3rd March 2003 Archive

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150 Brits x 419 fraud = £8.4m

The mathematics of greed and stupidity

You'd like to think that after all the publicity generated around Nigerian 419 advance fee fraud, the boys from Lagos would be pretty well out of business. Sadly not. According to figures from the UK's National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) - quoted in Scotland on Sunday - no less than 150 Britons got burned last year …

Music and Media 3 Mar 2003, 09:17
Massive growth ahead in Net traffic

BB migration

Traffic over the Internet is set to double every year for the next five years, according to IDC. The market research firm predicts the volume of Internet traffic generated by end users worldwide will nearly double annually between 2002 and 2007. This will mean an increase in traffic from 180 petabits per day in 2002 to 5,175 …

Music and Media 3 Mar 2003, 09:17
Why criminalizing Crypto is wrong

Opinion Felony SSL

The Justice Department's plan to make routine encryption illegal in the hands of criminals will hurt law abiding citizens, and prove catastrophic for Internet security, writes Mark Rasch There is nothing like the fear of weapons of mass destruction to bring out weary old legislative proposals. Earlier this month, it leaked out …

Security 3 Mar 2003, 09:44
Getting Red Hat Network support for free just got harder

Surveyware? Egad...

With the impending rollout of Red Hat Advanced Workstation the company has made another move to 'encourage' users to pay for Red Hat Network support. As you'd expect it's a mixture of carrots and sticks, but some of the sticks look quite painful for people who're trying to run businesses off of the free RHN service - presumably …

Software 3 Mar 2003, 11:44
Wanadoo makes a profit

Freeserve makes larger loss

French ISP Wanadoo has notched up a profit a year ahead of forecasts. Publishing its full-year results today, the company reported a net income of 30m euros, compared to a net loss of 193m euros in 2001. Earnings before interest etc (EBITDA) rolled in at 90m euros compared to an EBITDA loss of 64m euros the year before. Total …

Business 3 Mar 2003, 11:45
Colt gets new MD

That's it

Telecoms outfit - Colt - has a new UK Simon Vye was, until recently, senior VP of sales and customer operations at Priority Telecom, a telecoms outfit in the Netherlands, Austria and Norway. He replaces Cedric Smith, who moves sideways to head up the company's blue chip sales force. ®

Business 3 Mar 2003, 11:45
Friends Reunited ditches sale, plans to go global

Looks to expand instead

Friends Reunited has shelved plans to flog itself. Instead, the UK schools and colleges reunion outfit has recruited former FT.com COO, Michael Murphy, to help expand the business. According to the Sunday Times, the site is looking to double in size by turning itself into a multi-national operation. It already has 8m …

Music and Media 3 Mar 2003, 11:48
DVD Jon faces summer retrial

Try, try again...

Norwegian teenager, Jon Lech Johansen, is to be tried again by an appeal court this summer despite being cleared of cyber piracy crimes earlier this year, his lawyer confirmed last Friday. "DVD Jon" Johansen, 19, was acquitted on criminal charges this January relating to his involvement in creating and distributing a utility …

Music and Media 3 Mar 2003, 12:25
Gates gives China peeking rights at Windows source

It'll be on ISOnews next...

Explaining Microsoft's Government Security Program a while back Craig Mundie intimated that it applied to practically everybody except Cuba and Iraq, and he even gave China as an example of a qualifying country. So Bill Gates goes to China and it's not exactly a surprise that Chinese participation in the GSP is announced. Hey, …

Software 3 Mar 2003, 13:28
Leaked NSA email exposes UN bugging offensive

Giving US policymakers an edge...

The US National Security Agency is mounting a bugging offensive against UN delegations in order to gain "information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises" in the Iraq debate. According to an email from one Frank Koza leaked in yesterday's Observer, UN …

Music and Media 3 Mar 2003, 14:32
DDR surge favours Infineon, Nanya

Low-rankers tustle for Samsung's table-leavings

Surging DDR SDRAM sales backed by higher prices drove Infineon and Nanya respectively into the top three and top five global DRAM suppliers for the first time, according to preliminary data from US market research organisation iSuppli. But with Samsung extending its market dominance to 32.5 per cent of the world's DRAM chip …

Channel 3 Mar 2003, 14:34
IETF aims to can spam

Research group aims to fill technical breach

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the influential Net standards body, has set up a research group geared to fighting the spam menace. Although there's no shortage of tools designed to filter out spam from legitimate email, the industry has yet to come up with a co-ordinated approach. Enter the Anti-Spam Research …

Music and Media 3 Mar 2003, 14:35
Pricey Tungsten T prompts Palm sales slide

Should have known all along

Palm's current quarterly sales will be $25-40 million less than it had hoped, the PDA maker admitted to shareholders today. Last quarter, Palm predicted Q3 2003 revenues of $230-250 million. Now its expecting just $205-210 million, a dip of between 11 and 16 per cent. Palm blamed the shortfall on diminishing demand for its top …

Personal 3 Mar 2003, 15:25
World chip sales rise despite seasonal dip

Up 22 per cent on January 2002

Global chip sales in January were up significantly on the same month last year despite a fall against December 2002's figures, according to data released today by the Semiconductor Industry Association. Last month, worldwide chip sales totalled $12.2 billion, down on December's $12.5 billion. The SIA blamed the "modest" 2.4 per …

Channel 3 Mar 2003, 16:04
The US M1A2 Abrams, and war as a video game

First test of the digitized battlespace looms...

Over the past few months there's been no shortage of improbable military technology stories lauding the latest in risk-free smart weaponry and cyberwarfare techniques. Today, for example, AP posits spoof text messages from Saddam giving his generals misleading orders. Which we suppose would be dead clever if Saddam habitually …

Software 3 Mar 2003, 18:00
Energis creates 100 jobs

Business growth

Energis is to create more than 100 jobs after announcing that it has generated more than £1bn in sales in the last six months. The telecoms outfit began advertising the jobs - which include technical roles and consultants - over the weekend and claims the creation of new positions "reflects the growth in new business". Indeed …

Business 3 Mar 2003, 18:02
UK distie fingered for selling pirate MS software

Out of the Blue

UK software distie Blue Solutions has settled with Microsoft for inadvertently dealing in counterfeit Microsoft software. Settlement terms weren't disclosed. Since 1997 Berkshire-based Blue had unknowingly sold a number of counterfeit and incorrectly licensed Microsoft products to its customers through its extensive (7,000-plus …

Software 3 Mar 2003, 18:13
RIAA website now routable and public

Phew!

The Recording Industry Association of America website is once again up and running. It may have been up and running a lot longer. When we checked in yesterday, riaa.com had been registered with the domain service with an IP address of 10.10.10.1 - a nonroutable, private address. So, in order to see it, you had to call round to …

Music and Media 3 Mar 2003, 18:22
Microsoft quits OpenGL board

Exclusive Go it alone

Microsoft has tendered its resignation from the consortium governing the OpenGL standard, signalling an intention to go it alone with its Direct3D graphics platform. Microsoft was a founding member of the Open GL architecture review board (ARB), and in a letter to ARB members seen by The Register, said it would "focus our …

Personal 3 Mar 2003, 21:53