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The Recording Industry Association of America has apparently found out the hard way what other organizations, like the mafia, have known for years: The American legal system is for pansies. If you want to get something done, don't bother with the courts. It's expensive, it's time-consuming, and it'l...

Cisco isn't content to just sell products for the deepest, darkest innards of the data center. It's also got its eye on consumer technology. It already has Linksys, which sells stuff like home network routers, and Scientific Atlanta, which does set-top boxes. Soon it will add Pure Digital Technologi...

MTV pretty much gave up on music years ago in order to concentrate on how many different variations of "The Real World" and "Road Rules" it could squeeze out. But YouTube has largely picked up MTV's slack -- type in just about any video you want to see, and Google's sharing site will play it for you...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a gathering of analysts that the company won't be making any further layoffs, and once word got out, Wall Street proceeded to pummel the company mercilessly, sending its stock to an 11-year low. Analyst Rob Enderle told us the no-more-layoffs decision made sense beca...

Maybe the people over at Hulu really are evil aliens trying to turn our brains to mush. Or maybe they're just beholden to the studios that sign their paychecks. Either way, Hulu's decision to take its content stream away from startup Boxee has users crying foul. Boxee is an application that makes it...

OK, you heard Oprah rave about the Kindle, and you were so impressed that you ordered one. Then you ended up waiting because the darn thing was out of stock -- for months! Your patience is being rewarded, and you'll be getting the improved version 2 of the Kindle, which has more memory to store book...

Now you and your friends can play "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?" with Google's new mobile technology called "Latitude," but you, or they -- all of you, as a matter of fact -- can be Carmen. All of your movements can be geographically tracked through cell tower signals, and everyone you let...

The Obama techies had their fingers on the switch on Tuesday, and at precisely 12:01 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, they threw it. The Bush administration's WhiteHouse.gov underwent a Cinderella-like transformation and joined the Web 2.0 era. There's a White House blog now, if you can imagine that, and...

There's been a fair amount of snickering over the possibility that Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry after his swearing-in next week, with the implication that it's just a personal habit he'll have a hard time breaking, like quitting smoking. Apparently, the security risks associated ...

Looks like Santa visits cybercrooks too. Their present this year was a big, fat security hole in many widely used versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The critical vulnerability allowed remote code execution if an Explorer user visited a specially crafted, malicious Web page. That translated i...

If you want a G1 Android phone but you can't bear the thought of using a carrier with pink logo, help is on the way. You can now get a version of the HTC handset that's both SIM-unlocked and hardware-unlocked. But in order to get one -- and, yes, they really are limiting quantities to one per custom...

TV shows like "The Hills" focus on the petty squabbles that go on in the world of spoiled, vapid socialites. I can't think of a program that gets into the catfights that go on in the IT world, and I don't know whether there'd really be a huge audience for something like that, but they do happen, and...

Now you can get your fix of "Bulletproof Monk" and "American Gladiators" -- all without leaving the comfort of YouTube. Yes, the king of user-generated, short-form video is now embracing the other kind: studio-generated, feature-length films. Yes, this is the same YouTube that said long-form video w...

Yahoo was quite the chooser last spring when Microsoft offered to buy it -- the Yahoo board held out for a higher price. Now it's looking more and more like the beggar. Its relationship with Google is pretty much finished before it even had a chance to begin, and it appears Yahoo is reaching the end...

About 30 years ago, we Earthlings sent a probe to check out Mercury, the tiny planet closest to the sun, and concluded that it was just a big hot rock. But after poking around on the moon and Mars for a few decades, we decided to take another look at Mercury. Messenger, the probe that has now passed...

Technology has become the newest foundation of family values. According to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, families that use technology tend to have better communication. Where once they gathered 'round the old Westinghouse to listen to one of FDR's fireside chats, families no...

eBay came through with a profitable third quarter, but don't expect such good news in the coming months. Its earnings were almost 1 and a half billion dollars better than Q3 of last year, but the total sum of all transactions on the auction site actually went down one percent. That's a first. It's a...

Outside of the money you pay for Internet access, it still costs nothing to watch YouTube. Technically. But if you have a problem with compulsive shopping, you may want to cut up your credit cards, because Google has figured out a new way to monetize its video-sharing site, and it's actually pretty ...

IBM has had enough of the silliness that goes on at some of the standards bodies it belongs to. So Big Blue now has a new policy: No shenanigans. Setting standards for hardware, software, communications protocols, document formats -- is a job that's way too important to be done in the dark, says IBM...

If you're a ninja assassin, a terrorist, an illegal street racer, or any other variety of violent outlaw, you shouldn't look to YouTube for training anymore; you won't find any there. The Google-owned video sharing site has revised its policies to specifically forbid videos that offer instructions o...