Start-up company Loopt Inc. is launching a social mapping service in conjunction with the Boost Mobile brand of Sprint Nextel. With the service, users can see on a map where other users are and can contact those people, either by phone or text message. The service, which is free for the rest of 2006, uses […]

British legislators have passed a bill that expands and clarifies portions of the Computer Misuse Act, which was passed in 1990. The Police and Justice Act 2006 addresses a number of concerns that arose with the growth of the Internet and as the scope of computer-based criminal activities has broadened. In November 2005, a British […]

Online gambling company BetOn Sports has settled a U.S. lawsuit by agreeing not to accept any bets from the United States. The settlement, announced November 9, ended a civil case filed by U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway this summer. The settlement does not affect a criminal case still pending against several of the company’s ex-employees, including […]

A study by Gartner analysts found that phishing scams preferentially target people who earn more than $100,000. People in that income bracket or higher received almost 50 percent more phishing e-mails than people with lower earnings. In addition, those with higher incomes lost, on average, four times more money than other victims. Overall losses from […]

The latest survey of online learning by the Sloan Consortium reported that about 3.2 million students took at least one online course from a degree-granting institution in fall 2005, double the number who did in 2002. The report, issued jointly by the Sloan Consortium and the College Board, defines an online course as one in […]

Market researcher iSuppli claims that the number of mobile phone subscribers worlwide will hit 2.6 billion this year and 4 billion by 1010, largely because of ultra-low-cost handsets. The growth in users is driven by new subscribers in developing nations like India and China, along with Africa and the Middle East, said Dale Ford, vice […]

Microsoft has agreed to pay royalties based on sales of its Zune portable media player to the Universal Music Group, a unit of Vivendi.
Under the deal, Universal will receive a percentage of both download revenue and digital player sales. In exhange, Universal Music will license its musical recordings for Microsoft’s digital music service.
Universal said it […]

More than three-fourths of Web visitors to large U.S. Web sites such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo come from overseas. The three companies are among 14 of the top 25 U.S. Web sites that draw more foreign traffic than U.S.-based traffic, according to market research company ComScore Networks. In 10 years, the U.S. share of […]

Officials in the United Kingdom have announced an upgrade to HPCx, a supercomputer used by academics for projects including studying biology and ocean currents. With the addition of 1,200 new processors, HPCx is now capable of processing speeds of 15.4 teraflops, though the system will typically operate at 12 teraflops, according to Arthur Trew, director […]

A company called SiCortex Inc. has introduced a line of supercomputers that take a fundamentally different approach to the question of high-capacity processing than do so-called cluster systems, which have become the mainstay of the industry in recent years. The SiCortex computers take advantage of technology that allows placing the equivalent of six separate processors […]