Nicholas Kolakowski

BlackBerry creator Research In Motion experienced a 3-hour service blackout on April 13 that left a significant number of users without the ability to send or receive e-mail. Many users were cut off from the BlackBerry Internet Service, and unable to view e-mail attachments or create new accounts. Many enterprise users, however, were spared; the […]

Nature Publishing Group has long been a staple of science-based publishing, but it only recently decided to make its peer-reviewed information on genetics available online to undergraduates and educators through Scitable, an online site found here. Scitable pulls information from over 30 different Nature journals, and also includes new peer-reviewed content. The site features a […]

Amazon.com claims a “glitch” in its system stripped the sales rank from several gay- and lesbian-themed books over the weekend of April 11, including tomes by James Baldwin and Gore Vidal. Books affected included Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar” and Jeanette Winterson’s “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” according to the Associated Press. Another […]

The dreaded Conficker worm made an appearance at the University of Utah heading into the weekend, attaching more than 700 computers and spreading its malware to the university’s three hospitals. A spokesperson for the university insisted that patient records remain unaffected. According to a report by the Associated Press, campus IT cut off online access […]

Microsoft and Yahoo are reportedly involved in preliminary discussions about advertising and search, suggesting closure to Microsoft’s failed 2008 bid to acquire the search engine company. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz have been talking over the possibility of Yahoo handling Microsoft’s display advertising, while […]

Electric, Green Cars for 2009 and Beyond The IT industry has taken a more active role in the automotive world in recent months. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are major investors in Tesla Motors, the company behind all-electric, zero-emission vehicles such as the Tesla Roadster and the Tesla Model S. Meanwhile, Intel, Microsoft […]

Google is encountering protests from users who say the information its Google Health beta Website presents has the potential to be inaccurate when it comes to electronic medical records. Much of the online traffic over the issue has stemmed from one particular case, that of kidney cancer survivor Dave deBronkart, who transferred his medical records […]

Apple has placed a counter on its Web site showing the number of downloaded apps, which is approaching the 1 billion mark. In a contest tied to the occasion, the company will randomly select one individual who downloads an app before that 1 billion milestone to receive prizes including a MacBook Pro, an iPod Touch […]

Twitter has grown to millions of users since it launched in 2006, with some posting 140-character microbloggings, or “tweets,” several times per day. Twitter itself is even becoming more incorporated into the enterprise, with Salesforce.com adding the site to its Service Cloud solution and Microsoft sponsoring a site, ExecTweets, as part of its “It’s Everybody’s […]

Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail users who signed into their accounts on the evening of April 9 may have experienced a shock when they received a message that said, “You don’t have an inbox … yet.” According to Microsoft, an undisclosed number of users experienced a temporary outage “caused by a networking issue” that has since […]