15th February 2002 Archive
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Amstrad touts em@iler-plus on TV
Pain today, gain tomorrow?
Amstrad is to spend £ 2.2m on advertising the e-ma@iler plus, its text-messaging, games-playing, email delivering telephone, on television. The campaign which kicks off in March, will have an effect on second half results, but the promotion will be good for the long term, chairman and CEO Sir Alan Sugar says in a statement. …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 08:18
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Call for tougher action, in Samsung stolen phone wake
Curb the trade
In the wake of the theft of 26,000 Samsung mobile phones last weekend, questions have been raised about why networks are less efficient at blocking mobiles stolen from individuals. Following the theft, the A300 phones (which were marked with Orange or One2One logos) were blocked from connection based on a list of International …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 08:22
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W3C makes digital signature recommendation
XML Rules OK
The World Wide Web Consortium yesterday unveiled the fruits of its unprecedented collaboration with the Internet Engineering Task Force with the publishing of XML Signature as a W3C Recommendation. XML Signature is one of three security markup specifications the organization is building. With XML Encryption and XML Key …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 09:37
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Dell hints at services, storage ambitions
EMC deal worth $1bn a year
Dell Computer Corp emphasized its enterprise credentials and shrugged off the threat of the Hewlett Packard Co and Compaq Computer Corp combination as it unveiled its fourth quarter numbers yesterday, Joe Fay writes. The Round Rock, Texas-based PC vendor said it was considering ways of expanding its services capabilities …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 09:38
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Sun to marry iPlanet portal to Grid Engine
Control freak interface
Sun Microsystems Inc will announce today that it has created a set of Java-based frameworks that integrate its iPlanet Portal Server with its Grid Engine software, Timothy Prickett Morgan writes. The move, the company says, will facilitate the proliferation of grid applications among corporations and research institutions …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 09:38
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Nvidia opens books for SEC
Question of timing
Nvidia is conducting a review of accounting practices, in response to a 'request' from the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC). In monetary terms, it all seems like pretty small potatoes: Nvidia cites the possibility that product expenses of $3.6m recorded in Q2 and Q3 of fiscal 2000, should have been recorded in Q1. The …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 10:29
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Evesham sets up small business portal
Powered by Affinity
Evesham.com, the UK system builder, has introduced an internet access service for its small business customers. On offer are flat fee, metered and ADSL packages, with prices ranging from £10 to £55 per month. It's sweetening the offer with a portal, called e2binternet.com. The service is pre-loaded on all Evesham business PCs …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 10:50
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Gateway secures entry to small biz
Bundles for home
The making money mantras for PC builders large and small increasing revolve around three topics these days: wireless, security, and Internet access. All three can provide recurring revenues, although in the case of wireless, the big money kicks in for the road warriors. This week we have seen: Dell announce plans to roll out a …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 11:34
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Scanning for SNMP vulnerabilities
Sysadmins' corner
SANS has released a scanning tool called SNMPing which will find SNMP daemons running on a TCP/IP network. It defaults to port 161, but you can enter the port of your choice. The good news is that it's small and effective. The bad news is that it only runs on WinNT/2K. You can use TCP dump to log your attempts. You'll find …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 11:47
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Apple exec refused ‘Kill Dock’ bribe
BSDCon Darwin boss loyal to the core dump
An Apple executive turned down an offer to sabotage the Mac OS X code tree, yesterday, we can sort of exclusively reveal. The nefarious approach to Apple's director of core OS engineering Brett Halle - a member of the executive team which made the momentous decision on what should be the successor to MacOS back in 1996 - took …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 12:24
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Why your vendor has no SNMP fix
And why Microsoft hates Uncle Sam
Ever wonder why only a handful of vendors had a fix ready for the myriad SNMP vulnerabilities recently reported? The vulns were discovered nine months ago, after all. We picked up a tip from one of our sources Thursday. It appears that the FBI's NIPC pressured the White House, which in turn pressured CERT, to break the news two …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 12:43
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Justice chief queried over MS campaign contributions
Enron-MS juxtapositions continue escalation...
A Democrat representative on the US House Judiciary Committee has written to Attorney General John Ashcroft asking why he did not disqualify himself from participation in settlement talks in the Microsoft case, whereas he has done so in the case of the Enron investigation. Ashcroft's failed senate campaign in 2000 received …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 13:27
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Symbian CEO Myers exits suddenly
Potter heads temp management team
Symbian CEO Colly Myers has stepped down, just a month after the company secured a new round of funding from its investors. It's not as yet clear where he's going, if it's anywhere in particular, but the move seems to have been not entirely planned for - David Potter, founder of Psion and Symbian chairman, is taking the post of …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 14:34
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MS to block internet apps by default in .NET
It's the corporates, stoopid...
Microsoft is to implement a switch in default security settings in a forthcoming service release for the .NET Framework. As shipped, the default policy will be not to allow managed code to run from the Internet. Think about that one for a moment and then think about what you thought .NET was supposed to be about, folks - but don …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 15:25
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BT Cellnet mmail falls off the Internet
SMS messages not getting through
BT Cellnet's email to its own SMS gateway service, mmail, is currently unavailable after the domain fell off the Internet. A whois search reveal that mmailco.uk was 'detagged' on Tuesday, possibly because BT Cellnet failed to renew the domain or because of some other administrative oversight. Beyond telling us that it hadn't …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 15:43
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Virus smuggling risk for Outlook Express users
MS bug foils Mail filtering utilities
Security researchers have identified a way to smuggle virus laden emails past AV checkers and into the in-boxes of Outlook Express users. A demo suggests it's possible to send attachments to Outlook Express users using non-standard attachment techniques, by encapsulating the data in Carriage Return (<CR>) specifiers in the …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 15:47
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Coming soon: foot-powered laptops
Pump up the volume
A US developer is coming to market with a device which lets users recharge batteries using a foot-operated pump. The StepCharger, from AladdinPower, gives approximately 20 minutes of laptop power after five minutes of brisk pumping. This is not a great deal of time but, as AladdinPower customer services rep Max Smith told us, …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 17:00
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802.1X can be toppled ‘like set of dominoes’
Wireless LANs are STILL insecure
Security researchers have suggested even more security shortcomings in the way Wireless LANs are set up. In a research paper, An Initial Security Analysis of the IEEE 802.1X Standard, Professor William Arbaugh and Arunesh Mishra from the University of Maryland outline two ways the standard falls short in providing access …
Security 15 Feb 2002, 21:51
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Lindows CEO delivers broadside in MS trademark dispute
Michael Robertson writes
Recently we published a piece in which we argued that Microsoft was doing no wrong in pressing a trademark case against Lindows.com. And it would probably win anyway, we said. Two people agreed, while 70 or so thought we were talking out of our proverbial. We invited Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows.com, to put forward his …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 22:26
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Freedom Network source code now available
CodeCon Anonymous surf service back from the grave
Source code for ZeroKnowledge Systems' discontinued anonymous Internet service has leaked onto the Web, apparently with the blessing of ZKS' Chief Scientist Ian Goldberg. The announcement was made on Goldberg's behalf at the CodeCon conference by Len Sassaman, co-organizer of the three day grassroots P2P and crypto conference …
Business 15 Feb 2002, 22:57
