23rd July 2003 Archive

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MIT says RIAA is legally challenged

Keeping students safe

After issuing a subpoena to the MIT, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) finds itself in yet another legal battle as university officials have refused to divulge their students' names. MIT is protecting students suspected of trading copyrighted files, citing privacy concerns and improper legal tactics by the …

Music and Media 23 Jul 2003, 07:43
Business Objects: not quite Crystal clear

Big challenge

Business Objects has agreed to buy Crystal Decisions in a stock transaction valued at $820 million. In a surprise move late last Friday, French-American business intelligence vendor Business Objects announced its intention to buy privately-held Crystal Decisions, a Canadian enterprise reporting vendor. Business Objects has a …

Hardware 23 Jul 2003, 07:45
Northern Ireland aims for 100pc broadband

Digital inclusion

The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Northern Ireland wants to make broadband available to 100 percent of its population in three years. The ambitious target, if met, would make Northern Ireland one of the most wired regions in the UK. Currently, only about 52 percent of homes in the North have access to …

Telecoms 23 Jul 2003, 07:49
UK.gov urged to crack down on ID theft

Call for more data sharing

The Government has been urged to take steps to help combat the growing problem of identity fraud, which costs the UK economy a massive £1.3 billion a year. A new report by the Fraud Advisory Panel (FAP) argues the government needs to clarify situations in which data-sharing between businesses is lawful in order to tackle the …

Security 23 Jul 2003, 08:31
Sales down at Black Box

Across the board

Black Box Corporation, the hyper-acquisitive networking equipment reseller, saw a big sales fall in the three months ended June 29, 2003, its Q1. Group revenues were $128m, down 17 per cent from $154m last year. North American sales were $86m, down 20 per cent from last year's $36m. All other revenues were $8m, down 20 per cent …

Channel 23 Jul 2003, 08:46
Siebel de-installs 490 staff

'We have bit the bullet'

Siebel Systems is culling 490 staff -nine per cent of the pay-roll in an effort to hold profit margins steady at 15 per cent as sales fall. Apparently 350 staff have already gone in this round, with the rest expected to be out the door in the next few weeks. By the end of October the CRM vendor will have 5,000 employees on its …

Hardware 23 Jul 2003, 09:12
Sprint goes Wi-Fi

Poker counters

Sprint PCS, late to the table, has announced that it will have over 800 Wi-Fi Zones ready for its mobile phone customers in two months - and 2,100 Zones by the end of 2003. In fact, the first 800 are a simple franchise deal. "The service will complement PCS Vision services offered on the enhanced Sprint Nationwide PCS Network …

Wireless 23 Jul 2003, 09:52
Time looks to India for call centre pilot

Rejects claims of UK job losses

UK-based Time Computers has rejected claims that outsourcing a tech support call centre to India will lead to job losses in the UK. Time's 200 call centre staff in Burnley were told on Monday that the PC maker is to use workers in India to handle calls as part of a six month pilot to test the scheme. Currently, Time provides …

Channel 23 Jul 2003, 09:53
Antitrust trouble brewing for Microsoft in Israel

Mac lock-out complaint

Israel's antitrust director has been blasted for dragging his feet over declaring Microsoft a monopoly. In May last year Oded Lavi, of the 'Online Freedom Foundation' asked to declare Microsoft Israel a monopoly. Israel has anti-competitive legislation which alerts regulators to any vendor with over 50 per cent market share. …

Mac Channel 23 Jul 2003, 09:56
Welsh virus writer loses appeal

Go back to jail, do not collect £200

A Welsh virus writer who created three computer viruses has failed in an appeal to get his prison sentence reduced. Simon Vallor, 22, admitted three counts of distributing computer virus and was jailed for two years for offences section three of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 at Southwark Crown Court in January. Vallor, Llandudno …

Anti-Virus 23 Jul 2003, 10:10
3Com-Huawei wins US, UK export licenses

Huawei the Lads!

3Com says its joint venture with Huawei to make networking equipment is moving closer to becoming fully operational, after it gained export license approvals from the US and UK governments. The legal status of some Huawei-owned technology is unclear - as Cisco is sueing the Chinese firm in the US for the alleged theft of …

Data Networking 23 Jul 2003, 10:14
Palm launches Tungsten T2

Reg Kit Watch Plus: Hitachi's mobile HDD for servers

PDA Palm today officially launched the Tungsten T2, as anticipated, though we note it's been on sale for a couple of days now from some outlets. This new version of the existing Tungsten T doubles the memory to 32MB (29.5MB of which are available to the user), adds a superior 320 x 320 transflective colour screen, and upgrades …

Mobile 23 Jul 2003, 10:22
Have big IT companies had their day?

Historic excess

Perceived and historic wisdom was that the large IT Companies gobbled up smaller IT Companies, once they had reached a size or prominence, writes Bob McDowall of Bloor Research. Acquisition was dictated by the potential opportunity that technology had to integrate into the acquirer's business or to quietly turn off the …

Business 23 Jul 2003, 10:25
Infineon loss narrows during Q3

Memory division back in the black

Infineon saw sales remain flat during its third quarter, the chip maker said yesterday, which led to its ninth consecutive loss-making period. The company lost €116 million ($131 million) on sales of €1.47 billion, the latter much the same as Q2 but 11 per cent up on the Q3 2002. It's loss narrowed 64.6 per cent year-on-year, …

Channel 23 Jul 2003, 10:25
IBM fills out Lotus Workplace with Aptrix

Snug fit

IBM has joined the ranks of the other major vendors of content management and collaboration software and decided to acquire a key building block of its enterprise content management strategy, rather than build it itself, writes Martin Langham of Bloor Research. Usually, acquiring additional functionality from a third-party …

Hardware 23 Jul 2003, 10:28
ARM Q2 profits slump

Static sequentially as royalties rebound

ARM's second fiscal quarter saw revenues of £31.4 million ($50.3 million) yield a profit of £4.3 million ($6.9 million), the company reported yesterday. Both figures were well down on the same period last year, when ARM recorded revenues of £43.2 million and pre-tax profits totalling £16.2 million - a fall of 73.5 per cent. …

Channel 23 Jul 2003, 10:45
Asus drives dual Xeons with P4 chipset

Canterwood enabled for SMP?

Intel's i875P chipset, aka Canterwood, supports dual-processor Xeon chips and not just single Pentium 4s, as the part's documentation suggests. So mobo maker Asus suggests. Its PC-DL Deluxe motherboard, detailed here, is based on the i875P, the company says, and yet has been designed to accommodate two 3.06GHz Xeon DP chips …

Personal 23 Jul 2003, 11:21
Extended warranty hard sell to end

Transparency and choice

Shoppers could be spared the hard sell for extended warranties when buying electrical goods if proposals put forward today by the Competition Commission (CC) are adopted. In a letter to electrical retailers the CC said that punters should not be rushed into buying extended warranties when buying goods and needed time to decide …

Channel 23 Jul 2003, 11:24
SCO not playing by Aussie Rules

'IT equivalent of Nigerian scam'

An Australian Open Source group has filed a complaint with the country's competitition regulator over SCO's attempt to extract license fees from enterprise Linux users. This week, the SCO Group said that Linux Kernel code 2.4 and the upcoming 2.6 was "tainted" with unauthorised Unix code owned by the company. It has written a …

Servers 23 Jul 2003, 12:20
Iomega touts 1.5GB micro drive as Flash killer

Clik! all over again?

Iomega is having another go at getting its removable disk technology incorporated into devices other than PCs. This time it's touting a micro-drive system based on a 1.5GB disk encased in a stainless steel cartridge that's a couple of inches in diameter and weighs 9g. Iomega calls the unit a Digital Capture Technology (DCT), …

Personal 23 Jul 2003, 12:25
Lucent wins $1bn Sprint gig, splashes more red ink

Strike breaker

At last some good news for Lucent, the hard-pressed networking equipment vendor. Yesterday it won a $1bn contract to supply 3G infrastructure kit to Sprint, the US mobile network. Sprint is to base its next-gen network on Qualcomm's CDMA 2000, which comes as little surprise, as the company is a CDMA shop. Lucent has been …

Data Networking 23 Jul 2003, 13:23
Vodafone seeks UK Mobile Gaming Champ

Calling the nation's Kevins and Perrys

Vodafone is offering the chance to win a holiday in Ibiza and a share of £700 worth of mobile gaming goodies to tempt gamers to participate in what it claims is the world's first mobile games championship. Ten regional heats running through July, August and September kick off tomorrow at 10am in Glasgow's George Square. All …

Mobile 23 Jul 2003, 13:27
BT inks US Wi-Fi roaming deal

Roaman Empire

BT has struck a roaming agreement with US outfit Airpath Wireless Inc that means its punters will be able to use Wi-Fi on both sides of the Atlantic. From September, BT Openzone punters will be able to access their service at 350 hotspots in the US. Airpath - whose network is made up of locations set up by different ISPs - …

Wireless 23 Jul 2003, 13:42
Spam clients outed, credit card details published

You can be Heroes just for one Day

Anti-spam activists have upped the ante in their fight against junk email by publishing the details - including credit card information - of people who've ordered spamming services online. Activists published details from order forms left on a monumentally insecure spam services Web site (http://202.63.201.239), run by …

Security 23 Jul 2003, 13:51
BuyMusic offers 300,000 songs to US PC users

Not as cheap as it looks

The latest challenger to Apple's online iTunes Music Store launched in New York today. And the new service, BuyMusic.com, is already claiming to be the world's biggest music download store. How come? It claims it offers more songs than any other legal site - 300,000 tracks, according to its home page, from all the major labels …

Music and Media 23 Jul 2003, 14:17
Epson inks: a modest proposal

Letters And what happens when you bypass the smart chip

Epson, we don't have a problem Letters Last week's story about the Dutch Consumer Association withdrawing its call to boycott Epson inkjet printers prompted a small but high-quality response from Reg readers. First up is Joe "Floid" Kanowitz who challenges printer makers to put the intelligence on the printhead. He is followed …

Letters 23 Jul 2003, 14:27
Those ghostly Iraqi mobile networks in full

Er, maybe...

The mysterious sightings of mobile phone networks that shouldn't even exist yet in Baghdad aren't even half the story, Register Middle East sources reveal. Although nobody yet has a licence from anything you might care to class as a current Iraqi government, there are four networks in the country, and more will be bidding, …

Mobile 23 Jul 2003, 15:42
Greek games ban breaks EC rules

So what is The Commission going to do about it

The European Commission yesterday issued a warning against Greece for passing a law to crack down on Internet gambling. A blanket ban was introduced in July 2002 on all electrical, electromechanical and electronic games, including computer games, in all public and private places, including cybercafés, with the exception of …

Music and Media 23 Jul 2003, 15:52
Cracking Windows passwords made easy

Crypto turbo boosto

Cryptographic researchers have outlined techniques to greatly reduce the time it takes to crack alphanumeric Windows passwords. Brute force attacks on such passwords have always been possible but the techniques outlined in a paper from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) show how such passwords could be …

Security 23 Jul 2003, 15:52
Sun's shares tumble, The Loon grumbles

The end is near. Is it?

Sun Microsystems shares took a serious hit in the early hours of Wednesday trading, opening the door for Merirll Lynch's top server analyst to wax eloquent on Sun's demise. Sun tends to post its best results for any fiscal year in Q4, and true to form, it did. The problem is that the numbers posted by Sun on Tuesday came in …

Servers 23 Jul 2003, 15:59
Google says the VAT Man should exercise, not excise

Letter Helpful suggestion

As you know many American companies have had to register for VAT. Including Google. It thefore made me laugh when Google sent me an email asking me to change my adwords advert for my website. VAT cheat sheet Written originally by the people who know. HM Customs & Excise. www.redreminder.co.uk Here is Google's response. Ad …

Letters 23 Jul 2003, 16:24
‘Online banking in SA was a time-bomb waiting to go off’

Absa case spotlights e-banking security concerns

South African bank Absa has been criticised for its handling of a series of raids its Internet banking service that have seen hundreds of thousands of rand disappearing from its customers' accounts. Absa says its own systems are secure and blames the problem on security mistakes by its clients. Police are working on the theory …

Security 23 Jul 2003, 17:15
Veritas has record run in Q2

Backup pays

Software maker Veritas reported record revenue in its second quarter and only expects things to improve in the coming three months. Veritas posted revenue of $413 million in the quarter ended June 30. This is the highest total in company history and a 13 percent rise over the $365 million generated in the same quarter a year …

Storage 23 Jul 2003, 22:02
Carly's ‘Mean One’ jibe offends HP veterans

Packard slur

"Certainly we have very good relations with the Packards and the Packard Foundation,'' HP chief executive Carly Fiorina told a Silicon Valley audience on Monday. For how long, following a jibe in a CNET interview published the same day, we can only guess. In the interview Fiorina recalled that Dave Packard, co-founder of HP, …

Channel 23 Jul 2003, 22:04
AT&T Wireless promises all-IP real 3G

Nortel, Ericsson wins

AT&T Wireless today repeated its commitment to launch a scaled-back 3G network Stateside by the end of next year, alongside its upgraded "2.75G" EDGE network. The carrier began the migration from its TDMA network to GSM/GPRS two years ago, and its CTO Rod Nelson remains bullish about the decision. Nokia says that its base …

Mobile 23 Jul 2003, 22:05