David Legard

Spam sent via instant messaging (IM) is set to become a major nuisance in 2004, with the number of IM spam messages tripling from 400 million to 1.2 billion, according to research firm the Radicati Group.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has pushed back the dates by which U.S. companies must comply with the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act relating to financial reporting within companies, SEC said in a statement Tuesday.

Eight officials from Japan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) entered the Japanese offices of Microsoft Corp. Thursday morning as part of an investigation into possible anticompetitive practices by the U.S. software giant, the company confirmed.

Software piracy remains a multi-billion dollar industry in Asia, but there are some signs of improvement in the 14 Asian countries being most closely surveyed, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA).

Officials in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust division have made a recommendation to the department to block the proposed acquisition of PeopleSoft Inc. by rival Oracle Corp., PeopleSoft said in a statement Tuesday.

The standard desktop PC of 2007 will have a hard disk drive with capacity between 500GB and 600GB, according to Mark Geenen, managing director of research company TrendFocus Inc.

China will become the world's largest Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) market in 2004 as Asia-Pacific's investment in telecommunication infrastructure rises for the first time in five years, according to a report released Tuesday by Gartner Inc.

Major players in China's IT and telecommunication industries signed deals Tuesday to buy equipment from U.S. vendors worth a total of around US$2.3 billion, the companies said. The deals were signed at a seminar on telecommunications and IT trade in Washington.