Matthew Hicks

Following about six months of competitive bidding, VeriSign this week officially retained control of .net, the Internets third-largest domain. ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the oversight body for the Internets domain-name system, announced Wednesday that it will enter into a new, six-year contract with VeriSign Inc. for the operation of .net. […]

BERKELEY, Calif.—When it comes to their advertising relationships, are the Webs top search engines disclosing enough information? Consumer advocates, search-engine marketers and representatives of the engines themselves debated that question during a Consumer Reports WebWatch conference held here on Thursday, and their answers varied widely. Consumer groups called for more disclosure about paid listings, while […]

Googles sponsored-link ads may have helped turn the worlds best-known search engine into a financial powerhouse, but they also are coming under attack for contributing to spyware practices that undermine trust on the Web. Anti-spyware researcher Ben Edelman this week criticized Google Inc. for playing a role in the distribution of browser toolbars that he […]

A Web browser spoofing vulnerability has returned to plague the latest version of Mozilla Firefox and other Mozilla browsers, a security researcher reported Monday. The seven-year-old frame-injection vulnerability could allow an attacker to load malicious content in the browser window of a trusted Web site, reported Secunia, a Denmark-based security company. The problem lies in […]

In an attempt to index more content, more quickly, Google has begun letting Web-site operators point the search engines crawler at Web pages and tell it when content is updated. Google Inc. started the beta program, called Google Sitemaps, late Thursday in a move that officials said would help supplement its Web crawling technology in […]

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Security will continue to dominate the e-mail management industry over the next year as enterprises face more sophisticated threats from increasingly organized groups of attackers, messaging executives predict. Speaking here on Thursday at the INBOX conference, the executives from e-mail service providers and software makers said that the fight against spam, phishing attacks […]

SAN JOSE, Calif.—The days when managing e-mail meant keeping a server up and running are long gone as enterprises increasingly must figure out how to comply with government regulations affecting messaging. Panelists at the INBOX conference here on Wednesday laid out strategies for how companies can comply with laws ranging from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and […]

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Yahoo and Cisco have joined forces to promote a cryptographic approach for authenticating e-mail in the battle against fraud and spam. The two companies announced Wednesday that they are combining their two separate authentication proposals into a new specification called DomainKeys Identified Mail, or DKIM, and are planning to propose it as a […]

Once filled largely with small, specialized vendors, the market for desktop search in the enterprise is gaining renewed attention as major Web search players take note of corporate users. Google, the worlds most recognized search engine, and Microsoft Corp.s MSN search service both are targeting enterprises in their desktop search plans. Google released its corporate […]

For Webloggers, sending notifications of new postings are like the street-corner sellers yelling the hot headline for metropolitan newspapers. With the rapid growth of bloggers and Weblog communities, its becoming increasingly hard to be heard. But adjustments to a piece of basic RSS plumbing that is responsible for keeping readers informed of feed updates may […]

The Mozilla Foundation is preparing to release the first alpha version of its next Firefox Web browser within the next few days. The release, called Deer Park Alpha 1, is targeted to Firefoxs base of testers and will include developer-focused features such as support for additional Web standards, extensions improvements and a way to report […]

In a bid to distinguish itself from its larger search competitors, Ask Jeeves is tapping into its core search technology to present more-detailed related searches and to answer questions. The Oakland, Calif., company plans to announce the two new features Thursday as a way to improve search navigation and the relevancy of results. The first […]