Tuesday, February 12

The Anna Kournikova virus purports to be a picture of the tennis star, but is a VBS script that spreads to email addresses in your Outlook address book. It typically has a subject line of "Here you are ;-)," "here you have ;o)" or "here you go ;-)." We can thank fun, easy-to-use virus-writing tools for this one.

MWave owners, rejoice. IBM has released a GPLed Winmodem driver for Linux .

Covad disconnected the service of DSLnetworks and Internet Express after the two DSL ISPs failed to make payments.

Small ISPs are up in arms over Verizon's decision to require ISPs who want to resell DSL to sign up for a minimum of an OC-3 connection, a 155 megabit link that's beyond the budget of some smaller companies.

A Danish study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute concluded that cell phones do not elevate the risk of cancer. The study involved 420,000 Danes and is the largest study of its type to date.

Google search engine bought Deja.com's Usenet search engine. Google promises to increase the service's speed, resume posting, and restore the archive back to 1995.

Netscape 6.01 is an upgrade designed to fix the numerous bugs in Netscape 6.0. At press time, Netscape 6.01 was not yet available on Netscape's web site.

Cool ads, but on the skids anyway

Aussie sports site Quokka Sports lays off 217 employees (59 percent).

Barnes & Noble is facing terrible financial prospects, and may be folded back into its parent company.

Metricom will be out of cash by June if it doesn't find new funding. Metricom makes the Ricochet wireless modem.

Motorola is planning another round of layoffs. About 4,000 jobs will be cut.

Friday, February 16

Kevin Poulsen of SecurityFocus reviews "CyberTraque," the French movie based on "Takedown," the controversial book about the arrest of Kevin Mitnick.

Long-time EarthLink shareholder ITC Holdings sold its 10,648,134 shares of EarthLink common stock. ITC also announced that two of its officers have resigned their place on EarthLink's board of directors.

Dutch authorities arrested On The Fly, a 19 year old man who confessed to authoring the Anna Kournikova virus.

Content filtering software has been criticized many times, but usually by left-leaning, free speech-cheering activists. Now Consumer Reports lends its weight to the argument with a critical review of content-filtering software. The non-profit magazine, which accepts no advertising, found that popular home filtering software failed to block 1 in 5 X-rated sites, and blocked many sites that children should be able to access. The report appears in the March issue of Consumer Reports, and is available online .

Nortel Network is laying off 10,000 .

Dell is laying off 1,700 .

DSL industry woes

Last week Covad turned off DSL service to customers of DSLNetworks when the company failed to pay Covad for line fees. DSLNetworks sued when Covad began moving disconnected customers to its own DSL service. Covad prevailed in court yesterday.

Covad announced it will delay its earnings report due to complex financial issues, and greater-than-expected restructuring charges due to greater job cuts. Covad will close 260 offices and suspend applications for 500 offices.

Following the bankruptcy of Flashcom, Rhythms NetConnections has transferred several thousand DSL customers to EarthLink.

Darrell Dunn of EBNews believes 2001 is the make or break year for DSL.

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