Staff Writer - itbusinessdirect

During Shutdown, IRS Computers Still Churn Out Tax Liens, Levies And Bills

October 7, 2013 Staff Writer

At 1 A.M. Tuesday, just an hour after the budget standoff forced the partial shutdown of the federal government , Forbes contributor Kelly Phillips Erb (aka Taxgirl) delivered two pieces of bad news to taxpayers: you still have to pay any taxes due, and if you have problems, tough luck, the Internal Revenue won’t be answering its phones. (Yes, you cynics, that is news. Even during the busy tax return filing season more than two thirds of callers do get through to a human being at the IRS, although they…

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Twitter to raise $1bn in its stock market launch

October 4, 2013 Staff Writer

Social networking company Twitter has said it plans to raise $1bn (£619m) in its stock market debut in documents filed with US regulators. In the filing, revealed on Thursday, the seven-year-old company said that it now has 218 million monthly users and that 500 million tweets are sent a day. It made a loss of $69m in the first six months of 2013, on revenues of $254m. It will be the largest Silicon Valley stock offering since Facebook’s listing in 2012. Analysts said that the offering was likely to get…

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ICANN and Your Internet Abuse

October 3, 2013 Staff Writer

In spite of the material we were presented with in Durban something has gone very wrong inside of ICANN Compliance. KnujOn has published a report which demonstrates that ICANN Compliance appears to completely collapse between September 2012 and December 2012. Following December 2012, ICANN seems to stop responding to or processing any complaints. It is around this time certain compliance employees start disappearing. This was not limited to the Sydney office as some would have us believe, all while we have been given assurances the compliance team was being ramped…

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Tips to Protect eCommerce Website Availability and Security During the Holidays

October 3, 2013 Staff Writer

With the holiday shopping season quickly approaching, Internet retailers are gearing up for an onslaught of Web traffic — which is great, as long as they have the right measures in place to keep their customers safe and satisfied. Even one hour of downtime due to a website outage or a malicious attack can have significant impact on a retailer’s reputation and revenue, especially during the holidays, a time which the National Retail Federation says can add up to 40 percent of an online retailer’s annual revenue. With some large…

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DCA Registry Services Kenya Participates in 2nd African IGF – Updates its .africa Bid

September 30, 2013 Staff Writer

The 2nd African Internet Governance Forum (AfIGF) successfully concluded. The conference was held from 24-26 September 2013 at the Multimedia University, Nairobi Kenya. The AfIGF conference was organized by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the IGF Secretariat in cooperation with the Kenyan government among other stakeholders. DCA Registry Services Kenya delegates also attended the conference and contributed to important discussions and pertinent proceedings. In his opening address that was communicated via a recorded video message, Fade Chehade, ICANN’s President & CEO noted that the African IGF…

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IT Security is critically underfinanced by business

September 30, 2013September 30, 2013 Staff Writer

53% of South African based IT decision makers feel that not enough time or money is available to develop IT security policies. As a result, barely half of the companies feel that they have highly-organised, systematic processes to deal with threats. These findings emerged from the recent Global Corporate IT Security Risks 2013 survey conducted by B2B International for Kaspersky Lab in 2013 among business representatives around the world. The situation is especially poor in the global educational industry, where only 28% of organisations are confident that they have sufficient investment in…

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Protecting the open Internet may require defunding the ITU. Here’s how to do it.

September 20, 2013September 20, 2013 Staff Writer

In the past week, two senior U.S. officials, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai and Republican Rep. Greg Walden (Ore.) were quoted as saying the United States should pull funding from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), at least as a last resort, if the U.N. telecommunications body persists in its attempts to regulate the Internet. What’s the ITU? Why do people want to defund it? And what would it take to do so? Read on to find out. What’s the ITU? The ITU was founded in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, an organization…

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5 things neither side of the broadband debate wants to admit

September 18, 2013 Staff Writer

As I was editing my interview with Jeffrey Eisenach, the director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy, I had a sense of deja vu. Eisenach’s arguments were thoughtful and cogent. But they were eerily similar to those I encountered when I first started thinking about Internet regulation a decade ago. That’s puzzling because the Internet has changed rapidly. Over the last decade, we’ve gotten Netflix streaming, the iPhone, or FiOS. So why are ideologues on both sides of the broadband debate still making the…

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ICT strategies as business differentiators

September 16, 2013 Staff Writer

Information technology is fast becoming a primary driver of market differentiation. “In this context, the IT agenda is quickly extending outside of the realm of IT executives and into the agenda of the CEO, COO and CMO. It is clear that technology trends are changing the world as we know it, and business leaders who are able to grasp these trends and execute on their implementation will position themselves for future business success,” says Hans Zachar, senior manager of IT strategy at Accenture. In order to gain insight into the…

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Online music piracy in the UK drops by a third

September 16, 2013 Staff Writer

In the last year, us Brits downloaded a third fewer pirated music tracks than the year before. According to figures from Ofcom, the number of such songs we snaffled fell from 301 million in March 2012 to 199 million in March this year, the Guardian reports. So maybe we’re less a bunch of Fun Lovin’ Criminals than before. The music industry is said to be on the road to recovery, with total revenues increasing for the first time this year since 1999, although they only went up by 0.3 per…

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