"There’s a lot of movement in the browser area now, and consumers are clearly looking for a choice," said AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein.   "We look forward to talking to other PC manufacturers about offering consumers a similar choice." America Online has inked a deal to distribute its Netscape Web browser with Hewlett-Packard.   Latest [...]

An emerging Web development technique promises to shake up the status quo in PC software and blur the line between desktop and Web applications.   Over the years, desktop applications tied to a specific operating system have become entrenched as the main way to work on a computer. AJAX, a set of development techniques standardized [...]

A school in Arizona, US, has thrown out its paper-based text books and is relying solely on laptops and digital material to teach its pupils.   Empire High School is one of a band of schools which is taking computer technology out of the classroom and into students’ bags.   Calvin Baker, chief superintendent of [...]

Yahoo is taking on Google with its own digital archive of books, audio and video.   As part of the Open Content Alliance, Yahoo will help digitise 18,000 works of American literature plus material from national and European archives.   It hopes to avoid the legal action that has dogged Google’s plan by adopting an [...]

Geri Agalia doesn’t appear to leave less of a data trail than most Americans. She has a phone in her name, a bank account, utility bills, a mortgage and a credit card. But the stay-at-home mom and part-time student is among a select and ever-shrinking group of the digitally privileged — her name does not [...]

The digital music market has more than tripled in a year, and that has helped offset a continuing decline in sales of CDs and other physical formats.   Spurred by the iPod revolution, digital music sales totaled $790 million in the first half of this year, equivalent to 6 percent of industry sales, the International [...]

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.   Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico. Experts who have studied the US navy’s cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying ‘toxic [...]

A scientist has described a spider that was trapped and preserved in amber 20 million years ago.   Palaeontologist Dr David Penney, of the University of Manchester, found the 4cm long by 2cm wide fossil during a visit to a museum in the Dominican Republic. S   ince the discovery two years ago, he has [...]

The world’s first iris-recognition system designed to identify people on the move has been unveiled.   Similar in shape to airport metal detectors, the Iris on the Move system can identify 20 people a minute as they file through. This makes it far more efficient than existing systems, which can take several minutes to complete [...]

Are we alone in the universe? Are there planets like Earth around other “suns” that might harbor life? Thanks to a recent technology breakthrough on a key NASA planet-finding project, the dream of answering those questions is no longer light-years away.   On a crystal clear, star-filled night at Hawaii’s Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, [...]

Oracle’s president said on Friday his company would rather beat Salesforce.com than buy the much smaller provider of customer management software.   Oracle has been scooping up software companies to diversify its slow-growing database business. Most recently Oracle said it would buy Siebel Systems for nearly $6 billion, raising the specter that it might try [...]

Gwen Stefani’s "Hollaback Girl" has not only been a hit on the radio but also in cyberspace, where it’s poised to become the first song to register 1 million legal downloads, according to Nielsen SoundScan.   The No Doubt singer will be recognized for that numerical milestone with a certification that will be presented to [...]

The Mozilla Foundation on Friday shipped a new version of its Thunderbird mail client to plug a potentially serious URL parsing security hole affecting Linux users. The open-source group described Thunderbird 1.0.7 as a "security and stability update" that provides a comprehensive fix for the URL parsing bug that was also flagged in the Firefox [...]

The European Union has unveiled plans to require all telephone and Internet traffic to be logged and stored for up to a year in order to help combat organized crime and terrorism.   The plan was unveiled on Wednesday by the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, and would require the approval of the European [...]

No thanks, says a U.S. government official.   The United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is ready to take over governance of the Internet from the U.S., ITU head Yoshio Utsumi said today. The U.S. has clashed with the European Union and much of the rest of the world over the future of the Internet. [...]

The common electric socket will serve as your home’s connection to broadband with a new chip developed by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. — doing away with all the Ethernet cables or the hassle of hooking up to a wireless network device.   Products are still being developed, but gadgets embedded with the chip from the [...]

Microsoft Corp. is hoping to lure hobbyist programmers and young children to the Windows operating system through a Web site and forthcoming version of Visual Studio aimed at making Windows development easy and fun, a company spokesman said Thursday.   On a Web site called Coding4Fun, Microsoft is inviting third parties to submit content that [...]

DirecTV satellite subscribers will be able to tune in several XM Satellite Radio channels free beginning in November, XM announced Thursday, escalating the Washington company’s war with New York rival Sirius Satellite Radio.   DirecTV is the nation’s leading satellite service with more than 14 million customers. Starting on Nov. 15, they will receive 72 [...]

Malicious code masquerading as a trusted application could trick a ZoneAlarm firewall into letting it connect to the Internet, security experts have warned.   The issue affects the popular free ZoneAlarm firewall and default installations of version 5.5 and earlier of the paid product, maker Zone Labs said in a security advisory on Thursday. Default [...]

Sony has apologized for an advertising campaign for its PlayStation game console which featured a young man wearing a crown of thorns with the slogan "Ten years of passion".   Some Catholics were outraged by the adverts, which ran in newspapers and magazines to celebrate the product’s tenth anniversary. "This time they’ve gone too far," [...]