Anne Chen

How to Slam Spam Are you sick and tired of the daily ritual of wading through and deleting dozens of unsolicited e-mail messages offering the usual assortment of bogus medical cures and doubtful financial schemes? Well, youve got nothing on Max Levchin, chief technology officer at PayPal Inc. Not only has Levchins e-mail account accumulated […]

Get spammers back by charging them for unsolicited, commercial mail! Too good to be true? Well, this isnt one of those crazy, get-rich-quick schemes that show up daily in your in-box. Banking on the fact that few enterprises sending commercial mail want to be associated with spam, IronPort Systems Inc., in San Bruno, Calif., has […]

If only passing effective anti-spam laws were as easy as slashing your mortgage or losing weight by responding to unsolicited e-mail. But apparently, its not. Although legislators and regulators continue to work hard at passing and enforcing laws banning unsolicited or fraudulent commercial e-mail, experts say their efforts may be too little, too late. Even […]

Its not often Bill Gates applauds an application that users say works better than one of his companys programs. But last month, the chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft gave the nod to DateLens, a scalable calendar user interface that runs on devices including the Pocket PC, Tablet PC and Windows desktops. Created by […]

There isnt a day that goes by when Im not cursing Cingular Wireless—my mobile phone provider—for the dropped calls, lack of service and undecipherable monthly bills. So lets just say it was with a degree of hope and a healthy dash of skepticism that I attended the rollout of Sprints nationwide 3G network yesterday. Beginning […]

In this period of shrinking IT budgets and slow enterprise software upgrade cycles, Oracle Corp. could use more customers like Rick Fletcher, director of database technology at automobile research site Edmunds.com Inc., in Santa Monica, Calif. Just three weeks after Oracle began shipping Release 2 of Oracle9i last month, Fletcher was using the new database […]

As third-party developers and vendors of handheld devices beef up encryption and password management technologies, Palm OS, Pocket PC and other handhelds are becoming more secure. But, experts say, IT managers should not rely on the availability of improved software alone to secure handheld devices. To be sure, users should be required to install anti-virus […]

REDMOND, WASH.—Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates today responded to critics who call his companys .NET initiative incomplete and lacking innovation by acknowledging that it will take at least four or five years before the promise of .Net is realized. “.Net is not an overnight thing,” Gates told 325 university faculty members as […]

If theres one person who may be able to unite the likes of Microsoft Corp., IBM, Sun Microsystems Inc. and other vendors fighting for control of the Web services space, its Ian Foster, the so-called guru of grid computing and the co-head of the Globus Project, a U.S. government- and industry-backed research initiative leading efforts […]

David Levines customers think playing video games on the Web with a million other people is cool. Whats not cool, however, is having your arrow miss its target during a dramatic battle sequence in the latest Braveheart game because the online gaming site youre using ran out of computing power. Levine, CEO of Butterfly.net Inc., […]