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17th December 2002 Archive

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  • Deadline nears for DMCA exemptions

    Reason not rants, please

    Wednesday's the deadline for you to make a small difference to the draconian DMCA, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. One of the quirks of the Act is that the Library of Congress provides administrative oversight. A strange decision, since this is a job usually left to the courts. But every three years the Librarian gets to …

    Media 17 Dec 2002, 00:05

  • Of IBM's Power5 Armada Servers

    True 64-way

    Sometime in early 2004, IBM Corp will launch its next generation of high-end RISC servers using the Power5 processors, writes Timothy Prickett Morgan. The company has just started talking about the machines, and the first official sales of the box for the so-called ASCI Purple supercomputer for Lawrence Livermore …

    Channel 17 Dec 2002, 10:16

  • Novell breathes new life into GroupWise

    Exchanging notes

    Novell Inc, which has had to play second fiddle to Microsoft Corp's Exchange and IBM/Lotus Corp's Notes, is once again gearing itself up for an assault on the enterprise collaboration software market. The Provo, Utah-based company has previewed plans for its next-generation GroupWise platform - version 6.5, due out in …

    Data Center 17 Dec 2002, 10:16

  • CRM ‘recovery’ predicted for 2003

    Customers? Who needs 'em!

    2003 will constitute a recovery year for the CRM sector, according to research house Meta Group. However, in the current climate, "recovery" is defined as a year in which spending levels are predicted to remain flat to slightly positive, as opposed to undergoing a further slump. Despite this gloomy forecast, Meta Group VP …

    Data Center 17 Dec 2002, 10:17

  • .NET My Services. Gone but not forgotten?

    Roadmap gap

    .NET My Services, Microsoft Corp's high-profile set of XML web services postponed eight months ago, seems to have dropped off the company's 2003 roadmap, writes Gavin Clarke. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft yesterday issued a nine-page document summarizing 2003 launch plans for operating systems, applications and tools …

    Data Center 17 Dec 2002, 10:17

  • ICANN plans more top level domains

    Why?

    ICANN's board of directors gave the go-ahead for the creation of new top level domain names at its fourth annual meeting in Amsterdam last weekend. The board authorized the president to take the necessary steps to implement the New TLD Evaluation Process Planning Taskforce's recommendations on the new names. It also …

    Media 17 Dec 2002, 10:20

  • Marconi lives! (But sales are slumpier)

    Freed from Debtor's Prison

    Marconi Plc has finally clinched the deal that it sketched out in August to hand 99.5% of its equity to its creditors and it expects to finally emerge from a humiliating reorganization before the end of its financial year on March 31, 2003. In a deal delayed by continual haggling with creditors, Marconi has been forced to …

    Business 17 Dec 2002, 10:21

  • $32m man Capellas meets his maker (or Judge)

    Compaq overlord must empty his pockets

    The collapse of the dotcom bubble has been described, quite accurately, as the greatest loss of wealth in human history. But take heart, a few survivors have prospered. Give or take the minor judicial roadbump. So let's hear if for endurance! When we interviewed Scott McNealy recently, he claimed that all of Sun's executive …

    Business 17 Dec 2002, 10:24

  • BT improves ADSL demand trigger process

    Figger Trigger

    BT Wholesale has refined its much-criticised ADSL pre-registration system making it quicker and easier for areas to upgrade to broadband. The move is a victory for common sense and means that BT will upgrade an exchange as soon as it hits its trigger level. Up until now, once the threshold had been met ISPs then had to seek …

    Broadband 17 Dec 2002, 13:08

  • And deep in IE, a creature was stirring…

    Bug in the Rug

    eEye security researcher Derek Soeder was moved to verse after analysing a complicated - and not particularly devastating - heap corruption vulnerability involving the way Windows handles PNG image format files. An advisory by eEye begins thus: Twas the night before Christmas, and deep in IE A creature was stirring, a …

    Security 17 Dec 2002, 13:14

  • AOL wins $7m in porn spam case

    Issues warning to others

    AOL has won $7m in damages after it claimed its punters had been bombarded with porn spam. The giant Internet company used the court ruling to warn spammers that it will use the full force of the law to hit at anyone who targets its punters with unsolicited email. AOL brought the case against CN Productions in the late 1990s, …

    Media 17 Dec 2002, 13:20

  • IE accounts for 95% of browsers – survey

    Browser Wowzer

    Nineteen out of 20 surfers use IE as a browser, with Netscape a very distant second, and alternative browsers restricted to use among a small tech savvy niche, according to Web analytics outfit OneStat.com. OneStat.com found IE 6 global usage has increased with 5.3 per cent from 52.3 per cent to 57.6 per cent since its last …

    Media 17 Dec 2002, 13:36

  • Infineon wins $2.5bn Kingston gig

    Big Deal

    Kingston Technology has selected Infineon to be its prime supplier of memory components. The two firms estimate the deal is worth $2.5bn over five years. At the same time, Kingston, probably the world's biggest memory module brand name, will provide contract manufacturing services to Infineon. This is a huge headline price, and …

    Channel 17 Dec 2002, 14:20

  • The company formerly known as MicronPC

    Name change

    MicronPC, the direct selling US PC builder, is changing its name to MPC sometime in 2003. It is also changing its main domain name from micronpc.com to buympc.com. The company retains redirect rights for three years, suggesting that micronpc.com will at some point revert to Micron Technology, its former parent. Micron's MPC …

    Personal 17 Dec 2002, 14:35

  • 3G is coming (ready or not)

    We don't need no killer app

    3G is coming, ready or not, says the wireless research team at Instat/MDR. Most of us aren't ready - the EU reckons that the market in Europe for 3G services will start booming only in 2008. But InStat notes: "While UMTS (WCDMA) has borne the brunt of the recent gloom and doom scenarios, it is actually being deployed, and …

    Mobile 17 Dec 2002, 15:02

  • So farewell then, OS/2 – Windowed to death, finally

    'Better Windows than Windows' Losedows

    Hats off to PC Magazine's John C Dvorak for noting that last Tuesday IBM finally pulled the plugs on OS/2. With a long and characteristically detailed death notice, years after the shooting died down (this is also characteristic), IBM has finally brought the Great Rebellion to a close. We at The Register enjoyed it while it …

    Software 17 Dec 2002, 16:13

  • Your storage area networking needs

    Panel beaters

    Interoperability is the greatest challenge in building a storage area network, according to a roundtable of US IT executives. It's hard to get Unix, mainframe and Windows NT apps working together on the same SAN, and any vendor which can do this easily, could find the world beating a path to its door (or a takeover offer from …

    Storage 17 Dec 2002, 17:21

  • Multiple vulns in MySQL, upgrade now

    DoS, password bypassing etc.

    Security researchers urge admins to update MySQL database servers, following the discovery of a set of potentially troublesome security flaws. The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to crash unpatched versions of the popular open source database server, inject malicious code on servers or hack into accounts without a …

    Security 17 Dec 2002, 17:34

  • Anti-spammer in car chase

    Threatening phone calls too

    Rich Clark, an American spam hater, claims he was involved in a car chase and received threatening phone calls after taking photos of the house belonging to mega-wealthy bulk-emailer, Alan Ralsky. It seems Rich was taking the photos so he could post them on an anti-spam Web site. Next thing he knew, he was being cut-up by a guy …

    Media 17 Dec 2002, 17:53

  • Register ‘scopes’ Small Biz channel

    Site News Wanted: Readers, information suppliers

    Early next year The Register is to launch a small business channel. That's right a channel for small businesses. We will concentrate on providing tech-related news, cause that what we do best. We are also looking at information suppliers to link up with, and maybe even doing some reviews. In the meantime we are kicking off with …

    Site News 17 Dec 2002, 17:54

  • Intel delays 802.11a access for Banias

    Minor roadmap bump

    Intel has altered plans to introduce a dual-mode 802.11a/b WiFi chip alongside Banias, its next generation notebook processor, in Q3 2003. The wireless technology (codenamed Calexico) which initially ships with Banias will initially support only slower speed 802.11b wireless access using radio chips from Philips, Intel …

    Mobile 17 Dec 2002, 19:56

  • Spring has sprung: a new desktop era for the Mac?

    Objects über alles

    We all know what's wrong with personal computers, and we must all at some time despair at the lack of imagination of modern UI designers, who offer us ever more creative ways of futzing. These 2D desktop architects started from what Neal Stephenson called "massively promiscuous metaphor-mixing" [download here] ... i.e., …

    Mac Channel 17 Dec 2002, 22:48

  • Elcomsoft not guilty – DoJ retreats from Moscow

    Your tax dollars at work

    The Russian software company which has found itself on trial in an American court was acquitted on all counts of circumventing the DMCA today. Elcomsoft's woes began in August last year, when programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was charged under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's circumvention 1201 clauses (one small part of which …

    Security 17 Dec 2002, 23:55