John LeSieur is in the software business, so he took particular interest when computers seemed mostly useless to his six-year-old grandson, Zackary.
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/ 27 November 2007
If the experience of the world’s largest software vendor is any guide, the industry’s best hope for reducing piracy rests with anti-copying technologies rather than in policing the legalistic user agreements that restrict how software can be used. Microsoft is locking software down through a programme it calls its Genuine Software Initiative.
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/ 13 October 2007
From clothes riddled with sensors to name tags that detect our moods, computing’s next wave could unleash small devices that increasingly augment everyday activities with digital intelligence. That was the vision at a conference on "wearable computing" this week in Boston, where researchers showed off prototypes.
What edits on Wikipedia have been made by people in congressional offices, the CIA and the Church of Scientology? A new online tool called WikiScanner reveals answers to such questions. Many of the edits are predictably self-interested, but others hint at procrastinating office workers.
John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82. Backus died on March 17 in Ashland, Oregon, according to IBM, where he spent his career.
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/ 20 February 2007
"Patch Tuesday", when Microsoft releases repairs for problems in its software, came and went last week with six critical fixes — including the first one that touches Vista, the new operating system billed as the most secure Windows version yet. This isn’t to say that Vista had previously appeared clean.
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/ 25 January 2007
Microsoft landed in the Wikipedia doghouse on Tuesday after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced web encyclopedia site. "We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said.
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/ 23 October 2006
IBM filed two lawsuits against Amazon.com on Monday, claiming key aspects of the internet retailer’s websites violate patents held by Big Blue. Amazon is accused of infringing on five IBM patents, including technologies that govern how the site handles customer recommendations, advertising and data storage.
Visa USA and American Express are cutting ties with the payment-processing company that left 40-million credit and debit card accounts vulnerable to hackers in one of the biggest breaches of consumer data security. CardSystems Solutions ”has not corrected, and cannot at this point correct, the failure to provide proper data security for Visa accounts,” said Rosetta Jones, a vice president at Foster City, California-based Visa.