Microsoft said Wednesday that it has launched mobile versions of its MSN Internet portal in Europe, specifically designed for the small color screens of handheld computers. Two mobile MSN portals in France and Germany, for Pocket PC computers that have access to the Internet over a Wireless LAN or a mobile phone network, went live on Wednesday. British and Spanish versions will launch in coming weeks.
"The launch means that for the first time a broad range of MSN content.can be accessed from mobile devices," Microsoft MSN said in a statement. The portals will have special Web addresses that are different from the URLs that MSN uses for its portals that are viewed on a large PC screen.
Little in Steve Ballmer's two years as CEO resembles the scope of the challenge Microsoft embarks upon this month, when the company will go into lockdown mode to conduct a top-to-bottom review of its software code. Call it March Madness, one month early. The unprecedented move follows a company-wide memo that Chairman Bill Gates sent to employees in January, urging Microsoft employees to write more secure software and make customer privacy a priority.
Clearly, the heat is on to fix a software vulnerability that has dogged myriad Microsoft products over the years, a problem brought into sharp relief last summer by the Code Red and Nimda virus attacks.
Three vulnerabilities have been discovered in Cisco SN 5420 Storage Router software releases up to and including 1.1(5). Two of the vulnerabilities can cause a Denial-of-Service attack. The other allows access to the SN 5420 configuration if it has been previously saved on the router.
It seems that AOL's stock is scraping bottom. Poor AOL, my sincere condolences :)
AOL Time Warner Inc. said its net loss totaled $32.5 million, or 28 cents a share, compared with a loss of $3.4 million, or 3 cents a share, a year before. Excluding one-time items, Time Warner Telecom said its loss was 24 cents a share in the fourth quarter of 2001. Wall Street analysts expected the company to post a loss in the range of 22 cents to 48 cents a share, with a mean forecast of a loss of 30 cents a share, according to research firm Thomson Financial/First Call.
Thanks Rod! Government computers that handle trillions of dollars in tax refunds and Social Security benefits remain vulnerable to cyberattacks despite previous warnings, a government report released Monday said. The report by the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, found that computer-security controls at the Treasury Department's Financial Management Service remain lax, despite warnings dating back to 1997. "Billions of dollars of payments and collections are at significant risk of loss or fraud, sensitive data are at risk of inappropriate disclosure, and critical computer-based operations are vulnerable to serious disruptions," the report said.
Hewlett-Packard announced Tuesday that it has set a date for its shareholders meeting on its proposed mega-merger with Compaq Computer. Shareholders will cast their votes March 19 at the Flint Center in Cupertino, Calif. Investors who held HP stock as of Jan. 28 will be eligible to vote. The long-awaited vote is expected to bring sweeping changes to HP, whether or not the deal goes through. The $24 billion arrangement, which would be the largest technology merger in history, would dramatically consolidate the PC industry and significantly alter HP's business operations, as it seeks to merge two huge companies.
Thanks to NeoWin for this link.
Chip giant Intel confirmed the large caches it will include on future versions of the Itanium and has also further explained its tie in with Ovonics on these chips, first revealed here some months ago. Intel is delivering eleven papers at the Solid State conference. Along with this, Intel has now formally released details of the 3MB cache on chip which it claims will deliver 1.5 to two times performance over the current designs. The low latency level three cache which will be included in the McKinley design is expected to give better performance for the processor, which will be used in servers.
Thanks Robert! An invisible cyber assault has cut off access for the second day running to the Web site of the World Economic Forum, organizers of the gathering of the world's political and business elite confirmed on Friday.
The flood of Internet traffic to the Web site at http://www.weforum.org began on Thursday afternoon, the first day of a five-day conference, and continued through Friday, with only intermittent let-up, a conference organizer said.
CURRENT MEMBERS OF the U.S. Congress have introduced hundreds of technology-related bills, many of which signal a willingness among legislators to regulate this industry sector instead of letting market forces rule, according to a policy research group's report released Monday.
It labels twelve bills "destructive" because they aim to increase government involvement in the technology or telecommunication sector, promote regulatory decision making over voluntary action of the industry's players, or threaten civil liberties of U.S. citizens.
Microsoft today announced the immediate availability of a free tool that will help developers move their existing Java source code to .NET. The Java Language Conversion Assistant (JLCA) Beta 1 is now available, and will port Java to C#, Microsoft's new programming language.
"Integration is a fundamental principle of the .NET platform, as is our commitment to providing a path so developers can build XML Web services in the programming language of their choice," says Tom Button, the vice president of Developer Marketing and Enterprise Tools at Microsoft. "With the JLCA, Java language developers have yet another avenue with which to target XML Web services through the .NET Framework."