2nd April 2001 Archive

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Win-NT/IIS admins made April Fools by hackers

DoD, WSJ, BT, HSBC and more defaced

Several crews got busy on April Fools Day to make a mockery of Microsoft security by targeting Web sites running MS' IIS server over Windows NT/2K for defacement. Among the higher-profile victims were the Walt Disney Company; the Wall Street Journal's WebWatch; British Telecomms; HSBC; the US Navy's Center for Tactical Systems …

Security 2 Apr 2001, 05:50
DoJ regulating digital cams to fight child porn

Neural networking and GPS features will bust pedos

Washington, 1 April 2001-- The U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly hoping to thwart the burgeoning Internet kiddie-porn industry by regulating digital cameras, the tool of choice for child pornographers. A bill to be introduced next month says that digital cameras sold after April 1, 2001 must recognize and prohibit "child …

Bootnotes 2 Apr 2001, 06:40
Action stations for Dixons bid?

Insight-less

Dixons is preparing to bid for Action Computer Supplies, the big but ailing direct marketing computer reseller, the Financial Mail on Sunday reports. The electrical retail giant looks like it wants to do a friendly deal, as it has made 'friendly approaches to Action', the newspaper says. Action, a B2B supplier, would fit in …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 08:05
Misys stops the Meta tag Madness

Amateur Hour

A Misys subsidiary has been caught red-handed inserting the names of rival suppliers into its Web site Meta tags. Key words included, until Friday March 30, in the meta tags of M-link, a site for independent financial advisers, the "trademarked names" of The Exchange, and DBS services Assuresoft and AssureWeb. M-link's …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 08:38
McHackers deface Burger King – again

Descending the food chain

The UK Web Site of Burger King has been defaced once again by hackers who have chosen to poke fun at the site's security and praise arch rival McDonalds. Hackers from a previously unknown group, called the KeBaB KrU, left the following embarrassing message on the site's front page: "0wn3d burgerking.co.uk obvious pro McD …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 11:14
MS Office XP trial edition goes retail at $9.95, or free in the UK

If it's at all hackable, this does not seem smart to us ...

Microsoft is aiming to ship over a million trial editions of Office XP via retailers, hardware manufacturers and even magazine cover mounts - and this before the product is officially "available." The 30 day trial version will cost $9.95 in the US, but Microsoft UK plans to offer the software as a cover mount with at least one …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 11:15
Corrupt IBMer gets five years in slammer

Kickbacks and surplus components

A former IBM executive has been sentenced to more than five years after been found guilty of corruption on a grand scale. Robert St. Germain who was convicted last December of money laundering and tax evasion, was sentenced last Friday to a prison term of 63 months and ordered to pay a fine of $1.2 million by US District Judge …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 11:18
Sharky leaves Sharky Extreme

HWRoundup So that makes it Extreme?

Alex 'Sharky' Ross, the British founder of Sharky Extreme, the hardware review site, is hanging up his fins. Read the valedictory here. Last month, Internet.com effectively made Sharky Extreme, bought in 1999 for an undisclosed sum, its lead hardware site, when it fired all the staff from its more recently acquired property, …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 12:06
Sharp Linux PDA to be first next-gen Amiga device

Amiga Digital Environment to drive content generation

Amiga's next-generation operating system is at long, long last to get a home of its own: Sharp's upcoming Linux version of the Zaurus PDA. While Sharp's comments on the new device have focused on Linux and Java as the twin foundations of its plan to return to the top of the PDA totem pole, we noticed that the Java …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 12:14
Judge slams Govt IR35 test

Updated But contractors still lose

IR35, the controversial rule to reclassify most self-employed IT consultants as employees, will stay in place, following a High Court ruling today. But in dismissing the application to overturn IR35 from the Professional Contractors Group, Mr. Justice Burton was critical of the Inland Revenue, ruling the government had failed …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 12:17
Internet.com joins Dotcom Firing Range

15 per cent fewer heads

Internet.com, the online IT publishing firm, is cutting staff numbers by 15 per cent, in the face of a soft advertising market. Most of the redundancies will come from removing 'overlap' introduced through the company's recent acquisition binge. In December, for example Internet.com bought 14 IT Web sites from Earthweb. Early …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 13:04
Pirate MS software sales ‘fund global drug terror gangs’

MS attorney loses plot entirely?

Drug dealers and terrorists have been using counterfeit Microsoft software to fund their nefarious activities, according to a Microsoft release which Microsoft UK tells us hasn't gone out yet. Nor has our search for the smoking and the pistols been crowned with success so far, although a Microsoft spokesperson may have said …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 13:28
US will need half as many IT-savvy staff in 2001

Supply high, demand low, says IT Association of America

US-based hi-tech workers seeking a new employer and job-hunters looking to break into the sector are set to find it tough going this year. Demand for technology staff is set to fall 44 per cent through 2001 over last year, according to research from the IT Association of America. Companies with 50 or more staff last year hired …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 13:48
EDS gets fully Systematic(s)

Big in Germany

EDS is to buy German computer services firm Systematics for $570 million in cash and shares. This is equivalent to one-times turnover, so it suggests either very good negotiating skills on EDS' part, or poor profitability on Systematics'. EDS says the acquisition, its biggest in Europe to date, should close mid-year and it will …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 13:56
Creditors demand MicroAge dismemberment

And succeed

MicroAge, the stricken US hybrid distie/reseller is to close its doors for good, after creditors rejected its survival plan. The company will now sell its last remaining major asset, distributor Pinacor. How the mighty fall. Microage was, only last year, listed as a Fortune 500 company with annual sales of $6bn. But sales …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 13:59
AMD sponsors 3D lab (not 3D Labs)

Athlon-powered Scouse

It's getting difficult to keep up with AMD's British sponsorships - a channel awards here, a TV programme there, and now a deal to furnish Liverpool's new International Centre for Digital Content (ICDC) with a heap of Athlon-powered PCs. For their money, AMD bigwigs can hobnob tomorrow ath the official opening of the IDC with …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 14:17
AMD ships 900MHz Duron

Duron and on and on...

AMD released its 900MHz Duron today, promising the part offers a 30 per cent performance improvement over Intel's rival mid-range PC part, the Celeron, at the same clock speed. Of course, Chipzilla's part doesn't run above 850MHz, yet. The 900MHz Celery isn't due until Q3. When it does ship, the 900MHz Celeron will only support …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 14:21
Compaq culls 700 at Scotland plant

'Paq 'em and sack 'em

The Big Q is sending 700 Scottish workers - around 22 per cent of its 3100-strong workforce in Scotland - straight to the dole Q. The job cuts, to be made at Compaq's Erskine, Renfrewshire plant, are the latest in the company's programme to cut its worldwide headcount by a little over seven per cent - around 5000 out of 67,000 …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 14:37
Duron Ron Ron – Day of the 900MHz

HWRoundup Reviews, reviews, reviews

So today is the day of the Duron, and the ending of review embargoes for AMD's spanking new 900Mhz. To check the official AMD press release go here. But to the reviews: the two-second summary it seems to be the same old story, up 50MHz and about the same performance. However this fails to do justice to hundreds of hours of …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 15:04
EMI, BMG, AOL define universal Net music scheme

Want Napster to join in too

Three of the world's five biggest music companies - EMI, Bertelsmann and AOL Time Warner - and streaming media specialist RealNetworks have launched what they all clearly hope with become the de facto system for digital music distribution. Called MusicNet, it's a secure distribution platform that allows third-parties to sell …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 15:33
Oi! Wanna a 1m flat screen for less than $3000?

That's a 100cm to you, John

Large, high res, flat screen displays are going to get cheaper if R&D by Philips' pays off. It claims that screens measuring one metre across the diagonal will be ready by 2003 and cost under $3,000. According to the New Scientist Philips' Eindhoven research lab is using a rotating prism to create large images from a single LCD …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 16:01
California orders NorthPoint to restore DSL

Carrier to disobey?

NorthPoint was on Friday, March 30 ordered to restore its DSL service for almost half of its former customers. The Californian Public Utilities Commission told the bankrupt DSL carrier it must give at least 30 days' notice of plans to shut down its network to the 40,000 users in the state. It must therefore temporarily continue …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 16:07
Codebreaker II – prize book review

Sarah Flannery's In Code

For all of you grappling with our second Codebreaker competition, here's some inspiration, courtesy of Sarah Flannery, author of our book prize In Code: A Mathematical Journey. Sarah shot to prominence in 1999 when, at the age of 16, her work in developing ideas for an encryption algorithm for public key cryptography earned her …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 16:11
Dramurai duel over next-gen RAM winner

But back DDR and RDRAM, just in case

DDR SDRAM will match SDR on price by the end of the year, be way cheaper than Rambus RDRAM and will become the standard for high-performance RAM, all thanks to a faster-than-expected ramp-up in sales, memory maker Hyundai happily announced last week. The claim follows similarly enthusiastic predictions - this time favouring …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 16:15
Son of CPRM fails ATA committee vote

Will it be driven underground?

The proposal dubbed 'Son of CPRM' has failed to make it into the ATA hard drive specification. The results of a postal vote are published today. The T.13 committee actually voted 8:7 in favour of including Curtis Stevens' 'Proposal to Support Generic Functionality' [19kb, PDF] with three formal abstentions. But the vote failed …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 16:44
Korea claims broadband crown

UK still high-speed Net laggards

Brits are still the world's broadband laggards, with only one in 32 online homes using high-speed Web connections. In a survey of eleven countries by NetValue, the UK came tenth in terms of broadband usage in houses already hooked up to the Net, with 258,000 homes, or 3.1 per cent of the population, connected. It came behind …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 17:15
Join the SETI-style quest for cancer drugs

Six million computers wanted

Oxford University will tomorrow start a SETI-style project to investigate cancer drugs. The peer-to-peer (P2P) computing scheme, which also involves the US charity National Foundation for Cancer Research, United Devices and Intel, will let surfers worldwide use their computers to test chemicals for future cancer-fighting drugs …

Business 2 Apr 2001, 21:16