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 [...]

There have been a growing number of stories recently about people finally fighting back against the various RIAA lawsuits, that are usually filed on the basis of a single IP address, without any effort being made to find out who might be responsible for any of the unauthorized sharing. This was a question that some [...]

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 [...]