Stories by Grant Gross

Net e-mailers tout antispam registry

A coalition of e-mail service providers has announced plans for registries intended to separate the good bulk e-mailers from the spammers, the latest in a series of recent antispam efforts.

WorldCom name disappears overnight

Telecommunications giant WorldCom, plagued by bankruptcy court and fraud allegations, got rid of its name in favor of MCI Communications in the space of a few hours Sunday night, but the change is more than cosmetic, said the company's marketing vice president.

Lexmark launches load of new workgroup printers

Lexmark International announced a series of new printer products, ranging from workgroup to personal printers, in a flurry of news from the AIIM Exposition and Conference in New York on Monday.

Sun lawyer faces grilling at Java appeal

Sun Microsystems lawyer Rusty Day faced dozens of questions from an appeals court judge during his half of an hour-long hearing on whether the court should let stand a lower court decision requiring Microsoft to carry a version of Java endorsed by rival Sun.

Study: Reduced piracy to create millions of jobs

Reducing software piracy by just 10 percentage points worldwide would generate 1.5 million jobs and add US$400 billion to the world economy, according to a study released Wednesday by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and IDC.

FTC spam forum: Variety of solutions advanced

A group of e-mail experts invited by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission advanced a number of ways to deal with unsolicited commercial e-mail, including better technology, an overhaul of the way the Internet works and new laws, but they couldn't agree on which approach would be best.

ActiveState launches antispam task force

ActiveState, a company focusing on a variety of open source-based enterprise software, has launched an antispam task force that it hopes will generate interest for its antispam product and ideas for other projects in the open-source community.

Study answers: 'Why am I getting all this spam?'

It's easy to fool e-mail harvesting software, even though the primary source for spammers' e-mail lists are e-mail addresses listed on public Web sites, according to a six-month experiment from the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).

Human error causes security breaches

Human error, not technology, is the most significant cause of IT security breaches, according to a security survey released by the Computing Technology Industry Association Tuesday.

Program encourages vendors to go open source

A US think tank advocating the use of open source software in government has launched a source-code escrow program that would allow vendors to make money on proprietary software while eventually releasing their products to the open-source community. At least one software company said it might be open to the idea.

Vendors push ultrawideband as wireless alternative

Several vendors are pushing a technology that could vastly multiply the transfer rate between wireless devices as a new wireless networking standard, as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.15 Working Group for Wireless Personal Area Networks meets in Dallas this week.

Jury turns down SSL patent claim

A jury has struck down four patent-infringement claims against two Internet security companies, and a judge threw out a fifth, in a Delaware trial in which a retired electronics engineer claimed to have invented a popular method for processing secure transactions over the Internet.

Internet transaction patent case goes to trial

A retired electronics engineer from Florida claims to have invented the way in which secure transactions are processed on the Internet, and opening arguments were heard Wednesday in his lawsuit asking for license fees from two technology companies.

Oracle, IBM push for Linux certification

IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp. have both launched efforts to get the Linux operating system a security certification required by the U.S. Department of Defense, so that Linux vendors aren't cut off from the huge defense IT market.

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