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21st November 2000 Archive

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  • Apple slashes two-way G4 prices

    No strings attached

    Apple announced steep discounts on its dual processor G4 Macs today in the US and Europe. US buyers can claim $300 off the 450MHz dual-processor Mac, and $500 off the 500MHz two-way before the end of the year, bringing prices to $2199 and $2999 respectively. In the UK, the same models get £250 and £400 discounts to £1349 and £ …

    Channel 21 Nov 2000, 03:06

  • MCI Worldcom is ‘random billing’ specialist – official

    Plagiarism Corner Register tarpit claims another klutz

    Regular readers will know that The Register employs some cunning booby-traps to foil the most obvious plagiarists. Yesterday, the British online IT news wire computerweekly.com followed up our report on Vint Cerf being named as the new chair of ICANN, with one remarkably similar. "As an engineer Cerf worked on early ARPANET …

    Bootnotes 21 Nov 2000, 04:51

  • It's like the Love Bug, only less romantic

    Romeo and Juliet, the virus

    Virus writers are slushy at heart - naming the latest computer masher "Romeo & Juliet". This nonetheless pesky virus arrives as an HTML email that contains an executable file entitled "My Romeo" and a compiled help file called "My Juliet" (a .chm attachment). It works the same way as the "Love Bug virus", which ran riot across …

    Software 21 Nov 2000, 08:29

  • Easier.co.uk on life support machine

    Braindead dotcom fed mush through tubes

    A British dotcom that helps people buy and sell property on the Web is about to slip into a coma. The board of Easier.co.uk today announced that it intended to flog the company's business and non-cash assets in a bid to realise as much cash as possible for its shareholders. Once completed, all that will be left is a cash shell …

    Business 21 Nov 2000, 08:30

  • Where next for Corel?

    Analysis Few degrees of separation in Middleware graveyard

    Last week, Corel's former Linux project lead, and now CEO, Derek Burney gave an equivocal backing to the company's Quixotic free software initiative. "We made it very clear that there are no sacred cows and we'll leave no stone unturned in determining our strategy," he told IDG News Service. Burney also said that he thought …

    Software 21 Nov 2000, 08:41

  • BT sacks domain grab contractor

    Reach for the VC stars

    BT is to launch a technology incubator business that will exploit the thousands of ideas its boffins come up with at the company's labs in Suffolk. BrightStar is set to be launched officially at the end of the month and is based at BT's Advanced Communications Technology Centre in Martlesham. It is already incubating 13 …

    Music and Media 21 Nov 2000, 09:19

  • The Euro Software Patent Chamber of Horrors

    Spotlight on IP lunacy

    The idiocies of the European Patent Office are to be highlighted in a unique exhibition opening today. Between 11am and 12:30 in Munich, the European Software Patent Horror Gallery will open to the public, hosted by FSF founder Richard M Stallman, only this time wearing his League of Programming Freedom hat. The show is part of …

    Software 21 Nov 2000, 09:24

  • Guninski finds another IE 5.5 security hole

    Does this man do anything else?

    We have a problem with IE security bugs - they all look the same to us. So thank goodness for George Guninski, who's found yet another security hole in Microsoft's IE5. The problem affects IE 5.5 and Outlook and Outlook Express, and exploits the compressed help file (.chm) format. Guninski has found a problem with the .chm …

    Software 21 Nov 2000, 10:37

  • Compaq $60m lawsuit centres on DVD violation

    Drives contain unlicensed MPEG 2 IP - allegedly

    More details have emerged concerning Compaq's legal tussle over alleged video compression patent violations - action that could see the PC vendor being forced to cough up at least $60 million in damages. When the story broke yesterday, we wondered what it might relate too - and now we know. The seven companies who have come …

    Business 21 Nov 2000, 10:50

  • Ozzy Osbourne to bite head off Net media co.

    If his copyright theft suit goes against it...

    Bat biter Ozzy Osbourne, Pantera and seven other metal bands are together suing a trio of media companies, including online video company MCY, for broadcasting bootlegged concert footage. MCY was granted permission to tape the gigs - last summer's Ozzfest 2000 tour - specifically for broadcast across the Internet. Its crime, in …

    Music and Media 21 Nov 2000, 10:56

  • Hello, Australia, are you there?

    World crisis as undersea cable breaks

    It was connection chaos for millions of Internet users yesterday - and to think we never noticed. Millions of people in Australia, Asia, America and Europe found it difficult, no impossible, to get onto the Net, after a 39,000km-long undersea cable was severed, possibly by a trawler, in the wee hours of yesterday morning (Brit …

    Music and Media 21 Nov 2000, 11:33

  • E-minister puts brave face on auction farce

    Government greed puts UK in need

    The collapse and utter failure of the auction for Broadband Fixed Wireless Access yesterday put e-minister, Patricia Hewitt, in a difficult spot. How to explain that the expected £1 billion windfall from the licences had, in fact, turned into a measly £38.2 million. How to pass over the fact that only 16 licences of the 42 up …

    Data Networking 21 Nov 2000, 13:25

  • Intel AGP 8x spec published

    Comments on a postcard to Intel please

    Intel has published the draft spec of the AGP 8x standard - an extension of the existing AGP 4x bus - including an outline of a 64-bit version supporting Itanic and its successors. AGP 8x is unlikely to appear in products until 2003 at the earliest, but should offer bandwidths of over 2GB per second. Intel is seeking input from …

    Channel 21 Nov 2000, 13:26

  • The Reg – a reader's guide

    Where there is confusion, let there be superciliousness

    Based on the number of emails we receive from irate readers (many of them written in green crayon - not an easy thing to do in Outlook Express), it would appear many people consider The Reg to be variously opinionated, biased, racist, too tough, too weak, political, apolitical, too technical, not technical enough, pro AMD, anti …

    Bootnotes 21 Nov 2000, 13:45

  • Cardiff Prison official faces child porn allegations

    Court case in February

    A senior member of staff at Cardiff prison has been arrested by police after kiddie porn was allegedly found on his laptop computer. The official - who has not been named - has been suspended from the Prison Service. The man has been bailed and is due back in court in February. A spokeswoman for the prison service declined to …

    Music and Media 21 Nov 2000, 14:28

  • Nokia unveils first Symbian Crystal Communicator

    As we may have mentioned a while back...

    Nokia has taken the wraps off its first Communicator based on Symbian's Crystal reference design - at its mobile Internet show in Prague, as indeed we said the company would several weeks ago. The 9210 Communicator is intended as a 'do-everything' high speed mobile device, and is intended to ship in the first half of next year …

    Data Networking 21 Nov 2000, 14:35

  • Reg reader finds hardcore Barbie porn

    Doll-on-doll action

    Last week we wrote a story debunking a hysterical article by the Daily Mail which claimed kids were at serious risk of viewing pornography while searching online for their favourite toys. According to the article, porn sites were including words like Barbie, Pokémon, etc into their meta tags to push up traffic and scoop money …

    Bootnotes 21 Nov 2000, 14:45

  • Reg pops Brit net lit zit

    Those pustulous comp results in full

    Quite a week for comps down here at Vulture Central. On top of the excitement over our Codebreaker competition results and our latest Bluetooth give-away, we can now announce the ten unclogged pores who will be curling up with a copy of The New English Book of Internet Stories. We asked for a 30-word outline of the ideal …

    Bootnotes 21 Nov 2000, 15:01

  • BBC sacrifices virgin online

    Blame it all on a 68-year-old sky-diver

    We were shocked, nay appalled, to find that that paragon of free speech, the BBC, prevented a loyal Reg reader from discussing sky-diving online. Respectable Janek Czekaj posed the following question to an online chat room discussing Dilys Price - a 68-year-old sky-diver: "I have some work colleagues in California who go sky- …

    Music and Media 21 Nov 2000, 15:08

  • EMI falls into red on failed Warner tie-up

    Will recover via Net music market

    EMI, the world's third largest record company, said today its attempt to merge with Warner - itself soon to be bought by AOL - knocked an anticipated first-half profit into a loss. Quite a significant loss, at that. This time last year, EMI reported a profit of £31.9 million ($45.3 million at today's exchange rate), or 4.1 …

    Business 21 Nov 2000, 15:17

  • Sony, Honda prep people-like robots

    These aren't the droids you're looking for...

    Sony has developed a 19 inch high robot, codenamed SDR-3X, capable of walking on two legs, kicking a ball and a few other nifty tricks. Meanwhile, Honda has unveiled a four foot tall bipedal robot that can even shake hands with people. Sony's offering has 24 joints, which means it can walk, change direction, balance, dance and …

    Business 21 Nov 2000, 15:30

  • Solar Sunrise hacker joins Mid-East cyber-war

    Pentagon humiliater turns on Palestinians

    The ongoing war of packet floods and Web defacements between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian hacktivists saw a new and famous name enter the fray last week: Ehud Tenebaum, the Israeli hacker known as "The Analyzer," who was fingered by the US government in 1998 as the mastermind of one of the biggest Pentagon hack-attacks in …

    Music and Media 21 Nov 2000, 15:53

  • Intel and Broadcom best friends again

    Sad day for lawyers

    Intel and Broadcom are reported to have kissed and made up, and settled all claims and counter-claims against each other. A brief joint statement was distributed earlier today saying: "Intel Corporation and Broadcom Corporation today announced they have settled all claims against each other brought under Intel's trade secret …

    Channel 21 Nov 2000, 15:59

  • Blunder cuts Lucent Q1 sales by $125m

    Er... we did our sums wrong... sorry...

    Lucent admitted today it has made a mistake its Q1 fiscal predictions, a cock up that will effectively wipe two cents of its earnings and cuts its sales figures for the period by $125 million. Oh dear. Poor old Lucent doesn't seem to be having a good time of late. Today's warning to investors that they should take the company's …

    Business 21 Nov 2000, 15:59

  • Another P4 mobo floods onto the market

    And then there were three

    Gigabyte's new GA-8TX mobo joins Aopen's AX4T, shown at last month's World PC Expo 2000 in Tokyo, and Intel's own D850GB Garibaldi and swells the number of boards available for Intel's new flagchip P4 to, er, three. The dual Rambus i850 (Tehama)-based 8TX also features a Creative CT5880 sound chip, four RIMM sockets, ATA 100, …

    Business 21 Nov 2000, 16:27

  • Employees blush at AltaVista porn deal

    Red faces all round

    Employees at AltaVista UK have expressed their concerns about the company's deal with a Nasdaq-listed porn company. According to sources close to the company, some of the employees have taken offence at working so closely with the porn merchants. Some feel the deal with Private Media Group breached their employment rights. …

    Music and Media 21 Nov 2000, 16:29

  • Police fence stolen goods online

    And the BSA acts as if it is the police

    Ever wonder why the police have the best drugs and hi-fi systems? Sorry, that is a completely false and libellous allegation and completely without foundation. However, there is the question of what happens to all the kit that the police inevitably end up with - the lost, found and stolen goods that no one ever claims. Well, …

    Music and Media 21 Nov 2000, 16:32

  • MP3 to kill the CD by 2005 – MORI

    A study backed by an MP3 player maker reveals...

    The CD is dead, buried by MP3. Or at least it will be by 2005. That's the conclusion of punters in the UK, a recent survey by market researcher MORI reveals Some 1629 adults were asked about their CD buying habits over the next five years. MORI's results suggest that young adults in particular are "planning to abandon CDs in …

    Music and Media 21 Nov 2000, 17:42

  • uTravel.co.uk goes titsup.com

    It's open season on dotcom failures

    Another one bites the dust. Yes, United News & Media-backed travel site uTravel.co.uk has gone titsup.com, joining a host of other Web sites that have folded in a pre-Xmas rush. The reason? Extremely competitive conditions. Nothing to do with haemorrhaging money then. We don't have the figures on how much money this site …

    Business 21 Nov 2000, 18:00

  • Essex girls to get free WebTV

    Bridging the white stiletto divide

    The land of white stilettos is to receive free Internet connections as part of a government drive to get Brits wired. The Essex housing authority is looking for quotes from suppliers who fancy the contract. It wants to include between 250 and 5000 homes in the scheme, which will connect tenants to the Net through their tellys …

    Music and Media 21 Nov 2000, 18:01

  • Fujitsu Siemens de-emphasises desktop PC biz

    Mobiles and (yawn) services

    Fujitsu-Siemens said today, in a London strategy briefing, that it will concentrate on its mobile computing business and services to back up its products for the next three years Paul Stodden, the new chief executive at Fujitsu-Siemens, said users want mobile access now and the pressure is already on companies to deliver, even …

    Business 21 Nov 2000, 18:10

  • Gameplay zaps 20 jobs

    Another dotcom feeling the pinch

    Gameplay is poised to axe as many as 20 people from its operation following a decision to downsize the games portal company. It is also planning to close two offices in Colchester and Wimbledon. Operations will now be focused in Vine Hill (London) and Leeds. Tim Coles, MD of Gameplay, confirmed that the company was undergoing …

    Business 21 Nov 2000, 18:11

  • Republicans peevishly await Bush coronation

    Re-counts are a Democrat dirty trick

    As the manual re-count proceeds in several Florida counties carefully chosen by the Gore people to boost his chances, and its various parties square off in quest of vindication by the courts, Republicans have turned to their favourite tactic of alleging deliberate malfeasance and perfidious intent among their opponents. Feeling …

    Music and Media 21 Nov 2000, 19:21