Microsoft has filed another suit against the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, seeking information about the tax agency’s decision to hire outside lawyers, including one-time Microsoft nemesis David Boies, to help conduct an audit of the company. The lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the …
The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged an investment adviser in Miami with siphoning money from his investment fund and defrauding investors, including several local teachers and law enforcement officers. The SEC alleges that Phil Donnahue Williamson conducted a Ponzi scheme with money he raised for the Sterling Investment Fund, …
Google may not have caught up to Amazon in the cloud market, but that’s OK, according to a Google executive. The company is heading in a slightly different direction with cloud computing that involves helping customers analyze their data. “It’s not about catching up to [Amazon],” said Brian Stevens, vice …
Microsoft has acquired 6Wunderkinder GmbH, a German startup that makes the popular Wunderlist to-do list application, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The deal was worth between $100 and $200 million, and is the latest in a string of acquisitions from the Redmond company aimed at bolstering …
Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 now power more personal computers than the still-strong, senior-citizen Windows XP, according to the latest statistics from analytics vendor Net Applications. The growth of Windows 8 and 8.1, and the not-quite-corresponding decline of XP, should make it easier for Microsoft to make its public goal …
Xbox cofounder Otto Berkes may have spent the bulk of his recent years focusing on consumer technology, but his next career move will be set squarely in the enterprise arena, as CA Technologies on Monday announced that it recruited him to serve as its next CTO. Most recently, Berkes was …
Some Facebook users should soon be able to receive encrypted emails from the social networking site if they add PGP public keys to their profiles. Facebook called the PGP feature “experimental” and said it is slowly rolling it out, although a timeline wasn’t provided. The PGP key details will be …
Alongside its announcement that Windows 10 would be coming on July 29, Microsoft also revealed the system requirements for its new OS, and they appear built for widespread adoption of the new operating system upgrade. In order to take advantage of the free upgrade, users will need to be running …
BlackBerry has reached a settlement with Typo Innovations, which made an accessory keyboard for iPhones that the handset maker said infringed its patents. Under the settlement announced Monday, Typo, which was co-founded by “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest, is barred from selling keyboards for devices with screen sizes smaller than …
The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged two Merrill Lynch entities with using inaccurate data in the course of executing short sale orders. Merrill Lynch agreed to admit wrongdoing, pay nearly $11 million, and retain an independent compliance consultant in order to settle the charges. According to the SEC’s order …
Enterprise storage is a long-term bet. Pure Storage, a growing maker of all-flash arrays, is reshuffling the deck on that gamble in a way that might save IT departments time and money. Pure’s plan is to let customers keep the same system for a decade, upgrading various components as improved …
About a decade or so ago, it was almost impossible to find a tech analyst who wasn’t predicting that radio-frequency identification (RFID) would soon change the world. While RFID eventually became a useful tool in retail, logistics, healthcare and a handful of other enterprise sectors, the technology largely lurked in …
All Web administrators want to secure their sites for the benefit of their users (we hope), but doing so can be a cumbersome and error-prone task. Now, those using the Varnish Web acceleration software will have a helping hand in this task, as the enterprise edition can be configured to …
Enterprise storage is a long-term bet. Pure Storage, a growing maker of all-flash arrays, is reshuffling the deck on that gamble in a way that might save IT departments time and money. Pure’s plan is to let customers keep the same system for a decade, upgrading various components as improved …
Virtualization has taken over the data center. Cloud computing has become a household phrase and big data is going beyond hype to delivering results, but what’s next? Software-defined infrastructure, or SDI, is fast becoming a reality. If you’re not familiar with SDI, it’s basically an infrastructure in which the application …
SanDisk, known for thumb drives, memory cards and internal SSD, has announced its first line-up of pocket-sized, high-capacity external drives. The new line of drives includes four products of varying size, ranging in capacity from 120GB to 1.9TB. The new line includes the Extreme 900 Portable SSD, which uses the …
You’d think in the digital age that no country would dare Photoshop satellite images and then use those images to blame a different country for shooting down a plane that resulted in all 298 passengers being killed. Yet that’s exactly what Russia did to point the finger of blame at …
Intel has agreed to spend a whopping $16.7 billion to acquire Altera, a company that makes something Intel lacks: FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable chips. Some of Intel’s major acquisitions in the past haven’t panned out well, most notably the 2010 purchase of McAfee for $7.68 billion, so …
Using data in marketing is a tremendous competitive advantage for any organization, in every industry. Data is the fuel powering business processes, machines, sensors and customized user experiences. As a result, enterprises today are confronted with an unparalleled opportunity to put massive amounts of data, structured and unstructured, to work in optimizing …
People we love to hate on LinkedIn Image by Thinkstock Some social media platforms try to be everything to everyone, but LinkedIn is different. The service offers a lot of features to its 364 million registered members, but it’s also uniquely focused and specifically tailored for working professionals. The eight …
Intel has agreed to shell out a whopping US$16.7 billion to acquire Altera, a company that makes something Intel lacks: FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable chips. Some of Intel’s major acquisitions in the past haven’t panned out well, most notably the 2010 purchase of McAfee for $7.68 billion, …
Nokia wants to help mobile network operators launch new services and cut their costs with a new range of servers, switches and storage they can use to virtualize their networks. Enterprises have already adopted virtualization and cloud-based IT infrastructures, and now telecommunications operators are looking at doing the same thing. …
A Pennsylvania man who posted violent rap lyrics and other comments on Facebook about his estranged wife, an FBI agent and nearby elementary schools is not guilty of making criminal threats, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided. The justices, in a 7-2 decision released Monday, overturned the 2011 conviction of …
A Pennsylvania man who posted violent rap lyrics and other comments on Facebook about his estranged wife, an FBI agent and nearby elementary schools is not guilty of making criminal threats, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided. Justices, in a 7-2 decision released Monday, overturned the 2011 conviction of Anthony …
Goodbye, Google Wallet! It’s Android Pay’s time to shine. Google has finally souped up its mobile payments system—though not too much. It’s a pretty straightforward upgrade, with a few new features added to make it more secure than its predecessor. If you’re interested in using it yourself, here’s a quick …
Google has launched a centralized hub that lets users manage the privacy and security controls of all its services, and introduced a site with information about these topics. The hub, called My Account, is not the first effort from Google to centralize settings: in 2009, it introduced a dashboard to …