According to David Gardner, chief operating officer for Electronic Arts (EA), the video gaming industry continues to fail women by not producing suitable content. Gardner was speaking to a conference in Edinburgh at the time. His company’s research discovered that 40 percent of teen girls play video games versus 90 percent of teen boys, and […]

Boeing has announced plans to drop its in-flight Internet service, called Connexion, due to lack of demand. Airline passengers access the Internet through a high-speed wireless network, with signals bounced off satellites. Despite preimplementation surveys showing strong interest in the service, very few passengers used Connexion, which cost $9.95 an hour or $26.95 a flight.
New […]

An annual report on state and federal e-government portals recommended increased consistency of government Web sites. According to Darrell West, a professor of political science at Brown University and the author of the report “Digital Government: Technology and Public Sector Performance,” government Web sites should use consistent designs on their pages. The seventh annual report, […]

The U.S. Department of Commerce renewed its contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), leaving the management of the technical details of the Internet with the nonprofit group. ICANN will continue its responsibility for Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which includes allocating IP addresses, assigning protocol identifiers, and managing top-level domain […]

Pennsylvania State university will launch a text-messaging wireless service called PSUTXT today as an expansion of Penn State Live, a news service with 360,000 subscribers. The university plans to use the service to send text messages of news alerts to mobile devices.
Registered users can sign up for short message service (SMS) text messages on campus […]

A British company said it has developed technology that encrypts transmissions on cell phones, allowing users to make calls with confidence that their conversations cannot be intercepted. One Day Mobile reportedly developed the technology with German company Safe.com and with the military. With the software, which must be installed on cell phones, users can decide […]

Microsoft acknowledged that a patch issued earlier this month for significant flaws in its operating system has led to new problems for some users. Computers that installed the August patch on Windows 2000 or Windows XP machines with Service Pack 1 and Internet Explorer 6 are experiencing browser crashes when they visit Web sites that […]

A federal appeals court has turned down an appeal of a decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that exempted certain kinds of telecom lines from regulations that require companies to lease access to rivals. A law passed in 1996 forces telecom companies to unbundle local phone networks and allow competitors to buy access to […]

Security companies have identified a new worm circulating that seeks to take advantage of a flaw in the Windows operating system and allows hackers to use infected computers to send spam. Earlier this month, Microsoft issued a patch for 23 vulnerabilities, including the one that the new worm uses. Because the patch has only been […]

Microsoft announced plans to introduce an inexpensive version of its game-development software. Currently, development applications for Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo games cost thousands of dollars, and access to them is frequently limited to established companies. The new product, called XNA Game Studio Express, will allow amateur developers to create games on PCs and convert them […]