Spotlight Features

Since they hit the Web in the mid-1990s, Web logs, more commonly known as "blogs," have matured from simple journal entries cataloging the day-to-day goings-on in the lives of Net dwellers to, in some cases, serious enterprises. Today, corporations, political parties and their partisans, the media a...

Viral marketing may be relatively new on the Internet, having emerged roughly a decade ago in its high-tech form, but it's by no means a novel promotional technique, and it certainly doesn't depend on technology. "Viral marketing is about generating buzz," Orvel Ray Wilson, coauthor of the legendary...

A sophisticated group of spammers has been targeting since late May high-salaried workers at selective corporations in a spam attack using e-mail disguised as messages from the Better Business Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Trade Commission. A fourth variation of the spam attac...

This past May, the country of Estonia was hit hard by what its authorities called a "virtual war." This war took the form of an attack on the country's computer infrastructure. Many governmental and commercial sites were hit. The attacks on the country's commerce seemed to focus on the country's med...

Enterprise IT departments are straining despite huge increases in network capacity in the past decade. There are growing concerns over bandwidth availability, interoperability and security, as online video, VoIP, social networking and on-demand application services proliferate. Network providers are...

The three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court has upheld a ruling that grants extensive new privacy protections for e-mail users. It is an ambitious decision -- said to be the first for the Circuit Courts -- and one that is almost surely headed to the Supreme Court for review. In Warshak v. Unite...

Ethernet has been steadily extending its influence as it continues to evolve beyond the local area network. The ongoing development of virtual local area network, or VLAN, standards, is paving the way for Ethernet to play a key role in next-generation networking. As networks expand, so do opportunit...

With all the press rogue Internet pharmacies have received in recent months for selling prescription drugs illegally, it's tempting to assume that there must be similar sites -- or maybe even the same ones -- trafficking in illicit drugs as well. After all, with all the anonymity the Internet provid...

Just a few years ago, picking broadband services and a pay television provider consisted of going with dial-up or DSL to access the Internet, and cable or satellite to get TV access. Consumers trying to make that decision today, however, have multiple options for a whole host of broadband, telecommu...

In five years, the number of mobile phone subscribers is expected to increase by almost two billion -- at that point, the way people purchase goods and services could be forever changed. For now, text-messaging, or short message service, is chiefly used for communication, but businesses hip to m-com...