Matthew Hicks

Some users of Google Inc.s Gmail service were unable to access their accounts for a few hours over the weekend. A Google spokesman confirmed on Monday that accounts for a “small number” of users were unavailable for a number of hours on Sunday. He declined to specify the exact length of the outage, its nature […]

Nine months after starting its investigation, an advisory committee of the Internets main oversight body has released a report condemning VeriSigns SiteFinder redirection service. The report, issued Friday by an ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) committee, concluded that SiteFinder, suspended in October, should remain shuttered and that similar domain registry services should […]

Yahoo Inc. has acquired a Web-based e-mail startup company as it moves closer to rolling out further changes to its popular e-mail service. In a message to subscribers posted late Friday, Oddpost Inc. said it had been bought by Yahoo and that its development team was focusing it energy on building new additions to Yahoo […]

Ask Jeeves Inc. almost seems to relish its underdog status in the Web search engine world. Its smaller than its top competitors, and its often been overlooked as the media and Silicon Valley ogle searchs revival. But as attention has turned to Google Inc.s IPO and Microsoft Corp.s attempt to build its own MSN search […]

Internet Explorer users continued to hammer Microsoft with questions about the Web browsers security during an online discussion Thursday, but they also sought answers about IEs future support for Web standards and new features. The Redmond, Wash., software maker hosted a public chat with IEs product and development team on its Windows XP Expert Zone […]

Yahoo doubled its earnings in the second quarter, continuing a string of record quarters but failing to wow Wall Street on Wednesday. Yahoo Inc.s net income for the quarter ended June 30 rose to $113 million, or 8 cents per share, compared with $51 million, or 4 cents a share, a year earlier, the company […]

The calls to dump Internet Explorer may be getting louder, but they are falling largely on deaf ears among enterprise users. IT managers and users say that while the rash of security flaws associated with IE has drawn new attention to its vulnerabilities and has led some individuals to switch browsers, enterprises are reluctant to […]

A group of Web browser makers has banded together to make software plug-ins as functional in their own browsers as in Microsofts dominant Internet Explorer browser. The Mozilla Foundation, Opera Software ASA and Apple Computer Inc. announced earlier this week that they have developed an extension to a plug-in API that serves as an alternative […]

A federal appeals court ruling this week has put a spotlight on the increasingly public nature of e-mail messages and has unraveled expectations that e-mail would gain the same privacy protections as traditional communications. The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday ruled that protections under the federal Wiretap Act do not extend to e-mail […]

Microsoft Corp. is offering it first public peek into its new search engine technology. The companys MSN division on Wednesday launched a technology preview of MSN Search with Web search results delivered from its own Web crawler and search algorithms. It is available as an alpha test from the MSN Sandbox Web site. The preview […]