Webware

A bug that made e-mails and folders go missing for some Windows Live Hotmail users has been fixed according to Microsoft.

"We have identified the source of the issue (and) have restored e=mail access to those who were affected," the company said on the Windows Live Solution Center help site yesterday afternoon. "We recognize that even though we restored e-mail access, some of the affected users did not receive mail sent to them during the last 24 to 72 hours."

Microsoft says the issue was fixed early this morning, although if users are still having … Read more

As another year dawns, life is still pretty good for Google but ever more complicated.

With that, let's reexamine the five New Year's resolutions we outlined for Google at the start of 2010 to see how the company lived up to that unsolicited advice, and offer more of the same for 2011.

First, last year's report card:

1. Don't forget where you came from: This resolution involved priority No. 1 at Google: remain the world's leading provider of Internet searches by a comfortable margin. It passed this test with ease: despite significant investment on Microsoft'… Read more

With the steady rise in Chrome, 1 out of every 10 people surfing the Web in December used Google's browser.

Chrome's gains have come largely at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, whose usage share has been dropping for years, but there's also a ray of hope for Redmond. IE9, which embodies Microsoft's ambition to build a cutting-edge browser once again, is showing signs of real adoption with usage that grew from 0.4 percent in November to 0.5 percent in December, according to new statistics from Net Applications.

Fractions of a percent may … Read more

A majority of American voters wants the FCC to keep its hands off the Internet.

At least, that was the finding of new survey results released this week by polling firm Rasmussen Reports.

Among the 1,000 "likely U.S. voters" questioned, only 21 percent said they'd be in favor of the Federal Communication Commission regulating the Internet. A majority 54 percent said they're opposed to government control of the Net, while 25 percent were left undecided.

Rasumussen conducted its survey on December 26, just a few days after the FCC unveiled new regulations that would … Read more

It's a long-standing truism that people won't pay for online content, but a new study from Pew Internet suggests otherwise.

Among the 750 Internet users in the U.S. surveyed by Pew for a study out today, 65 percent said they've paid for online content.

Music, software, and mobile apps were the most popular items among paying users. But the range of content that people were willing to pay for ran the gamut from games to news articles to adult material.

The survey focused on 15 different kinds of online content to see what people had purchased. … Read more

Online stores scored record sales this holiday season, but it's not just low prices and a tentatively improving economy that may have brought in the buyers.

Though customer satisfaction with the top 40 online retailers dipped 1 percent this year, scoring 78 out of 100, that number still proved much higher than in prior years, according to survey results released yesterday by ForeSee Results.

Among the online businesses tracked in ForeSee's E-Retail Satisfaction Index (U.S. Holiday Edition), Amazon, Netflix, QVC.com, Avon.com, LLBean.com, Newegg.com, and Apple.com were highest in customer satisfaction, each scoring … Read more

Managing the passwords for all the Web sites you use is a neverending challenge, but one tool that can help is RoboForm. Siber Systems recently upgraded its popular password manager to version 7 with a variety of new features and enhancements.

For those of you not familiar with the product, RoboForm lets you create, save, and use a different strong password for any Web site where you need to log in. Instead of you having to juggle dozens of different accounts, RoboForm does it for you, automatically filling in your username, password, and other details at each site.

The new … Read more

Skype has pinned the blame for last week's outage in part on a buggy version of its software for Windows.

In a blog posted today, Chief Information Officer Lars Rabbe explained the house of cards that took down the service the morning of Wednesday, December 22, and kept it offline for many until the following day.

On December 22, a number of support servers that handle offline instant messaging became overloaded, according to Rabbe. Because of that, some Skype clients didn't receive responses as quickly as usual. A bug in one particular Skype client for Windows (version 5.… Read more

Those obsessed with where Google ranks their Web site have a new topic to mull over: cloaking.

Google's Matt Cutts, in charge of much of the search giant's antispam efforts, tweeted over the past week that Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of "cloaking," or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one's site while presenting another look to users. This can include "serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users," according to Google's Webmaster Central help pages, … Read more