Matthew Hicks

Search engine message boards and Weblogs are aflutter with news of a new MSN Search beta, but officials at Microsoft Corp.s Internet division say the beta test is nothing new. MSN began a beta test of its Web search site early in the fall and has targeted less than 4 percent of MSN Search users […]

VoiceXML 2.0 is one step away from becoming a full-fledged standard of the World Wide Web Consortium. A Web specification for the development of voice response applications, Voice Extensible Markup Language 2.0 has reached the W3Cs “proposed recommendation” stage, a final review period before becoming an official recommendation, or standard, the W3C announced on Tuesday. […]

In its legal battle with Google Inc., American Blind and Wallpaper Factory Inc. is challenging much more than the search engines keyword-based advertising practices. The home decorating retailer also is questioning Googles cherished search algorithms and Web index. American Blinds lead attorney, in a recent interview with eWEEK.com, made it clear that the scope of […]

Apple Computer Inc. on Monday released an update to its Safari Web browser that adds new digital certificate and Java support as well as greater keyboard accessibility. Safari 1.2 is only available for Mac OS X 10.3, known as “Panther.” The update takes advantage of Panthers Keychain feature for enabling its support for personal certificate […]

Days away from facing the potential of separate distributed denial of service attacks, The SCO Group Inc. and Microsoft Corp. on Friday were providing few new public details on how they plans to stop the variants of the MyDoom e-mail worm from hitting their Web sites. Both are targets of DDoS attacks that security experts […]

A federal appeals court has upheld a preliminary injunction in a 3-year-old case involving the use of the Internets database of domain name registrants for marketing purposes. Domain name registrar Register.com Inc. on Wednesday announced the decision, handed down last week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York. The […]

Orkut, Google Inc.s closely watched experiment with social networking, is back in service. After going offline over the weekend, the invite-only social network returned on Wednesday. Members can once again connect with one another on the site, and those invited to join can sign up for the service. But Orkut isnt promising that another outage […]

Microsoft Corp. gave Web developers a reprieve on Thursday, announcing that it had scrapped its plans to modify Internet Explorer this year in response to a patent infringement verdict against it. Microsoft in October said it would change the way the Web browser and Windows XP handle Web pages that use its ActiveX Controls, its […]

Alleging that Google Inc.s search advertising practices violates trademark law, a home decorating retailer is taking Google to court over its use of certain keywords to trigger competitors paid search results. American Blind and Wallpaper Factory Inc., in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in New York, isnt stopping with Google. It also […]

Security researchers are warning of another spoofing vulnerability in Internet Explorer, this time one that allows an attacker to mask the true file extension of malicious downloads. The file-extension spoof means that an attacker could lull a user into opening a malicious file from a Web site by making the file appear as a legitimate […]

FAST Search & Transfer ASA on Tuesday launched a platform approach toward enterprise search. The Oslo, Norway-based company announced the FAST Enterprise Search Platform, or ESP, which is aimed at providing a search engine that cuts across an entire enterprise and can search both structured information from databases and unstructured information from e-mails, documents and […]

As the fastest-moving e-mail worm continues to haunt inboxes, it is creating some hiccups in response times on the Internet. But the real danger could lie in MyDooms “time bomb” set to trigger a denial of service attack next month against the SCO Group Inc.s Web site, experts say. Response times from major Web sites […]