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28th November 2001 Archive

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  • San Francisco takes IBM to the cleaners

    $100,000 for cleaning up Penguin promo droppings

    IBM has offered the city of San Francisco $100,000 compensation after graffiti-ing public spaces - including a church - with "Peace Love and Linux" slogans. Big Blue also ran the tacky and patronising publicity stunt in Chicago in April, which has sent the clean-up bills to Armonk. The campaign has been traced back to Chicago- …

    Bootnotes 28 Nov 2001, 09:21

  • UK IT salaries hold steady

    Scots doing rather well

    Salaries for IT professionals increased 1.65 per cent in the third quarter, an overall average of £31,191 for the UK. London-based workers are the highest paid of the lot, with an average salary of £39,395, an increase of 3.5 per cent over the last quarter. Scotland had the largest increase at 5.4 per cent, bringing its average …

    Business 28 Nov 2001, 09:24

  • MS opts out of European antitrust hearing

    Radical new 'button it' legal strategy

    The European Commission antitrust case against Microsoft may be heading for a quiet settlement. The next stage in the case was to have been a hearing in late December, but Microsoft has decided it doesn't want one. Is it possible that The Beast has learned from the US case that the more it says, the worse it looks? But more …

    Software 28 Nov 2001, 11:03

  • Intel admits Pentium 4 supplies still tight

    No improvement 'til Q1 2002?

    Intel has publicly admitted that the supply of Pentium 4 processors continues to be a problem for the chip maker, suggesting that volumes may not increase significantly this quarter as some Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers have predicted in the past. "People are beginning to see the benefits of Pentium 4 PCs - this is …

    Channel 28 Nov 2001, 11:15

  • Freeserve fingers Chancellor in VAT ad

    'Come on Mr Brown!'

    Freeserve's taken out ads in today's newspapers urging Chancellor Gordon Brown to close a tax loophole it claims is favouring AOL. Underneath a picture of a tight-lipped Mr Brown clutching his famous budget box the ad screams: "Every month our case is getting bigger." (Case, box, geddit?) It goes on: Every year at least £30 …

    Music and Media 28 Nov 2001, 12:14

  • Register hits million page imps a day mark

    That's what they call a result

    We've been edging around it for a few months now but yesterday The Register surpassed one million page impressions for the first time - well, 1,000,182 to be exact. Not to put too fine a point on it, this fact makes us rather happy. Of course, the air of joy and frivolity may be sullied by argument over whose story precisely …

    Site News 28 Nov 2001, 12:16

  • DiData buys Belgian reseller

    CTi plans

    Networking equipment reseller Dimension Data has acquired Planet CTI, a Belgian computer telephony integrator, for E2.4 million. Planet CTI specialises in delivering CTI middleware with call centre technologies to its customers around Europe, using partnerships with Genesys, Siebel and Accenture. Its customer list includes …

    Channel 28 Nov 2001, 12:18

  • Fujitsu sues Samsung over mobile phone patents

    Talks fail, let's sue

    Fujitsu Media Devices is suing Samsung Electro-Mechanics in the US for infringements on its mobile phone component patents. Fujitsu hopes to stop Samsung from importing and selling various components in the US, reports the FT. Fujitsu says its efforts to negotiate with the Korean company over the past two years have been …

    Business 28 Nov 2001, 12:20

  • Govt report calls for e-tax incentives

    Electronic filing to be mandatory by 2007

    A government review into payroll systems, published and referred to in Gordon Brown's pre-budget report yesterday, has recommended that incentives be given to small businesses to encourage them to file their tax returns electronically. The Carter Review, conducted by millionaire businessman Patrick Carter, suggested all …

    Business 28 Nov 2001, 12:22

  • The Google attack engine

    Exclusive Wanna own a government router?

    Some clever empiricist appears to have been abusing Google to attack Web servers, switches and routers in a novel way, by crafting search terms to include known exploits. Such a search will occasionally yield active Web pages used by administrators. On top of that, a number of them have already been cached. It's reasonable to …

    Security 28 Nov 2001, 12:26

  • Symbian signs Fujitsu for 3G phones

    List is growing

    Fujitsu has joined the burgeoning list of Japanese licensees for Symbian's smartphone OS. The Japanese giant will base its 3G phones on the Symbian OS, according to a release issued by Symbian Japan today. Today's announcement makes the OS accessible to Fujitsu's web of R&D and component subsidiaries, of which this is but a …

    Data Networking 28 Nov 2001, 12:27

  • Rambus to challenge Infineon injunction

    Latest in a line of 'errors of law', it claims

    Rambus will appeal against Judge Robert Payne's ruling that it may not pursue future DDR SDRAM-oriented intellectual property infringement violations against Infineon, the memory technology developer pledged yesterday. Judge Payne's decision was announced by Infineon on Monday. It follows from a previous ruling, made in the …

    Channel 28 Nov 2001, 12:33

  • Intel growing happier with sales forecast as quarter nears end

    No kidding...

    Intel is getting happier that it will meet its $6.2-6.8 billion revenue forecast for the current quarter, the company's CFO, Andy Bryant, said yesterday. Apparently the events of 11 September have made predicting such figures rather more difficult than was once the case, but Intel's chiefs are "getting more and more comfortable …

    Channel 28 Nov 2001, 12:37

  • US court ruling nixes software EULA sales restrictions

    Go forth and resell your bundles

    In an intriguing ruling picked up by LinuxJournal's Don Marti, a US district court has given encouragement to software users who want to extricate themselves from restrictive software licenses. The judge, in the case Adobe vs Softman heard in the Central District of California, has ruled that consumers can resell bundled …

    Software 28 Nov 2001, 13:53

  • International Net paedophile ring smashed by UK police

    130 arrested, ten in the UK

    Ten people were arrested in the UK today after police launched a series of dawn raids to smash an international child porn ring. A further 120 people were arrested as 19 countries including Australia, France and the US took part in the raids, codenamed Operation Landmark. Officers from Britain's National Criminal Squad (NCS) …

    Music and Media 28 Nov 2001, 15:49

  • Meet the future of Windows security exploits

    Black Hat Europe Application logic corruption

    Buffer overflow bugs, for years the most prevalent type of security vulnerability, will become a thing of the past as crackers realise the potential of different ways to exploiting Windows machines. Sloppy programming practices (the root cause of buffer overflow vulnerabilities) give rise to security bugs where arbitrary and …

    Security 28 Nov 2001, 15:53

  • RMS tagged as Gnomewhere man in board elections

    Fork off

    The Christmas piss-up of the Gnome board of directors should be a melodic one this year. Free software pioneer and evangelist Richard M Stallman has failed to be elected to the board, and we can assume, won't be serenading attendees with his rendition of The Free Software Song. RMS came eighteenth out of 25 candiates, picking …

    Software 28 Nov 2001, 16:07

  • PowerPC G5 enters ‘volume production’ – source

    Power Mac G5s soon rolling off the production lines?

    The PowerPC G5 has been passed for full-scale manufacture, a source close to Apple has claimed. And the Mac maker is still on course to ship Power Mac G5 desktops at Macworld Expo San Francisco in just over a months' time - provided Motorola can increase the chip's yield. According to our mole, the G5 is tentatively being …

    Mac Channel 28 Nov 2001, 16:45

  • The Ziff-Davis Guide To Britishers (and other foreigners)

    Book Club The Glottal Stops Here

    The mighty Ziff-Davis publishing empire has chalked up many triumphs over the years, but one masterpiece from 1943 has been sadly neglected. It's the Manual of Foreign Dialects for Radio, Stage and Screen, by Lewis Herman and Maguerite Shalett Herman, published in Chicago. As the title suggests, it's a manual for speaking …

    Bootnotes 28 Nov 2001, 20:41

  • StorageTek feeds TimberWolf

    Tape news Quantum supports ValuSmart

    StorageTek has beefed up its high-end TimberWolf 9710 tape libraries by adding support for the recently-released T9840B tape drive, as well as SDLT drives. The company says T9840B is one of the speediest drives around, allowing a transfer rate of up to 19MB per second. This nearly doubles TimberWolf's previous 10MB transfer …

    Hardware 28 Nov 2001, 21:38

  • The ICANN movie: Part III

    Show some respect

    The cult ICANN cartoon is back with a part three and you can find it here. Creator of the previous two, Kendall Dawson, is back with more scathing commentary, although the cartoon is hosted on a new site to the others. The same appalling graphics are there in all their glory as we embark on a satirical look at our favourite …

    Bootnotes 28 Nov 2001, 21:42

  • How to crash a phone by SMS

    Black Hat Europe Broken message, frozen phone

    So now you can send an SMS and crash a mobile phone, so that the user is locked out. Job de Haas, a security researcher at ITSX, has adapted a program called sms_client, which sends an SMS message from an Internet-connected PC, in which the User Data Header is broken. During a presentation during the Black Hat conference last …

    Security 28 Nov 2001, 21:52