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5th February 2003 Archive

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  • A Homage to Catatonia

    Letters Dangerous Times, Improbable by Design, Super JpZr!

    "Your piece making fun of the New York Times put my Mom into a fit of giggles with extracts of like ''hallowed be its name, more incense please vicar...'," writes one reader. Damn, I was simply trying to strike the appropriate, reverential tone for this great institution. However, I have one question that m'learned readers may …

    Letters 5 Feb 2003, 08:52

  • Safari, so good: browser and Bluetooth boost OS X

    Analysis Whither Mozilla?

    Something funny happened on the way back from the Forum. About a week before MacWorld a fellow Apple user asked me if Jagwyre had been enough to lure me to OS X full time. "Pah!" I groused - "when it matches the speed of MacOS and that kind of tactile comfort I get with MacOS, then sure, I'll be right over." Because I've never …

    Mac Channel 5 Feb 2003, 09:13

  • Anti-Pirates slam EUCD proposals

    'Inadequate'

    A group that calls itself "Europe's creative sector" has slammed the EU's crackdown on piracy, calling the measures "inadequate". The detractors include the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the Interactive Software …

    Software 5 Feb 2003, 09:24

  • Dud queries swamp US Internet Root servers

    Security Alert

    Broken queries are swamping US Internet servers with unnecessary traffic. A detailed analysis of 152 million messages received on Oct. 4, 2002 by one of the root servers in California showed that only 2 per cent of the queries were legitimate. The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the San Diego …

    Music and Media 5 Feb 2003, 09:48

  • Freeloader ships in UK

    Game Cube region protection hack

    The much-delayed Freeloader product for the GameCube- originally scheduled for release long before Christmas - has finally been shipped by UK-based cheat products specialist Datel, and should be in shops at the end of the week. The disc, which is not officially sanctioned by Nintendo, allows Cube users to play games from any …

    Personal 5 Feb 2003, 10:07

  • Cisco sales down, profit up

    Gross margins. (Or is that grotesque?)

    Cisco Systems squeezed 50 per cent more profits from Q2 profits, compared with the same period last year, despite declining revenues. The networking equipment vendor expresses caution about an early return to recovery for the struggling network equipment sector. For the three months ending January 25, Cisco clocked net income …

    Business 5 Feb 2003, 10:13

  • What the Hell is IBM Information Integrator?

    Briefing Note It's a database thang

    Yesterday IBM announced its new Information Integrator family of products, writes Phil Howard. Ultimately this will consist of three offerings (although in the longer term the three products will probably converge), based on SQL, an object oriented API and an XML API respectively. However, the last of these, which will use …

    Hardware 5 Feb 2003, 10:24

  • MS cracks down on staff reselling software

    Unspecified disciplinary proceedings...

    A brief storyette on AP's Nando Times (registration required*) suggests that Microsoft may have found something nasty when it started checking employee purchases of software. At the end of last year the company claimed one employee had sneakily laundered a cool $9 million worth of software via the internal purchasing programme …

    Software 5 Feb 2003, 11:05

  • Opera fixes browser flaws

    In Brief Doublequick fix

    Opera today released an update to its latest browser software designed to fix potentially serious security vulnerabilities that became public yesterday. Opera 7.01, available for download from Opera's Web site, addresses the five security vulnerabilities reported to Opera by Israeli security firm GreyMagic last Friday. A …

    Security 5 Feb 2003, 12:09

  • UK Net growth stalls

    Leaping dachshund

    There's further evidence that Internet penetration in the UK has flattened out. Four in ten homes (42 per cent to be exact) in the UK has Net access - broadly the same as the previous 12 months. PC ownership in the home also seems to have reached a plateau. Official stats from Oftel reveal that half of UK homes (53 per cent) …

    Music and Media 5 Feb 2003, 12:32

  • BT to upgrade 180 exchanges to SDSL – report

    Yet to decide, says BT

    BT is preparing to convert around 180 exchanges to SDSL following trials of the broadband technology. ADSLGuide reports that the roll-out will be done in two phases with 28 exchanges being converted in March and a further 150 added in April. The exchanges listed on ADSLGuide cover areas across the UK including Birmingham, …

    Telecoms 5 Feb 2003, 12:34

  • MS beanies worry about Linux, suits, nasty governments

    Uneasy lies the head that wears the throne...

    We shouldn't get too excited over the worries about open source that Microsoft expresses in its latest Form 10-Q filing to the SEC. It's certainly progress for open source software to have made it into the Microsoft beanies' contingency worry/butt-covering list, but the subject is only dealt with briefly, in fairly guarded terms …

    Software 5 Feb 2003, 12:48

  • Cut price iMac wheezes to 1GHz

    Speed bumpette

    A minor speed bumpette for Apple's iMac range took the machines to 1Ghz today. The 17-inch model reaches 1Ghz and in line with the Pro range and Xserve rack, supports DDR memory. More interestingly the 15" model - upped only slightly to 800Mhz and still based on SDRAM memory - gets a price cut. Industry-wide lack of demand has …

    Mac Channel 5 Feb 2003, 13:02

  • Plaid up in arms as Commons spam filter bans Welsh

    Finger of blame points to Clearswift's MAILsweeper

    The recently introduced House of Commons email filtering package is blocking messages sent in Welsh, while letting spam pass through virtually unimpeded. Parliamentarians from the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, are complaining that bilingual English-and-Welsh emails are being blocked as containing "inappropriate content …

    Music and Media 5 Feb 2003, 17:56

  • Oops… BBC wrongly credits Ozzy, Madonna pix to porn site

    Pictures of Auntie in her bloomers?

    There are red faces at the BBC today after it wrongly credited pictures on its Web site to a porn site instead of a picture agency. The blunder happened on a page aimed at teenagers which quoted some sloppy celebs getting in the mood for Valentine's Day. The pictures of Mr and Mrs Ozzy Osbourne, Madonna and Guy Ritchie et al …

    Music and Media 5 Feb 2003, 17:59

  • UK to get 1.3m broadband punters this year

    Green shoots of growth

    More than a million homes in the UK will hook up broadband this year, amid signs that the UK is finally becoming a broadband nation. At the end of 2002, 1.6m UK households had signed up to broadband. This year, a further 1.3m people are expected to get broadband, bringing the total number to just under 3m by the end of 2003. …

    Telecoms 5 Feb 2003, 18:00