ONS: Festive sales worst for 20 years
by brian_turnerThe Office for National Statistics published figures in Trading slowdown at end of 2004 that, by themselves, suggest the worst retail sales figures for 20 years.
However, other agencies are warning not to read too much into the figures. This is partly because a clear picture of overall Christmas trading is not expected until Easter. Also, [...]
January 20, 2005
Registrars line up to control .net domains
by brian_turnerFive companies have now been short-listed to administer the internet’s third largest registry – the .net TLD – which will be re-contracted from July 2005.
Over the next two months a group of advisors, under the auspices of ICANN will make the decision as to which of the five contenders is most likely to serve the [...]
Google appeals French trademark judgement
by brian_turnerGoogle are appealing against a ruling by a judge in France, which seeks to prevent the serving of AdWords on display of trademarked hotel chain.
Le Meridien had served legal proceedings on Google, after hotel chain rivals were found to have their own ads prominantly displayed in search for “Le Meridien”.
Although in a similar case [...]
Microsoft Office: encryption vulnerability
by brian_turnerA researcher in cryptography at the Institute of Infocomm Research in Singapore has reported a serious flaw in the method of encryption used by Microsoft in its Office suite.
As reported in Hongjun Wu’s The Misuse of RC4 in Microsoft Word and Excel, the problem arises because Microsoft programmers apparently did not properly apply the 128-bit [...]
Phishing scams continue on the rise
by brian_turnerPhishing scams continue to increase, with the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) publishing figures that cover monitoring over December.
9,019 new, unique phishing campaigns
1,707 phishing-related sites reported
55 targeted companies/brands
Fears that commerce vendors would be specifically targeted were unfounded, as financial institutions became the big focus for phishing attacks.
However, the figures make a clear demonstration of the seriousness [...]
January 19, 2005
Google Desktop Search used in Peer to Peer file-swapping application
by brian_turnerIn a move that raises a range of uncomfortable legal issues for Google, its Desktop Search tool has been used in the development of an application for large-scale file-swapping.
DNKA remote desktop search tool acts as a webserver that utilises Google Desktop Search to allow other people to remotely search and download files from a users [...]
Voice activated iPod coming?
by brian_turnerVoice recognition software development company, Scansoft, and media library production company, Gracenote, have announced plans to join forces to produce voice-activated media applications.
The aim is to provide hands-free access to film and music media, with the technology available from Q4 2005.
Gracenote already provides music library information Apple’s iTunes, so it is not at all inconceivable [...]
Super airliner wars hots up
by brian_turnerThe Super airliner wars have opened in earnest, after Airbus finally revealed their A380 “super-jumbo” aircraft in an opening ceremony, that also served as a warning shot to US rival, Boeing.
With a projected seating capacity of almost 50% more than the Boeing 747, the Airbus A380 project is intended to provide the dominant single aircraft [...]
Yahoo! sales & advertising breaking profits records
by brian_turnerYahoo! today announced Q4 profits of over $187m from sales in excess of $1 billion, after sales of stock including shares from Google.
Yahoo! indicated strong advertising revenue as a principle growth area, with TV and media companies especially moving increasing marketing budgets to search and banner advertising.
The news was welcome on the stock market, [...]
EC investigates BT
by brian_turnerThe Curopean Commission has begun a formal investigation into whether UK telcoms operators, specifically British Telecom (BT) and Kingston Communications (KC), have received unfair tax breaks over competitors.
The complaint was raised by Vtesse, who argued that Business Rates, as set by the Inland Revenue’s Valuation Office Agency (VOA), gave unfair biases towards both BT and [...]
New nofollow tag cheers bloggers, but fails blogs?
by brian_turnerSPECIAL REPORT
A new tag is to be introduced to the internet, instructing search engine spiders to ignore specified links, and major search engines Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft will support it. Publicly claimed to be for the fight against blog spam, it effectively leaves the search engines asking webmasters to help improve their results.
A simple attribute, [...]
vBulletin patches to 3.0.6 and 2.3.6
by brian_turnervBulletin last night released two important patches, that follow closely on the critical 3.05 patch for vBulletin 3.
The current releases are general security and bug-fix releases for both the vBulletin 3.x and vBulletin 2.3.x platforms.
A primary role of the security fix relates to an issue with XSS that could lead to bbcode for member signatures [...]
Critical PHP bug slows dynamic applications
by brian_turnerAfter the recent security concerns with PHP, upgrades from PHP 4.3.9 to PHP 4.3.10 have left some dynamic applications with serious problems with slowed performance.
In a report at the PHP development community, Bug #31332 unserialize() works terribly slow on huge strings compared to 4.3.9, it is pointed out that this error is critical for [...]
January 16, 2005
New York ISP has domain hijacked?
by brian_turnerNew York ISP, Panix, is reported to have had its domain name hijacked.
According to ISP fights for return of hijacked domain:
A Panix.com representative said ownership of the domain had been moved sometime Friday evening to a company in Australia, the domain name server (DNS) records had been moved to the United Kingdom and that the [...]
IBM: offers free patents, offers to rebuild Linux kernel
by brian_turnerComputing giant IBM last week announced plans to offer around 500 patents to the open source community, in a planned investment of open source development for industry.
As reported in IBM offers 500 patents for open-source use, the company does still retain vast number of patents by volume, suggested to be as many as 10,000. Crucially, [...]
Deloitte predicts economic slowdown
by brian_turnerBusiness consultants Deloitte, in 2005 – Tough times ahead?, indicate that they expect the UK ecomony’s “golden period” of the past ten years to come to an end.
Citing a slowdown of the housing market as the major economic brake, it predicts this will impact comsumer spending, resulting in lower economic growth than forecast.
Interestingly enough, the [...]
Fund threatens Deutsche Boerse LSE bid
by brian_turnerTCI Fund Management, an investment company claiming more than a 5% share in Deutsche Boerse, has called an Extraordinary General Meeting of Deutsche Boerse shareholders to recommend against any further bid for the London Stock Exchange.
Under German law, any company with 5% more shareholding in a public company can call an EGM. However, it is [...]
January 15, 2005
Oracle cuts Peoplesoft
by brian_turnerAfter completing one of the bitterest IT merger acquisitions in recent years, Oracle have announced that they will lay-off 5,000 workers. The majority of the lay-offs are expected at acquired company Peoplesoft, which already employs nearly 11,000 people worldwide.
In Oracle to cut 5,000 jobs in PeopleSoft merger, CNet reports on how Peoplesoft tried to fight [...]
BT loses broadband, dial-up
by brian_turnerA fault at British Telecom’s internet switching site in Bletchley yesterday left more than 70,000 of their business broadband customers with little or no internet access.
The UK’s largest broadband provider, the disruption of service meant that online vendors and e-commerce sites hosted on BT were unable to process orders, as well as users being unable [...]
FBI blows $180 million on software upgrade
by brian_turnerAfter 9/11, disorganisation of security information was cited as a key failure in the application of intelligence gathering and application that helped allow the plane hijackers to succeed.
A $600 million package was assigned to the FBI to build 3 crucial computer systems for achieving their mandate, but one of them – Virtual Case File [...]