eWEEK EDITORS

When STR Enterprises Inc. decided, about a year ago, to put its pet supply business online, it didnt go fishing for some hotshot e-commerce executive to run the show. Instead, the company of 100-plus employees, in Panama City, Fla., gave the task of building its Web presence to one of its brick-and-mortar pet store managers, […]

Citrix Systems Inc., at once the champion and primary dependent of the still-unproven hosted applications concept, is advancing with major changes to its flagship product and a number of manufacturing deals with third-party hardware makers. With the moves, and still convinced that the enterprise will eventually warm to thin-client computing and hosted apps, Citrix is […]

Microsoft is getting sucked headfirst into the fast-spinning world of peer-to-peer computing whether it wants to or not: XDegrees, a small P2P start-up, has developed a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook that turns it into a peer-based Internet file sharing application. XDegrees this week will demonstrate XOutlook, a tiny piece of code that lets users of […]

More Greetings American Greetings online unit, AmericanGreetings.com, struck a deal to acquire rival Egreetings Network for $30.2 million. AmericanGreetings will pay 85 cents per share for Egreetings outstanding shares, a 35 percent premium over the price of the shares the day the deal was announced. The companies said the two sites will have about 20 […]

International experts are set to ratify the first standard technology for offering business-class broadband services over Digital Subscriber Lines later this month. Once approved, the deployment of such services will be simpler, cheaper and more efficient than todays methods. Symmetric High Bit Rate Digital Subscriber Line, or G.SHDSL, is the latest flavor of DSL, and […]

Security experts got a scare recently after a hole was found in an encryption code, allowing hackers to easily snatch transmissions passing through wireless networks. The vulnerabilities were discovered in the 802.11b wired equivalent privacy (WEP) protocol, which lets notebooks or devices connect wirelessly to local area networks. A team of computer scientists at the […]

To bid or not to bid. The recently postponed 700-megahertz wireless spectrum auction has confused wireless operators. They are unsure about the possible uses of the airwaves in this range, and broadcasters are using the spectrum for television channels. A number of wireless operators have been hoping the auction might help solve the riddle of […]

Direct to Skies Rupert Murdochs plan to add U.S. satellite beamer DirecTV to his Sky Global empire is taking a slightly different path than some analysts expected, but the deal to buy owner Hughes Electronics from General Motors is moving ahead. While Murdochs News Corp. will not put any cash into the deal, Microsoft is […]

To those of you who may have been unconvinced by recent warnings about the security risks of PDAs, the situation is even worse than thought. According to some experts, security features built in to the Palm Operating System may provide so little protection that it may be possible to steal data from a PDA from […]

Pacific Gas and Electric, one of Californias embattled public utility providers, is trying to make nice with its customers. But the method of accessing information has us scratching our heads. A recent letter to consumers claims “… the states booming economy can be a mixed blessing … the Internet age has brought multiple electronic devices […]

Once again, it seems Microsofts misfortunes are to serve as an object lesson to the rest of the online world. In the wake of errors that left most online users unable to locate Microsofts main Web sites in late January, many businesses are scrambling to find defenses and response plans to ensure their Web sites […]

Earthlink, the second-largest Net service provider, may be No. 2 for a reason. The companys Atlanta servers go down more than occasionally, leaving DSL subscribers like me stranded. You can call customer service to report the problem, but that requires waiting on the phone, often for long periods. Theres a recording when you call that […]