Chris Preimesberger

Cyber-thieves who hacked into the ATM information of at least 800 retail customers in California and Oregon have stolen as much as $700,000 from personal accounts during the last two months, according to police reports. People who used ATM cards to purchase items at Dollar Tree, a national retail toy store chain, in Modesto and […]

Normally, as summer rolls on in the Northern Hemisphere, data storage news—along with lots of other IT business news—slows down to a mere trickle. Not so in the summer of 06, however; the flow of new products and services announcements and other items of note is just as steady as it was during the busy […]

The city of Pasadena, Calif. selected EarthLink Aug. 1 to enter into final negotiations to build, own and operate a 23-square mile citywide municipal wireless Internet network, the fourth major metropolitan project the ISP has in the works. EarthLinks other current municipal Wi-Fi projects are being developed in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Mountain View, Calif. […]

SanDisk, which makes flash memory data storage cards for digital cameras and other handheld devices, announced July 30 that it is acquiring Israeli data storage company M-Systems for $1.55 billion in an all-stock transaction. M-Systems will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SanDisk, which said it will now be able to develop next-generation flash-enabled consumer […]

Flash memory data storage card maker SanDisk has recorded a historic pair of days this week in its 18-year history. On July 31, the Milpitas, Calif.-based company introduced a 2GB microSD card—the largest capacity of the worlds smallest removable flash memory card—in order to meet demand for a new generation of MP3 music phones, including […]

Microsoft plunged into yet another IT market—the IP-SAN space—by announcing July 28 the availability of the iSCSI Software Target Application Pack, which will be distributed to Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 OEMs. With the new offering, Microsoft is reaping the benefits of its March acquisition of String Bean Softwares intellectual property, which it has rebranded […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Paul Otellini, Intels CEO, was visibly annoyed that someone from the media would have the gumption to ask a negative question on July 27, a celebratory day in the chip makers history: the Core 2 Duo microprocessor launch. After all, about 1,000 people—media types, analysts, Intel employees, Intel customers, hangers-on—were partying it up […]

One survey of IT professionals released July 26 contends there is continued growth in the adoption of both older Fibre Channel and newer iSCSI Internet-based connections for storage networking at the expense of NAS. A second survey, released earlier, finds only flat adoption rates for both. Respondents to a Xiotech-sponsored survey said they expect the […]

Mozilla on July 26 started firing out notices to Firefox users recommending they install a newly released version of the browser, v1.5.0.5, which includes some essential security fixes. The Mountain View, Calif., company began sending out notices in the early afternoon, notifying users via popup windows. Chris Beard, vice president of products at Mozilla, told […]

Five IT companies—including giants IBM, Nokia and Samsung—and the OSGi Alliance announced July 26 that they will pledge royalty-free access to patents they own in an effort to speed the adoption of OSGi standards and Java-based networking software worldwide. The two other companies that pledged free patent access are Java middleware vendor Gatespace Telematics of […]