Erin Joyce

AOL Time Warner’s Netscape Communications browser division has lost an appeal in a lawsuit accusing it of electronic eavesdropping with “cookies” , which it had used with its free software “SmartDownload” feature. The ruling by the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which also draws a distinction between the structure of online and offline contractual […]

(Updates to clarify first reference to Jack Grubman in fifth paragraph) In an unprecedented action, New York’s Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has sued five former and current executives of telecommunications companies to return $1.5 billion they allegedly gleaned from “phony stock ratings.” The action is the latest in Spitzer’s ongoing investigations into whether Wall Street […]

David Colburn, the former AOL Time Warner executive in charge of deal making at the Dulles, Va.-based online division, is the initial focus of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) probe into AOL’s accounting practices. Last week, AOL forced Colburn out of the company, literally locking him out of his office. According to the Wall […]

AOL Time Warner joined the hordes of public companies certifying their financial documents under a new Securities and Exchange Commission rule and also revealed that it may have overstated revenue by $49 million within its struggling AOL division. The company said it discovered the accounting problems on three transactions about 10 days ago and was […]

Hit by a triple whammy of a recent recession, accounting scandals, and the impact of September 11, financial services firms are leading an outsourcing surge, a recent study shows. Technology research firm Dataquest Inc., a unit of Gartner, Inc. , estimates that worldwide financial services business process outsourcing (BPO) revenue will total $41.3 billion this […]