22nd November 2001 Archive

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Beyond the Valley of the Polyphonic RingTones

Nokia MDC Beep

At Nokia's Multimedia Developer Conference in Barcelona this week, the distant rumble of 16-bit mobile phone ring tones could be heard. Nokia demonstrated a MIDI player for phones and Beatnik showed off its Audio Engine running on the Symbian-based 9210 phone, and the two share plenty in common. Beatnik's Audio Engine is …

Data Networking 22 Nov 2001, 00:38
Man sued for venting auto-service blues on BBS

Updated Cites VW dealership's factory-authorized neglect

Georgia Tech graduate student George Mantis has been sued for libel by a local Volkswagen dealership after detailing his unpleasant experience with the company's service department on a BBS at VW enthusiast Web site VWvortex. According to Mantis' original post, Cobb County, Georgia dealership Jim Ellis Motors twice accepted …

Music and Media 22 Nov 2001, 08:46
Security: the enemy within

Execs miss internal threats

Senior managers are ignoring the internal risks to their computer systems, thinking instead that the biggest threats come from outsiders, says KPMG. KPMG surveyed more than 1,200 IT directors and senior managers from some of the world's largest organisations, and found that 79 per cent believed that a security breach to one of …

Security 22 Nov 2001, 10:34
Small WinXP sales boom – not many sold

MS 'runs out' of additional licence packs...

News is filtering out of what must surely be one of the smallest sales booms ever - Microsoft, it would appear, has run out of Additional Family License packs for Windows XP. Microsoft, to its slight credit, doesn't seem to be making a big thing of this; it is merely telling the scribes that it made an unspecified estimate of …

Software 22 Nov 2001, 10:38
Emachines sells itself to founder

Private Hands

Budget PC maker eMachines has agreed to a $161 million buyout offer from EM Holdings. At the centre of the deal is Lap Shun "John" Hui, a founder and director of eMachines, and sole owner of EM Holdings. At $1.06 per share, the offer is 36 per cent higher than an earlier proposal tabled by Hui. The deal as constructed by EM …

Channel 22 Nov 2001, 11:30
One2One cuts 900 jobs

Internal memo leak

Mobile operator One2One is to make 900 UK staff (out of 7,000) redundant, citing a slowdown in the market. The staff cuts include voluntary and involuntary redundancies but apart from that, the company is giving previous little information about where the cuts will be, what the terms of redundancy are and the amount it expects …

Business 22 Nov 2001, 11:35
Boltblue adopts NTL orphans

Eleventh hour rescue

Mobile portal Boltblue is to adopt 90,000 NTL's non-cable ISP customers from the end of the month. It was feared that the customers would be left orphaned with no ISP after the cableco's pledge to support the former Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC) customers expires on November 30. Last year NTL acquired the retail cable …

Music and Media 22 Nov 2001, 11:37
My debt is my telco bond

France Telecom and KPN Telecom this time

France Telecom and KPN Telecom are issuing bonds to cut massive debt. France Telecom has gone for a record-breaking £2.2 billion convertible bond offer, taking advantage of what it says are "favourable market conditions" and bringing its convertible debt up to £3.9 billion. KPN Telecom has gone for a £3.1 billion rights issue …

Business 22 Nov 2001, 12:20
Tiny subbie reins in Scots ops

Tiny effect on Tiny

Contract computer assembler Fullarton Computer Industries, responsible for putting together Tiny's PCs and notebooks, will cut 250 jobs, nearly 36 per cent of its 700-strong Scottish workforce, by the end of the year. Workers are furious because the company revealed that any growth in orders will be fulfilled by temporary staff …

Channel 22 Nov 2001, 13:29
Nokia takes charge at Symbian

Reference Designs head for early bath

Decoding mobile telecoms announcements has often required the skills of a Kremlinologist: working out who's up and who's down from dress details in the annual Politburo photograph. During negotiations to set the 3G standard a few years ago, the warring parties fired long-range press releases at each other, indicated shifting …

Data Networking 22 Nov 2001, 13:33
Bridge offers UK satellite broadband service

Helps soothe troubled broadband waters

UK businesses can now get broadband services over satellite following the launch of a commercially available service from Bridge Broadband. Aimed specifically at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and home workers, the service has been launched in tandem with Hughes Network, part of the giant Hughes Electronics …

Telecoms 22 Nov 2001, 15:45
Judge postpones Hynix Rambus patent suit

Pending Infineon outcome

A US District Court has postponed a patent infringement lawsuit filed by embattled memory-maker Hynix against Rambus. The court indicated that Hynix's case may be postponed indefinitely pending resolution of Rambus' appeal to the US Federal Circuit regarding its case against Infineon, as the two cases cover mutual territory. …

Channel 22 Nov 2001, 15:54
One2One internal memo on job cuts

915 jobs to go across the board

An internal memo, leaked to us, spells out the full details of the One2One job cuts announced today. There will be 915 redundancies against the 900 widely quoted and they will be across the board. These split into: 266 from Commercial and Corporate, 215 from Technology and Information Services , 434 from Customer Services. The …

Business 22 Nov 2001, 17:38
3A security software to boom

Big biz in 2005

The European market for administration, authorisation and authentication (3A) security software will grow from $742 million in 2000 to $2.4 billion in 2005, an annual increase of 27 per cent. This trio of software technologies are key tools for enabling online transactions and expanding customer bases in ebusinesses. This makes …

Security 22 Nov 2001, 17:42
ElcomSoft shies away from Black Hat Europe

Black Hat Europe Sklyarov casts legal shadow

ElcomSoft, the Russian employer of Dimitri Sklyarov, has cancelled its planned participation in the Black Hat Europe hacking conference, on legal advice. Sklyarov who helped develop the Advance eBook Processor (an app which busts the access controls on Adobe's eBook reader) was charged in August with five counts of copyright …

Security 22 Nov 2001, 17:45
SecurityFocus finds new DDoS tool

Microsoft SQL servers vulnerable

SecurityFocus has identified a new hybrid tool that combines distributed denial of service (DDoS) tools, with the automated propagation techniques previously seen only in worms. On 20 November, at approximately 4 AM PST, SecurityFocus ARIS Incident Analysts identified a rapidly growing network of controlled agents or "bots", …

Software 22 Nov 2001, 18:06
Sun ‘defies gravity’ with USIII benchmark

Too good to be true? Then it probably isn't...

Sun's spectacular benchmarks for its first 1GHz chip may be just too stellar. The 1050 MHz UltraSPARC III was officially announced this week, and along with it the SPEC benchmarks. One of these, a floating point neural network simulation benchmark (art.179) is truly remarkable, as the graph here illustrates. As the regulars …

Hardware 22 Nov 2001, 21:33
Fasthosts email system collapses

Fuming clients

Fasthosts, The UK's largest web hosting company, has had a complete email failure, leaving hundreds of companies which run their Web sites on its servers fuming. One in particular, Skyco International Food Club - a company which specialises in American food - says it has lost thousands of pounds worth of orders over …

Music and Media 22 Nov 2001, 21:43