cancelled the meeting. An hour […]

AT&T and BellSouth will have to keep the champagne on ice for at least another day. The telephone giants had hoped the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would approve their merger plans Thursday morning, but late Wednesday night the FCC announced it was delaying the vote until at least Friday. “We are committed to evaluating merger […]

UPDATED: The AT&T-BellSouth proposed merger cleared its first regulatory hurdle today with a resounding thumbs up from the Department of Justice (DoJ), which unconditionally approved the $67 billion deal. A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval would make AT&T the largest U.S. provider of landlines with 70 million customers in 22 states. The FCC is scheduled […]

Oracle  agreed to pay a $98.5 million fine Tuesday for inaccurate pricing disclosures made by PeopleSoft to the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). The payment is the largest ever obtained by the United States in a civil settlement under the False Claims Act involving the GSA’s Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) program. James A. Hicks, a […]

Will they, or won’t they? For AT&T and BellSouth, that’s the big question ahead of Thursday when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considers a possible vote on the companies’ proposed $67 billion merger. It’s also the big question for network neutrality proponents, who hope the FCC will attach provisions to the deal requiring equal handling […]

Two Romanian nationals are facing wire fraud and identity fraud charges for their roles in a $150,000 Internet auction scheme. According to a 10-count indictment returned Friday by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles, Teodor Manolache, 29, and Leontin Salageanu, 26, of Northridge, Calif., were involved in organizing bogus auctions for Hurricane Katrina victims. […]

WASHINGTON — “Should Google buy YouTube?” It was the first question asked of keynote speaker Mark Cuban Friday afternoon at an Online News Association conference. “They’d be crazy,” Cuban shot back. The question came amid a swirl of blog and media stories that Google is negotiating to buy the popular online video site for as […]

Chinese hackers are deviling the U.S. Department of Commerce, forcing the agency to replace workstations and bar employee use of the Internet from their own work computers. The targets of the attacks were computers in the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), which oversees a number of commercial U.S. exports having both commercial and military […]

At least three members of the Hewlett-Packard team investigating boardroom media leaks expressed serious concerns over the pretexting tactics used by HP to obtain the personal call logs of board members and journalists. Other members of the team, including Kevin Hunsaker, HP’s point man on the probe, though, eventually ignored the objections. According to media […]

As the hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building began to fill last Thursday for the Hewlett-Packard executives and former board members’ embarrassing day on Capitol Hill, one of my fellow reporters wondered aloud, “Can you believe how much money the lawyers are making out of all this?” Another replied, “Thanks to HP, the […]

WASHINGTON –- Phishing and spam are on a dramatic rise as home users become the prime targets of online criminals. According to a new report by Symantec, phishing attacks were up 81 percent over the last six months and spam jumped 50 percent over the same period. Between January and June of this year, Symantec […]

Before President Bush evens signs a new law aimed at curbing Internet gambling, online gaming companies are preparing to pull out of the lucrative U.S. market. In the early hours of Saturday morning, Congress approved legislation requiring banks and credit card companies to block payments to the estimated 2,300 offshore gambling sites located outside of […]