18th June 2002 Archive

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UK snoop charter: we're already getting all the data anyway

Home Office minister's bizarre confession

Last week's revelation that the UK government was planning sweeping extensions to RIPA (its snoop enablement legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) has provoked a furore and a mini-climb-down. Instead of attempting to give data seizure powers to every bureaucrat working for virtually every public body in the …

Music and Media 18 Jun 2002, 07:45
Apache admins screwed by premature vuln report

Anti-open source?

There's a controversy brewing over the announcement of a new Apache vulnerability similar to the chunked encoding flaws in Microsoft IIS, which we reported here and here. On Monday, Internet Security Systems (ISS) posted their discovery to the BugTraq mailing list, without knowing the full extent of the flaw, and without giving …

Software 18 Jun 2002, 09:28
Sun delivers Cherrystone UltraSparc-III servers

Pitches at 4-way Xeons

Sun Microsystems Inc will today announce that its "Cherrystone" UltraSparc-III workgroup servers, one of the few missing pieces in its Serengeti lineup of Sun Fire servers, are finally ready to go to market, Timothy Prickett Morgan writes . The Sun Fire V480 server was previously known internally as the 480R and is the …

Servers 18 Jun 2002, 09:29
Price war torpedoes Sprint forecasts

Roll on 3G

On the eve of its launch of 3G services in the US, Sprint Corp has warned that its full-year customer growth figures in its mobile phone business could be 10% to 15% lower than its original estimate of 3 million. The news, given in a financial update, led to its shares diving 29.5% to $10.58 last Friday, and puts the …

Mobile 18 Jun 2002, 09:33
Toshiba Chases HP iPaq Lead

Built-in wireless

By its own admission, Toshiba Corp is today only a "blip on the radar" of PDA market leaders Hewlett-Packard Co and Palm Inc, but its latest range is intended to catapult it into contention by embracing growing corporate demand for wireless handheld devices. The Tokyo, Japan-based company's latest e740 is among the first …

Personal 18 Jun 2002, 09:34
Fast Search claims Google's size crown

For Now

Fast Search & Transfer ASA has made a play for Google Inc's reputation as the web's largest search engine, in an effort to create a better brand to drive its enterprise business, Kevin Murphy writes. Fast said its consumer-facing site, AllTheWeb.com, now searches an index of 2,095,568,809 web pages, just over 20 million …

e-Business 18 Jun 2002, 09:34
IT Directors rate data storage

But what does it all mean?

For years, the enterprise storage industry has yammered on about the crucial role of enterprise storage, in the, err, enterprise. This message has filtered through to the UK’s IT directors, two thirds of whom say that storage is "extremely important" to their organisation, according to a recent Dell survey. And they spend a lot …

Hardware 18 Jun 2002, 10:51
RNIB ‘disappointed’ in Macromedia

Blind still can't read Flash

The RNIB - the UK charity that helps people with sight problems - has described as "disappointing" Macromedia's attempts to make its Web design software accessible to people with disabilities. Its assessment follows the recent introduction of Macromedia's Flash MX technology, which enables blind people to view Web sites using …

Music and Media 18 Jun 2002, 10:54
BT to map broadband demand

Finally...

BT is to create a nation-wide database to map demand for broadband in the UK. The monster telco wants punters and businesses to register their interest in receiving ADSL. If enough people in each area are prepared to subscribe to ADSL - then BT will go-ahead and upgrade exchanges for broadband. BT claims the database will …

Telecoms 18 Jun 2002, 11:16
Tell me why I don't like Monday:

PwC: Consulting: in: name: change: sensation:

Stop whatever you're doing, put down that coffee and prepare yourself for some news which will doubtless shake the corporate world to the very bedrock on which its foundations stand. Yes, its official: PwC Consulting is to split from accountancy giant PriceWaterhouse Coopers to emerge as, wait for it, Monday: Indeedy, they've …

Bootnotes 18 Jun 2002, 12:22
UK gov runs up white flag over snoopers' charter

Home Secretary comes over suspiciously reasonable

The UK government has run up the white flag over the proposed 'snooper's charter' extensions to RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act). Last week it intended to put these extensions before parliament today, yesterday it was going to do it next Monday, and today Home Secretary David Blunkett admits he goofed, and is at …

Music and Media 18 Jun 2002, 12:25
Apple's Jaguar – sliced and diced

Exclusive Words and pictures, and Steve Jobs' felon fetish

You’d think Apple developers would have something better to do after a WWDC Beer Bash, than write to The Register. But instead of stumbling back to San Jose hotel rooms to be sick in a bucket, a number of you kind souls instead chose to tell us about "Jagwyre", the codename for the 10.2 release of Mac OS X. "Jagwyre" is …

Mac Channel 18 Jun 2002, 12:25
Apple announces first rack servers, P2P, chat, web services

Updated "One more thing..." after another

Apple seeded developers with "pre alpha" code of Mac OS X 10.2 at the WorldWide Developer Conference in San Jose today, which many had predicted. What no one expected was a slew of bold software initiatives across the board - many more than a typical Jobs keynote - and as a teaser for an announcement next week, word of Apple's …

Mac Channel 18 Jun 2002, 12:25
Ex-DoJ economists pitch late for tougher MS remedies

Will the judge listen?

Six economists who formerly worked for the US Department of Justice (which seems to wear them out pretty fast) have flung themselves under the wheels of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly with the filing of a friends of court brief arguing for tough controls on Microsoft. According to a report in today's New York Times, the six ask …

Software 18 Jun 2002, 13:08
What the hell is Hyper-Threading?

Server Briefing More bangs per buck, maybe

Announced last autumn, Intel's Hyper-Threading technology has finally made it to market, courtesy of the latest Xeon processors. Hyper-Threading is a clever way of making a single chip operate like two separate devices without implementing two cores on one die. That, claims Intel, makes for higher performance without having to …

Servers 18 Jun 2002, 15:02
BSA in Euro piracy crack-down

Talking tough

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is tocrack-down on even more businesses using illegal software. The BSA's decision to get tough with a "hard core of businesses" which think they are "beyond the law" follows hard on the heels of a report into the alleged global rise of software piracy. In particular, the BSA wants to …

Software 18 Jun 2002, 15:05
MS restores Java (but not as we know it) to WinXP

Here's one we prepared a lot earlier...

After a short layoff, Microsoft is growing the polluted Java again. Boxed in by Sun's lawsuit the company decided not to ship its JVM (old, and pending resolution of the dispute, getting older) with Windows XP, but now it's going to ship it with XP SP1, which will be with us in a few months. It will also, bizarrely, be …

Software 18 Jun 2002, 20:27
Disney embraces HP Linux for animation

Tux to have lines softened, language moderated

HP today announced that something called Walt Disney Feature Animation had fixed on HP Linux workstations and servers as components (we'll italicise the weasel words) in its next-generation digital animation production pipeline (oh screw, no we won't). HP winning Disney for Linux is of course a massive victory, but if you pick …

Software 18 Jun 2002, 20:33