Tuesday, January 30

Jim Wagner of ASP News points out that Microsoft's recent web outages don't augur well for their Internet-based .Net service.

If you haven't heard enough about troubles in the DSL industry, Wired has another horror story.

The $199 Internet appliance from Larry Ellison's New Internet Computer Company will use EarthLink for its Internet access.

Napster will become a pay service by mid-2000.

Early betas of IE6 have leaked out. The biggest news so far is a yawn: the browser is integrated with Microsoft-owned web sites.

Computer security and privacy

A major BIND vulnerability was discovered this week. BIND is the most popular DNS software on the Internet. CERT recommends upgrading BIND to 4.9.8, 8.2.3 or 9.1.

Though Hotmail scans for viruses, the Hotmail virus checker is at least six versions behind. McAfee, who provides the anti-virus feature for Microsoft, says they've given Microsoft the updates, but Microsoft hasn't bothered to install them.

CERT has an excellent technical paper on intrusion detection systems.

Computer consulting firm @stake has written a program to demonstrate security vulnerabilities on the Palm. The program, dubbed Notsync, uses the Palm's infrared port and pretends to be a desktop computer. When the Palm hotsyncs data with Notsync, Notsync gets the devices password. A more sophisticated version could grab address book and calendar data, along with email and notes.

Economic turndown

AT&T will cut several hundred jobs in its broadband division.

Excite@Home has taken a US$4.6 billion charge after re-assessing the value of its media acquisitions. The company will layoff 250 workers.

Disney is closing its failing Go.com portal, which employs 400 people.

In other bad news, Lucent Technologies is laying off 10,000, and the newly-merged AOL-Time Warner will layoff 2,000 workers (about 3 percent of their combined workforce as a result of the merger.

Despite troubles in the dot-com industry, executive and mid-employee salaries are holding steady and even increasing,with employers trying to make up for the diminishing value of stock options.

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Friday, February 2

Happy Groundhog Day and Candlemas. Looks like we're in for six more weeks of winter.

McAfee is warning of the re-emergence of an AOL password-stealing Trojan Horse.

The Trojan is transmitted via email, and attempts to send itself to everyone on the user's Buddy List who is currently logged on.

Satellite phone company GlobalStar has run out of money.

Free ISP Juno has hatched a new scheme to save itself: sell the unused CPU cycles on its subscriber's computers for distributed computing tasks. The practice is already used by some volunteer groups, such as SETI@Home. Juno plans to sell the CPU cycles to biotech and other industries that require intense computational resources.

Out-of-dot-commision

Get-paid-to-surf site AllAdvantage has closed its doors.

Petopia is canceling its IPO and liquidating its assets.

Truste is watching Disney's fire sale of Go.com for privacy violations. Last year, Disney attempted to sell the customer information database of failed toy retailer Toysmart.com.

Amazon is cutting 1,300 jobs representing about 15 of its employees. In a separate announcement, Amazon stated it will discontinue selling unprofitable items.

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