Roy Mark

WASHINGTON — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off a national 20-city “Security Summit” tour by the Redmond giant with a nod to the company’s new alliance with Sun Microsystems and a poke at Linux distributor Red Hat . Ballmer told a packed luncheon event hosted by the Business Software Alliance and the Center for Strategic […]

WASHINGTON — Internet telephony should be exempt from carrier access charges, state taxes and local regulations, United States Senator John Sununu (R-N.H.) and Congressman Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) said Friday at a Capitol Hill press conference. The two lawmakers said they would introduce legislation in the next few days mandating Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications […]

The Federal Communications Commission has been dealt a setback after a federal court declined to hear an FCC appeal over how it classifies cable broadband providers. The Wednesday ruling, by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, means the cable industry may no longer be able to call its cable modems an information service, which frees […]

A congressional subcommittee voted late Wednesday afternoon to criminalize copyright infringement for peer-to-peer users who “knowingly and willfully trade 1,000 or more copyrighted works with other P2P users.” The maximum penalty under the proposed legislation carries a three-year prison sentence. Known as the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2004, the bill’s criminal provisions also […]

WASHINGTON — The trade relationship between China and the United States is growing but its pace is being threatened by some of Beijing’s current policies, particularly in the area of technology, a U.S. trade representative told a congressional subcommittee Wednesday morning. With the U.S.-China Joint Commission on Trade scheduled to meet April 21-22, the House […]

WASHINGTON — The offshoring of United States technology jobs will actually increase the number of American information tech jobs over the next decade, according to a new study released Tuesday by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). “We think this study will change the entire debate on offshoring,” ITAA President Harris Miller said at […]

UPDATED: America Online (AOL) will continue its high profile campaign against spam Tuesday when AOL Chairman and CEO Jon Miller unveils a sweepstakes program that will award assets seized from spammers to victims of e-mail scams and spam, the company said. The grand prize? A 2002 Porsche Boxster S, officials said. The sports car was […]

WASHINGTON — With Congress talking about a possible revisit of key provisions in the 1996 Telecommunications Act next year and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mulling regulations for IP-centric services, interest is running high in Washington over public policy for emerging broadband services never anticipated by the landmark Telecom act. Moving to lasso the interest, […]

Three weeks ago, dozens of CEOs visited Capitol Hill to push an economic agenda underscoring free trade and an ambitious tax cut on foreign dividends for U.S. IT companies. A key stop was the office of U.S. Senator George Allen, a member of the influential Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee who has been behind a […]

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) hit alleged music file swappers with another round of legal actions Tuesday, marking the music industry’s third consecutive month of stepped-up litigation against peer-to-peer (P2P) network users. Since January, the RIAA has filed almost 1,600 such actions. Included in this month’s round of 532 ‘John Doe’ subpoenas seeking […]

A permanent U.S. backbone network employing the next Internet protocol, IPv6, has cleared a second set of tests, the North American IPv6 Task Force said Monday. The new IPv6 backbone, which stretches from New Hampshire to California, now works with high-speed links, firewalls, routing, common applications and quality of service (QoS) standards for business applications, […]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will continue its exploration of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) issues Thursday when it hosts a public conference focusing on 911 access for Internet telephony users. Regulators are concerned emergency responders will be unable to properly locate VoIP callers, largely because Internet Protocol-based, packet-switched calls are incompatible with circuit-switched telephone […]