Dennis Fisher

The former IT director of an optical components company pleaded guilty this week to trying to sell trade secrets contained on backup tapes he stole from his employer. Brent Woodward admitted that he stole the tapes and then tried to sell the data contained on them to the chief technology officer of JDS Uniphase, a […]

Microsoft is suing Google, its chief rival in the exploding Internet and desktop search market, for hiring away an executive who helped develop Microsofts MSN search technology. The software company filed the suit last week after Kai-Fu Lee informed Microsoft officials that he was leaving to run a new Google research lab in China. Microsoft […]

Hewlett-Packard last week named former Dell CIO Randall Mott to take over the same position at HP. Mott will be responsible for application development, data management, network infrastructure, data center operations and telecommunications networks. Mott replaces Gilles Bouchard, HPs CIO since 2003, who will stay at the company as executive vice president. Check out eWEEK.coms […]

The merger of security software leader Symantec and Veritas, a force in the storage and backup sector, became official last week after months of planning. The companies announced the planned merger in December and have spent the intervening months working through the myriad details involved in combining two complex organizations. Gary Bloom, the former CEO […]

Concerto Software and Aspect Communications have agreed to merge in a $1 billion deal that would create the largest call center software company in the world. Concerto sells call center software, including predictive dialers, automatic call distributors and work force management applications. Aspect sells work force management products, as well as various other call center […]

Hoping to capitalize on Microsofts recent willingness to settle a variety of antitrust lawsuits, the founder of Go Computer filed two suits recently alleging that Microsoft used illegal means to prevent Gos pen-based system from taking off. Jerry Kaplan filed suits in both federal and California courts accusing the software maker of coercing a number […]

Anti-virus vendor Trend Micro last week announced its acquisition of Kelkea, a small provider of IP filtering and reputation services. Kelkea provides a service that monitors e-mail traffic entering customers networks and identifies the IP addresses sending that traffic. The service then develops a reputation for each IP address based on the amount of spam […]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed a “nano-printer” technique for mass-producing nano-devices. The method, supramolecular nano-stamping, involves individual strands of DNA that can assemble themselves on a surface in any pattern, duplicating an original design. Each duplicate pattern can then be used as a master pattern. The MIT team believes the clearest current use […]

Microsoft last week submitted its final proposal on how it plans to deal with European Commission antitrust sanctions imposed last year. The software maker paid a $654 million fine to the EC as a result of the commissions finding that embedding programs such as Windows Media Player in the Windows operating system is anti-competitive and […]

British researchers have built tiny aircraft that use Linux to perform parallel processing operations and can communicate with one another via Bluetooth. The aircraft are meant to fly together in a kind of flock or swarm and send data back to a central computer. The researchers, at Englands University of Essex, have equipped the copters […]

3Com last week named Marc Willebeek-LeMair, a founder of the companys TippingPoint security division, as its new chief technology officer. Willebeek-LeMair helped found TippingPoint, one of the first intrusion prevention vendors, and joined 3Com when the networking vendor purchased TippingPoint last year. Following the acquisition, Willebeek-LeMair served as CTO of the security division and oversaw […]

David Nagel, president and CEO of handheld software maker PalmSource, resigned last week. Patrick McVeigh, the companys vice president of worldwide licensing, was named interim CEO. Nagel plans to stay with the company through July as a consultant. He had been CEO since 2001 and led the company through a transition, during which it spun […]