White space replaces the sky-blue color scheme in MSN.com's new redesign, which Microsoft began previewing Wednesday before it becomes an official re-launch sometime in early 2010. Content sections are streamlined down to five top-of-page links: news, entertainment, sports, money, lifestyle

Free marketeers' primary argument against Net neutrality is that a government watchdog role in protecting neutrality is bound to be "political" -- and that any government agency will ultimately start a slippery slide to full-bore regulation of the Internet. This

If Apple's Safari is going to make any kind of a challenge for best performing Windows-based Web browser moving into next year, it needs to be now. In Betanews' most extensive testing to date, involving tests that by anyone's guess

In a move that resembles a major food vendor giving away its prize recipe -- minus the secret sauce -- to all of its customers and competitors, Yahoo on Monday donated the source code for its Traffic Server software to

The role-playing fantasy has been a staple of electronic gaming since the 1970s, when students cobbled together interactive quests on university mainframes. However, the genre has fallen out of favor in recent years, overtaken by grittier dramas like the "Grand

Handset maker Sony Ericsson on Tuesday announced the new Xperia X10 smartphone. It will run on the Android 1.6 mobile operating system, also known as "Donut." The Xperia X10 will begin shipping to select markets next year. In announcing the

Can the Web's big-time masters of malware really be tracked down? How risky is cloud computing to network security? And what challenges await the Obama administration's plans to lock down the nation's electronic infrastructure -- while at the same time

In the field of computer technology, some topics are so frequently and fiercely disputed that they almost resemble religious feuds -- Mac vs. PC, for instance, or open source vs. proprietary software. Other topics, though, don't see nearly the same

Promising faster performance and a bevy of new features, Mozilla on Friday released the first beta version of its Firefox 3.6 browser. Built on the Gecko 1.9.2 Web rendering engine, the new version contains numerous improvements for developers and users,

An update from Apple for its OS X 10.6 operating system could cause a lot of grief for tinkerers who have installed Snow Leopard on low-cost netbook computers. The update may cause Snow Leopard to no longer run on Intel's

I was never much one for "Guitar Hero." Playing "Smoke on the Water" 50 times while holding a pint-sized plastic guitar just never really got the blood flowing. I've been waiting for something better, and now it's here. Activision's new

Lawmakers are moving to ban the use of computer laptops and other personal electronic devices in airline cockpits to prevent another incident like the Northwest Airlines plane that overshot Minneapolis by 150 miles. Sen. Byron Dorgan, chairman of the aviation

We all contribute to the news cycle when we post timely content online, even if it's 140 characters or fewer, and recently we learned that our little bits of information have substantive value when search giants Google and Microsoft announced

Hold Esquire's December issue in front of a webcam, and an on-screen image of the magazine pops to life, letters flying off the cover. Shift and tilt the magazine, and the animation on the screen moves accordingly. Robert Downey Jr.

It's enough of a challenge to launch a new subscription movie channel in an industry segment dominated by the likes of HBO and Showtime. However, Epix, which begins life Friday, starts its adventure with a double feature of sorts: It

ICANN's decision on Friday to allow domain names in non-Latin characters may have been a move to forestall fragmentation of the Internet. "Not introducing international domains would mean that alternate root servers will be set up around the world because

The Android mobile operating system is graduating soon to 2.0 status, and Google gave it a pretty nice present to celebrate: a free turn-by-turn navigation app called "Google Maps Navigation." It'll run on Android 2.0 phones with GPS, and it'll

A tweet and a status update tell Facebook's story after a week of very unsociable social media slip-ups for Mark Zuckerberg's company. The tweet: "Dear Facebook: Stop sucking, you're making Twitter look reliable." The status update: "[Name withheld] knows FB

When the Verizon Droid from Motorola arrives next month, it will include a new version of the Android Operating system. Android 2.0, also known as "Eclair," will no doubt show up in lots of other new smartphones over the coming

A couple of days ago, a friend was trying to key my email address into his aging feature flip cellphone. He was muttering about how painful the process was and how stupid the phone was, and he remarked that he