Tag archive: Virginia

Every time a major event happens in the world these days, it’s only a matter of seconds before Twitter starts fizzing as people jump online to start spreading the news and sharing experiences. It happened just yesterday when Steve Jobs announced he was stepping down as CEO of Apple. And it happened again on Tuesday when a 5.8-magnitude earthquake struck Mineral, Va., about 100 miles southwest of Washington, DC. It may not have been the strongest… Read More

FBI Agents raided a data center in Virginia early Tuesday and confiscated several web servers. In the wake of the raid several websites remain offline, and people are left ruffled by the FBI's heavy handedness. According to the New York Times, the raid happened at a data center in Reston, Virginia, which was attached to the Swiss based DigitalOne. The FBI took three enclosures with equipment plugged into them, taking out the sites of… Read More

It’s a sign of the new digital age. Hackers claim to have stolen 8.3 million patient records, that track patient abuse of prescription drugs, from a Virginia state government site, and are holding them to ransom – for a figure of $10 million. In a note posted on Wikileaks, the hackers said they had the records: "In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I… Read More

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday announced it was refusing to consider re-instating a tough Virginia antispam law, effectively leaving stand a lower court's decision that the law was overly broad and restricted speech protected under the First Amendment. The decision ends the long legal road of the 2003 law, which made it a felony to send anonymously more than 10,000 unsolicited bulk email messages in a 24-hour period. The law was… Read More

GPS maker TomTom has found itself in the news a bit lately. Late last month Redmond software giant Microsoft filed suit against the company, claiming the company is infringing on Microsoft patents in its Linux-based GPS devices. Some open source advocates have viewed the lawsuit as Microsoft perhaps attempting a backdoor attack on Linux: three of the eight patents cited in the suit focus on TomTom's support for FAT (file allocation… Read More

There’s more to Google Street View than entertainment and not getting lost, it seems. Authorities have used it, along with GPS tracking from a cell phone, to locate a nine-year-old girl reportedly taken by her grandmother. The problem began after Rose Maltais collected her granddaughter Natalie from her guardians for a weekend away. Athol, Massachusetts, police chief Timothy Anderson told the BBC that Rose Maltais "said that… Read More

Rural Internet users left out of the loop by mainsteam Internet solutions like cable and DSL may soon have a new option thanks to a deal IBM has hammered out to begin providing broadband over power lines. On Wednesday, the company announced it had signed a $9.6 million deal with IBEC, a broadband-over-power-line (BPL) provider, to begin equipping several rural test markets with BPL technology. Under the agreement, IBM will supply project… Read More

Earlier this week, the FCC made it official (PDF) and ordered U.S. cable operator Comcast to end discriminatory network management practices that deliberately blocked certain types of network use by its customers. In Comcast's case, this means peer-to-peer file-sharing applications like BitTorrent and Gnutella; during periods of network congestion, last year Comcast was revealed by the Associated Press to be forging reset packets that… Read More

Spammers beware: despite some doubt that the first spammer to ever be convicted under the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act would actually go to jail for his deeds, the former junk mailer will indeed spend time behind bars for his crime. On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the decision of a lower court [PDF] to sentence Jeremy Jaynes to nine years in prison. The court wrestled with whether or not the state law banning unsolicited bulk… Read More

If there's one thing generally true of students today, it's that they're glued to their cell phones. Whether talking with friends and family, sending and receiving messages, or checking their social networking profiles, today's youth rarely do anything without a mobile phone close at hand. However, comparatively few students are embracing what would seem to be a welcome and important mobile service: campus safety… Read More

Once a towering giant of the online world, AOL has announced to its employees that it is eliminating some 2,000 jobs—1,200 in the United States—as the company continues to transition from a walled-garden to a provider of free, ad-supported online services. The layoffs will impact about 750 employees near AOL's Virginia location, and the Associated Press is reporting most of the U.S. terminations will be effective tomorrow,… Read More

It's been many years since America Online represented perhaps the world's largest online service and gateway to the Internet, but the folks currently running AOL don't want you to count them out just yet. Today, AOL made a series of significant strategic announcements that have the company bundling toolbar and portal software with Hewlett-Packard PCs, launching a mammoth new Internet advertising business under the monicker… Read More

Independent PC maker Velocity Micro has acquired boutique shop Overdrive PC for an undisclosed amount, giving the company access to the latter's signature Hyperclocking technology which wrings the fastest reliable speeds out of computer components, giving users the maximum performance from each part. The thought is that by combining Overdrive's capability to create high performance systems with Velocity MIcro's… Read More

Internet giant Google has announced partnerships with the state government s of Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia to improve public access to information available via state government Web sites. The partnership has two layers: the first makes difficult-to-find information already published on state Web sites more accessible to Google and other search engines using Google's Sitemap protocol, while the second has selected state… Read More

Following immediately on its settlements with Texas and California, music label Sony BMG has agreed to pay some $4.25 million as part of settlement agreements with 39 U.S. states and the District of Columbia regarding copy protection software included on some of the labels music CDs which caused computers to malfunction and exposed users to security threats. The terms of the agreement are similar to earlier settlements with Texas and… Read More