In an effort to staunch the bleeding, telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent announced Friday plans to cut costs by 1 billion euros (US$1.3 billion) in each of the next two years, which includes layoffs. According to Bloomberg, that will mean shedding 1,000 managers, while Reuters says it means cutting loose 5,000 contractors. The company has 77,000 employees [...]

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A utility tax that includes text messaging and VoIP calling goes into effect Friday in Sacramento, Calif. The tax rate under the voter-approved Measure 0, known as the “Utility User Tax Reduction and Fairness Measure,”actually goes down from 7.5 percent to 7 percent, reports The Sacramento Bee. The measure will not tax Internet access or digital [...]

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Despite Microsoft’s view of Windows Vista — which it calls its most successful operating system ever — a recent survey says otherwise. Information Technology Intelligence Corp. analyst Laura Dido found in a recent survey of 700 IT decision makers that 46 percent intend to wait for Windows 7 before migrating from Windows XP. According to [...]

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The Australian government wants to filter the Internet to block illegal content, but the country’s ISPs aren’t going along with the much-criticized plan, reports The Age. Trials of filters to block access to 10,000 sites deemed to hold illegal content were due to take place before Christmas. But ISPs Telstra and Internode have refused to take [...]

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Ceres, a national network of investors, environmental organizations and other public interest groups working with companies and investors to address sustainability challenges, recently ranked 63 large companies the retail, pharmaceutical, apparel and other sectors on climate change strategy and practices. According to the study, tech companies fared very well with one noteable acception. IBM and Dell [...]

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The latest bailout of the day appears to be gaining steam in the market for DRAM memory chips. With prices in the cellar due to oversupply, Taiwan, Germany and South Korea appear ready to provide aid as those companies come hat in hand, reports Network World. Easy credit led to companies building out too much capacity, especially [...]

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Just after Microsoft addressed four vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, the company is warning of XML Zero-Day flaw in the browser, reports internetnews.com. Initially the vulnerability was thought to only affect IE7, but PC Magazine says all currently-supported versions of IE are affected. Microsoft’s security advisory says it is aware only of limited attacks that attempt to use [...]

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A Russian businessman has been granted a trademark by that country’s federal patent agency for the punctuation marks ; -) that make a winking emoticon in texts and e-mails, reports BBC News. Oleg Teterin, president of Superfone, a company that sells advertising on mobile phones, says he doesn’t care if casual users include the symbol, but [...]

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Bit9 has released its list of the 12 most vulnerable applications commonly found behind corporate firewalls. According to vnunet.com, Mozilla’s open source Firefox browser tops the list, followed by Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Windows Live (MSN) Messenger. The applications are ranked according to popularity, the number and severity of vulnerabilities, and the difficulty of detecting and patching [...]

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Just 100 days after making its debut, Google has taken its Web browser Chrome out of beta, reports The Associated Press in the San Francisco Chronicle. It initially met mixed reactions, though IT Business Edge’s Ken Hardin was pretty impressed. Computerworld, with the headline, “Is Google out of its mind?”, runs through some of the reaction to [...]

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