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Once the pariah of the media world, peer-to-peer software has come a long way since the days of Napster and college kids with hard drives stuffed with pirated music. Now, current P2P software provider BitTorrent boasts 80 million users, which, as CEO Eric Klinker is quick to point out, is somewhere between four and five times the size of cable giant Comcast's customer base...

Once upon a time, the word "hypertexting" referred to the process of linking one page of text to another through a specific Internet protocol. Now, public health researchers are using it to describe the practice of sending mobile phone text messages in the extreme: "hyper," as in lots, and "texting" as in, well, texting ...

AOL is considering a play to take over Yahoo, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. ...

Microsoft's vice president of trustworthy computing, Scott Charney, has put the call out for a collective, coordinated approach to protecting the public from, among many other threats, botnets ...

With the launch of the new Windows Phone 7 operating system and the devices that run it less than a week away, another mobile carrier has been added to the mix. ...

In a set of coordinated investigations, federal, state and local officials filed charges this week against more than 70 defendants who allegedly used cybercrime techniques to defraud both individuals and corporations out of millions of dollars. New York County District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., announced the indictment of 36 people in Manhattan alone. This is in addition to the 37 defendants charged by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York...

We've all heard the lines: "blogging is so 2008"; "say that in 140 characters or less," and now, "the feed is the new desktop." This last one is from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and he said it in the context of his company's release of the new version of its enterprise social networking tool, Chatter 2. ...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg came forward to clarify rampant rumors that his company was working with a mobile handset manufacturer to make a Facebook-branded smartphone. The problem is, he didn't address the question. ...

The dream of streaming video and audio on the go, without boundaries, is one step closer to reality. The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday ruled in favor of releasing the parts of the broadcast spectrum called "white spaces" -- those frequencies that fall in between television channels -- for wireless broadband use. ...

ComScore's latest tally of smartphone operating system market shares in the U.S. showed Research In Motion's BlackBerry OS continues to hold a dominating lead in the smartphone arena with a 39.3 percent market share for the May-July period. However, that represents a slip of 1.8 percent since April. ...

The brave new world of technology will include devices that change our whole relationship to them and, perhaps, to the world around us. That's according to Intel CTO Justin Rattner, who outlined the future of "context-sensitive" computing at his keynote address to the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this week ...

Robots can be made made strong, robots can be made tireless, but a big problem with robots so far is that they can't be made to have a sense of touch as humans do. ...

Toshiba has announced its own entrant into the tablet market with the Folio 100, which will run on the Android 2.2 operating system. Sporting a screen just over 10 inches, the device will be larger than other early competitors to Apple's iPad tablet computer, such as the Dell Streak. ...

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has struck a deal with officials in India that will allow it to continue to operate in the country, for now. According to a statement by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs, the two parties will conduct a 60-day trial of access methods that RIM has proposed so that the Ministry can monitor communications sent on RIM devices.

During the first half of 2010, more than 4,300 new disclosures of software security issues came to light. That's according to the mid-year report issued by IBM's special X-Force security research team. What's perhaps a bit more disturbing is how many of those vulnerabilities remain unfixed. ...

Facebook rolled out its Places feature this week to much fanfare -- so much, in fact, that the official Facebook Blog has an update note posted that users who are unable to access the service should try back soon to see if they can check in. The app, available on the iPhone as part of Facebook for iPhone and available to all other mobile users through the touch.facebook.com website, allows people to indicate their location in the physical world to all their Facebook friends in the virtual world...

Research In Motion, maker of BlackBerry mobile phones and the new Torch handset, is looking to make a play in the mobile ad market. That's according to a report in The Wall Street Journal that quotes "people familiar with the matter" as saying that RIM has held talks with mobile ad firm Millennial Media. Those talks broke down over acquisition price, said the sources. Millenial was asking between US$400 and $500 million, a price that RIM executives felt was far too high...

Cable premium channel HBO has all but come right out to say it intends to compete head-to-head with online streaming video service Netflix. That's according to comments HBO co-president Eric Kessler made in an interview with Bloomberg. Remaining exclusive has a value of its own, Kessler said, and it can command a hefty price tag when consumers want the content badly enough...

How many times have we all seen comments like this on a Facebook status update: "Not like, but dislike," or "I'd press Dislike if there was a button." It's a common complaint about the social networking site's comment options; one can press the "Like" button to give a thumbs-up to a friend's post, but there is no analogous "Dislike" button ...

There was a time, early this decade, when every day saw a new technology company make an initial public offering (IPO). Talk of stock options and vesting schedules was common coffee break fare. Lately, the flow of capital for startups is much more like a trickle, and IPOs are sparse. Still, some partnership or venture-backed companies are managing to make it to market, and Hulu may be one of the next big ones, according to widely published reports...