14th November 2002 Archive

Browse by publication date, or search the site.

Letters Sinful SMS, Shaggy Solaris

A sackful of interesting mail - on Australia's broadband woes, and the great P.Eng debate to follow. But here's a fascinating miscellany on some recent stories. Geeks bearing gifts - dodging taxes too? Yesterday I was delighted to see that Bill Gates is donating $100 million U.S. to fight AIDS in India. The fact that the …

Letters 14 Nov 2002, 00:05
Microsoft says Enterprise IM coming in Q1

Race get racier

Microsoft Corp has penciled in the first quarter of 2003 for the release of MSN Messenger Connect, the beachhead for its foray into enterprise-grade instant messaging services, which will put it into competition with Yahoo! Inc and America Online Inc. Connect is a server/service combination for which Microsoft will charge …

Hardware 14 Nov 2002, 09:44
Sony, Philips to buy InterTrust for $453m

DRM giant

Sony Corp and Royal Philips Electronics NV are to jointly acquire InterTrust Technologies Corp for $453m, in an effort to protect future revenue streams under threat from the rise in web piracy, writes Tom Jowitt. However, there has been immediate speculation that Microsoft Corp would step in with a counter bid, which …

Business 14 Nov 2002, 09:44
Virtualization sells better as something else, HP Says

Let's call it data replication

While the stage debut of its main virtualization act continues to be delayed, Hewlett Packard Co has discovered that the best way to sell its place-holding VS3000 storage virtualization appliance is to dress it as a different technology. The VS3000 appliance - about to be renamed the HP CASA - runs the virtualization …

Storage 14 Nov 2002, 09:45
Etagon launches Oracle9i cluster appliance

Dealing with clusters is never easy

Etagon Inc, a new company established in New York, made a splash at OracleWorld this week as it took the covers off its Origon line of Oracle9i Real Application Clusters application servers, writes Timoth Prickett Morgan. Oracle9i RAC is one of those software technologies that looks great on paper and is great once it gets …

Servers 14 Nov 2002, 09:45
RSA teams up with Courion for identity management

Modular approach

RSA Security Inc teamed up with identity management software vendor Courion Corp to enable the management of user identities and access privileges across heterogeneous e-business environments. As part of the partnership, Bedford, Massachusetts-based RSA's ClearTrust web access management software will be integrated with …

Security 14 Nov 2002, 09:48
Inktomi back to square one after Verity search sale

Plain old search engine provider

Inktomi Corp is going back to being a plain old web search engine provider, following the sale of its enterprise search business to Verity Inc, announced yesterday, writes Kevin Murphy. Coupled with the discontinuation of its caching business, announced this summer, Inktomi is pretty much down to the bare bones on which it …

e-Business 14 Nov 2002, 09:48
PDA sales continue to slump

Palm proves most resilient

New research has shown that shipments of PDAs and handheld devices are continuing to drop, with the fall-off blamed on the weak global economy. According to IDC, global shipments of so-called PDAs, or personal digital assistants, fell 6 percent in the third quarter compared to a year ago and down 7.1 percent compared to last …

Personal 14 Nov 2002, 09:52
Pentium designer plans Indian wireless IC, phone powerhouse

It's that Dham again...

Vinod Dham, a strangely pivotal figure in the development of Intel and AMD, has done pretty well for himself, and is now bouncing back with what looks to us like the modelstly ambitious scheme of turning India into a wireless, semiconductor and mobile phone powerhouse. Earlier this week Dham set up his first Indian company, …

Mobile 14 Nov 2002, 11:15
Why VisionTek is sueing Mitac, Nvidia, VC and five ex-staff

In graphic detail

Creditors of VisionTek accuse Nvidia, Mitac, BFG Technologies, Advanced Equities Inc and 13 named individuals, many former senior employees of the company, of trying to sabotage the graphics card maker. In August 2002, VisionTek, the leading US graphics card maker collapsed. A so-called Trustee Assignee, Michael J. Eber of High …

Personal 14 Nov 2002, 11:46
Fasthosts mum over ad watchdog complaint

Big boast gets it into trouble

Fasthosts - which claims to be "market leader in the provision of innovative hosted services" - has been kicked up the backside by the Advertising Watchdog. It seems someone objected to a magazine ad in which the Web hosting outfit boasted: "...120 Mbits BANDWIDTH NOW OFFERING MORE BANDWIDTH THAN ANY OTHER PROVIDER...". …

Music and Media 14 Nov 2002, 11:50
EMI in US music download deal

Rock on

Music fans in the US are to be given the chance to download music by artists such as Pink Floyd and Joe Cocker following the announcement of EMI's "enhanced" digital download distribution programme. As part of its new strategy, EMI will let punters purchase radio singles from albums that have yet to be released. It will also …

Music and Media 14 Nov 2002, 11:52
MS hires security chief to win federal homeland contracts

Snuggling up to Washington

Microsoft has hired a Director of Federal Homeland Security, a job which despite the possibly misleading title involves working for Microsoft while dealing with the US government's Office of Homeleland Security, rather than vice versa. Or perhaps not. The occupant is Thomas Richey, formerly with the US coastguard and most …

Software 14 Nov 2002, 11:55
Hyper-Threading: best thing since sliced thread?

PC Pro puts Evesham, Dell through paces

When Intel starts adding the initials 'HT' to its Pentium 4 stickers, you know that Hyper-Threading is going to be a mainstream buzzword in no time, writes Ben Hardwidge. Hyper-Threading has been doing the rounds for a few months already, but was previously an exclusive possession of Xeon servers and workstations. We first saw …

Channel 14 Nov 2002, 12:28
Security ‘impossible’ for Win9x, buy XP now, says MS exec

Company to begrudgingly forsake compatibility, it says here...

Yesterday Microsoft senior VP and head trustworthy computing honcho Craig Mundie delivered his 'annual report' on the company's trustworthy computing initiative. He had much to say about the progress that has been made since Microsoft discovered security, but the bit that interested us was way down the bottom of this, where he …

Software 14 Nov 2002, 12:42
BTo in (another) ADSL promo

Can't keep up

BTopenworld is laying out the red carpet in a bid to sign up business customers to broadband. Trouble is, trying to figure out what exactly is involved takes a little time. First off, BT's ISP is waiving the initial set up fees and equipment costs (that's free service activation, a free ADSL modem and ADSL filters) for its …

Music and Media 14 Nov 2002, 12:43
NTL broadband maintains lead

Sheds 250 jobs

NTL continues to dominate broadband numbers in the UK gaining 105,000 new customers during the summer. Publishing its Q3 results today the cableco reports that at the end of September it had 380,600 broadband customers. In comparison, Telewest added 39,000 new broadband customers during the summer taking its overall subscriber …

Music and Media 14 Nov 2002, 15:57
Supanet ISP offers ADSL

While BT mutates into PC dealer

Supanet is launching its new broadband service tomorrow marking the ISP's first entry into the ADSL sector. At £29.99 a month, supanet broadband is more expensive than many ISPs. However, as part of an introductory promo the ISP is throwing in a free HP 3325 printer and activation worth £65 for anyone who signs up to the …

Music and Media 14 Nov 2002, 15:57
MS touts free security toolkit for SMEs

It's a start, we suppose

Microsoft today released a security toolkit designed to help Britain's medium-sized businesses evaluate their security needs. The toolkit, available to order free from Microsoft's UK site, includes resources and tools which deal with both desktop and infrastructure issues. These include the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer …

Security 14 Nov 2002, 16:00
AMD tightens belt, hammers workforce

One in six to lose jobs

AMD today announced that 2,000 people, or approximately 15 per cent of staff, will lose their jobs by the end of the second quarter of 2003. The announcement is part of the company's strategy to reduce its breakeven point and expenses by $350 million in 2003. Approximately 1,000 affected employees located in the US, Europe and …

Channel 14 Nov 2002, 19:32
Popular packet sniffing packages contaminated by Trojan

Libpcap and Tcpdump tainted

Users are warned to be vigilant after trojanised versions of popular packet sniffing packages were posted on well known download sites. A detailed alert from members of the Houston Linux users group warns that trojanised versions of Libpcap, used as a packet sniffing library in programs like Snort (the open source IDS package …

Security 14 Nov 2002, 19:36
When firewalls and intrusion detection just aren't enough

Top Layer touts intrusion prevention appliances

Firewalls alone are not enough to thwart today's more sophisticated range of attacks, while Intrusion Detection Systems detect and record attacks, but do not block them. AV products, properly updated, can help protect against malicious code but are necessarily limited in their scope. So enterprises and telecoms operators face a …

Data Networking 14 Nov 2002, 19:39
US gov's ‘ultimate database’ run by a felon

300 million ghosts in the machine

We all know that truth is stranger than fiction, and here we have an apparently real item straight from the realm of Tom Clancy. Imagine a huge, absolutely huge, central database containing both the official and commercial data of every single citizen, run by the US military ostensibly for anti-terror and Homeland Security …

Music and Media 14 Nov 2002, 20:23
Sun's missing Xeon-killer discovered

UltraSPARC IIIi shimmies into view

An exhaustive trek around the Mexican restaurants of Austin, TX and Sunnyvale, CA has revealed the whereabouts of Sun's missing microprocessor, the UltraSPARC IIIi. The year-late Xeon-killer may finally be about to emerge from the kitchen. Nicknamed Jalapeno, the IIIi was first revealed here, and officially unveiled over a year …

Channel 14 Nov 2002, 23:10