E-Commerce Times: E-Business Means Business

Saturday - July 26, 2008

At first it seemed like ordinary shoplifting -- stuffing a few pairs of jeans into an oversize bag and walking out of the store. But the thieves got bolder. They began showing up in groups of five or six in the middle of the day, spraying store clerks with mace and knocking customers out of the way as they gathered armfuls of clothes. Sometimes they tossed a brick through the glass. Sometimes they drove a truck through the front door. The thieves aren't looking for just any kind of jeans. They're snatching high-end designer duds that sell for $150 to $350. [More...]

Web Video and the Net's Creaking Backbone

Saturday - July 26, 2008

Two weeks ago, Apple and AT&T outlets opened their doors to massive lines of fans eager to buy the new iPhone 3G. The stores were stocked and ready to sell, but the network -- shouldered with the burden of activating so many new phones -- was quickly overwhelmed, and the process slowed to a crawl. [More...]

Yahoo to Music Customers: Burn It to Save It

Friday - July 25, 2008

Although Yahoo Music Unlimited subscribers have known since February that their music service would end in September, they may have been surprised to learn this week they would need to back up any purchased tracks on an audio CD by September 30 if they wanted to keep them. Failure to do so could leave users unable to play music they had bought. [More...]

Leaked DNS Exploit Drives Admins Bonkers

Friday - July 25, 2008

A significant domain name system flaw first spotted by Dan Kaminsky, IOActive director of penetration testing, is now out in the wild, and unfortunately for Internet users, it's the kind of danger that isn't easily seen. Hackers can use the DNS flaw to redirect Web page requests to carefully crafted phishing sites by replacing legitimate addresses with nefarious addresses and in effect gain control over a domain. [More...]

Microsoft's Quest for Search Cred Leads to Facebook

Friday - July 25, 2008

Microsoft is forging ahead with plan B, now that its proposed merger with Yahoo is all but dead. It is expanding its relationship with Facebook to broaden exposure of its Windows Live Search as well as increase its own search ad business. This latter goal, of course, had been the point behind the failed Yahoo acquisition. [More...]

Scrabble-Scrabulous Fuss Lands in Court

Friday - July 25, 2008

Hasbro, maker of the word game Scrabble, has issued the ultimate double challenge to social network Facebook and its wildly popular Scrabble-like application Scrabulous: a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement. The suit, filed Thursday in a New York district court, claims the application violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. [More...]

The Spam World's Election Season Blast

Friday - July 25, 2008

With the political election season ramping up, spammers are again using news headlines about the candidates to saturate in-boxes. Researchers have uncovered two new spam clusters with subject lines relating to Barack Obama. At certain points, one of these spam runs accounted for up to 18 percent of all spam, according to MessageLabs. [More...]

WEEKLY RECAP
Consoles Sell Like Hotcakes, Yahoo Cuts a Deal, Sysadmin Caves

Friday - July 25, 2008

As much as I love zombie movies, I really don't care to count how many times I've been invited to BECOME a zombie on Facebook. Yeah, you know the one I'm talking about. That's what you get when you open your platform to developers with all sorts of agendas -- you get a handful of good stuff, and you get oceans of crap -- spammy, garbagey applications -- the software equivalent of Cracker Jack prizes. [More...]

Sony Turns the Page on E-Book Business Model

Friday - July 25, 2008

Sony announced Thursday that the new iteration of its Reader digital book will be able to read electronic books published in the .epub file format, a file type gaining acceptance among major trade book publishers, many of whom have committed to begin publishing forthcoming e-books in the format. [More...]

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
eBay's Paul Strong on Building the Data Center of the Future

Friday - July 25, 2008

In this age when an Internet eon is roughly the equivalent of a calendar year and any given company titan can flicker out of existence in a flash, few companies, especially those solely Internet-based, are seen as enduring and solid and fated for perpetuity. Among these rarities, the world's largest online auction company, eBay, certainly holds it own. [More...]

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