Business currents

SAN FRANCISCO--The FBI agent whose undercover sting operation led to the dismantling of an international cybercrime ring believes that increasing transnational police cooperation is turning the tide against digital criminals.

J. Keith Mularski, a special agent who works in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cyber Division, says that when it comes to fighting cybercrime, the bad guys may still hold a technological upper hand but that the good guys are getting better.

"We're not far behind," says Mularski, who spent a couple of years infiltrating a crime network that offered a range of stolen data--including credit … Read more

Back from vacation and it's grand to see that the blabosphere's obsession du jour with all things Twitter remains as rabid as ever. For a while, at least, I suppose it elbows aside the other obsession du jour--the truly distressing state of newspaperdom--at least until word of the inevitable next bankruptcy hits the wire.

But with all due respect to the armchair commentariat, I'm sure there's something more interesting to write about in the wider world of technology. You wouldn't get that impression after randomly scanning headlines on the tech news aggregation sites. That's … Read more

Telecommunications providers on four continents are testing a plan to provide so-called virtual desktop computing to their business customers.

People familiar with the outlines of the pilot program say the idea is to offer Internet access to companies via dumb terminals connected through the so-called cloud. The tests are said to involve companies in the United States, Europe, Australia, and China.

The testing period is slated to run through the middle of the year. If it works out to participants' satisfaction, the pitch to customers will be why it makes more sense in an economic recession to outsource their computing … Read more

This is shaping up to be quite a winter of discontent. Mass layoffs at home and mass demonstrations abroad have combined to foster a seething desperation around the world that would have warmed the cockles of Dickens' Madame Defarge.

But shouting "off with their heads" only gets you so far. Whether we like it or not, the deterioration of the global economy has forced companies everywhere to take hard looks at how well they generate value. Especially in the Internet age, where your competitor may only be a mouse click away.

We Americans were first to figure this … Read more

It was to be expected. When a one-time tech powerhouse winds up bankrupt and sold off for chump change, that's bound to ignite the daily bloviation fest.

So it was that one and all are today offering their dutiful ruminations on the cosmic import of SGI's acquisition by Rackable Systems for a paltry $25 million.

This is not so complicated. SGI was a comet, soaring through the tech firmament during its brief moment of glory. But it's only one in a list of former high-flyers to come crashing back to earth, a roster that includes the likes … Read more

In the 1990s, Lotus Notes gained notoriety, in part, for the nifty collaboration features it brought to corporate e-mail. IBM's CEO at the time, Lou Gerstner, was so impressed that he paid a premium to consummate what began as a hostile tender to buy Lotus in 1995.

Notes went on to become an unqualified commercial success with some 145 million users around the world who use the product. Still, Lotus hasn't quite secured for itself the reputation of offering the must-have enterprise collaboration technology in the age of the Internet.

What with the proliferation of competing Web-based technologies … Read more

As cloud computing edges forward in fits and starts, one recurring question is whether more companies will opt to put their IT services on so-called public clouds or private ones.

The former are available to any individual or business, which essentially rent out a menu of scalable resources. That's a popular option for startups and fledgling outfits, which can't afford to sink much money into paying for an extensive hardware infrastructure. Private clouds, on the other hand, typically offer stronger security and reliability and are thought to have special appeal to IT managers keen on keeping their use … Read more

Faced with a growing protectionist backlash in the United States, the co-founder of one of the world's biggest IT outsourcing companies remains confident that the political controversy over exporting technology jobs overseas will ebb.

"Given the economic climate, there will always be protectionism. When the economy slows down, it's a reasonable thing to happen," Infosys Technologies' co-chairman Nandan Nilekani said Monday, adding that cooler heads ultimately will prevail. "We continue to believe that outsourcing adds value to the economy."

Nilekani, who is touring the United States on a book tour, said that both the … Read more

If you have the stomach, revisit the heated debates over how Unix or Web services should develop. Strong companies and strong personalities dominated the arguments. Ultimately, Web services flourished while the Unix standard fragmented, ending up with proprietary versions that were too weak to compete against Linux years later.

Such are the birth pangs that attend every interesting new technology. But while they say experience is a teacher, any lessons seem destined to land on deaf ears when it comes to the computer industry. At the dawn of the cloud-computing era, we're about to witness key tech companies again … Read more