Apple’s iPhone continues to attract not just customers but out-and-out fans, which can be a bit of a double-edged sword.

The company this week racked up the highest owner satisfaction ratings from J.D. Power. That’s especially impressive considering that it won the rankings for business use as well as personal use.

The catch is that when something does go wrong, the chorus of Apple chatterers can amplify criticism. Continue reading "Apple phones tops in customer satisfaction, mostly"

More than 10,000 user names and passwords for Hotmail and other Microsoft services were anonymously posted over the weekend at a free site for programmers, it was reported Monday, prompting security experts to recommend that users change their passwords.

Microsoft said it was investigating the posting to a coding site called pastebin.com, which hinted at a much bigger password collection: according to tech news site Neowin.net, the account names all started with A or B. Continue reading "Thousands of hacked Hotmail passwords posted"

Yahoo director Maggie Wilderotter, a onetime Microsoft strategy executive, will leave the company’s board at the end of the year, Yahoo said in an SEC filing late Friday.

Yahoo said Ms Wilderotter, whose day job is in Connecticut as CEO of telecommunications provider Frontier Communications, wanted more time to devote to other pursuits and didn’t leave as the result of any disagreement.

In an email exchange, Ms. Wilderotter remained supportive of CEO Carl Bartz, who struck a controversial deal to outsource Yahoo’s search mechanics to Microsoft.

“I think Carol is terrific,” she wrote to me. “The company is in good hands.”

Frontier’s Web page, incidentally, still offers search that is “powered by Yahoo search.” Which does sound better than “powered by Yahoo search, which is in turn powered by Microsoft’s Bing search.”

While some cast yesterday’s news in the Google books saga as the death of the settlement that would have resolved the search king’s long fight with publishers, the bigger picture is that out-of-print books for all just got a lot closer to reality.

True, the New York federal court filing was officially a request to withdraw the deal Google struck late last year with publishers and authors, in the wake of objections Friday from the US Justice Department. But that version had a good chance of getting rejected by the judge, given that the regulatory concerns followed major objections from the non-profit world, other interested parties and the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo. Continue reading "Google to US: we can work it out"

The love-hate relationship between Microsoft and Yahoo will be tuned to “hate” for the remainder of the month.
In private, the companies are working on separate versions of integration plans that will send some Yahoo engineers to work for Microsoft as it prepares to take over delivering automated free and paid search results to Yahoo. Continue reading "Microsoft and Yahoo keep punching at each other"

Apple has approved RealNetworks’ Rhaspsody music-streaming service for the iPhone, once again opening its doors to an iTunes competitor.

The decision announced Thursday comes a week after Apple, now the world’s top music retailer, blessed an iPhone application by music service Spotify, which for now will work only in Europe.

Continue reading "Apple allows Rhapsody music streams on iPhone"

UPDATE: follow it live. Chris Nuttall will be providing live coverage from San Francisco of Wednesday’s Apple event, starting at 10am local time. Follow it here.

Apple is holding a music-themed press event tomorrow, where it is expected to unveil a package of  goodies that will start being attached to sales of full digital albums.

The product, code-named Cocktail by the record labels, will include interactive lyric sheets, photos and other virtual extras aimed at replicating and improving on the old experience of opening a vinyl record sleeve or CD boxed set filled with trinkets. Continue reading "Apple might offer a `Cocktail’ of new iPods and music"

The part of US information technology most at risk from a serious attack is the directory service that steers internet users to the websites they want, according to a federal report issued Tuesday after more than a year of study.

The report from the Department of Homeland Security and private information technology leaders rated the chances of something serious going wrong with six key functions as part of the IT sector “baseline risk assessment.” Those assessments are being published for 18 sectors deemed critical to the country’s national security. Continue reading "Website directory system is most vulnerable to attack"