Infrastructure

Commentary is spreading across the Web after U.S. Senator Ted Stevens described the Internet as a "series of tubes" during a debate on net neutrality.

Skype Ltd. is dismissing a claim by a small team of Chinese engineers who say they have reverse engineered the protocol used for Skype Internet phone calls.

The Mozilla Foundation has released the first beta 1 version of Firefox 2. It's intended for web application developers and Firefox's testing community only.

Sony Corp. was ranked the best brand in the U.S. for the seventh year in a row, Harris Interactive Inc. said. The company's latest Harris Poll showed Dell Inc. retained its second-place ranking, followed by just two other IT companies, Hewlett-Packard Co. in sixth place and Apple Computer Inc., which entered the list in 10th place.

Lexar Media Inc. on Thursday recalled certain flash memory drives made in China over fears they could overheat and burn users or cause property damage.

Sun Microsystems Inc. launched three Opteron-based servers Tuesday, positioning them as midrange servers to be used for network computing in data centers.

Yahoo Inc. is set to launch a service that helps consumers plan trips online the way they do in real life: By finding out where other people went and what they did there.

Wal-Mart Canada Corp., has quietly been preparing to launch a modest pilot program to match the ongoing RFID program in the U.S. To woo suppliers to participate, Mississauga, Ontario-based Wal-Mart Canada has invited 16 companies to attend the Retail Council of Canada's annual STORE Conference in Toronto