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Issue no. 6, 2001 Published: Sep 21, 2001
Viruses are getting faster, tougher
Doctors in US perform surgery in France
European cyber-crime treaty on its way to formal adoption
W3C recommends online accessibility guidelines
Infoseek Germany to close after T-Online quits venture
NY disaster highlights need for data storage and back up
Giant online newspaper archive planned in US
Researchers ponder bacterial intelligence
Web without the waiting - the computer redesigned
DoCoMo, IBM Japan develop video transmitter for 3G mobile phones
New from Japan: taking pictures with your mobile
News knocks out sex in Net searches

Viruses are getting faster, tougher
One in every 300 e-mails circulating now contains a virus, up from one in every 700 in October last year, according to e-mail security company MessageLabs. Viruses are growing in sophistication and are thus able to propagate themselves faster and more effectively, the company said in a statement regarding the Nimda virus. Nimda is a hybrid virus that contains a mass-mailing component, enabling it to spread very quickly. But apart from that, the virus attempts 16 different exploits against known Web server holes. Once compromised, the Web server appears to serve up pages that exploit browser bugs to execute immediately without asking for permission, and thus infecting the PC running the browser. This outbreak shows that existing anti-virus systems cannot respond quickly enough to new outbreaks and that the problem must be addressed at the Internet level, MessageLabs said, adding that if the growth in the number and power of viruses and worms continues, as many as one in 10 e-mails circulating the globe would be infected by a virus by 2007.
CNN / IDG Sep 21, 2001	back to top

Doctors in US perform surgery in France
French surgeons in New York have used a robot to remove the gall bladder of a woman in Strasbourg, France, in the world's first long-distance operation. The surgeons used video technology and telecommunications to manipulate scalpel-wielding robotic arms. The technology could enable specialists to be on hand to help surgeons in war zones who lack a particular expertise, or to train doctors in resource-strapped developing countries. Experts have had the technology to carry out long-distance operations for some time, but it only became feasible once they squeezed the time-delay down to a fraction of a second. The images seen by the doctors are almost the same quality as television pictures and the time-delay is virtually imperceptible to the human eye.
ZDNet / Reuters Sep 20, 2001	back to top

European cyber-crime treaty on its way to formal adoption
Key representatives for the Council of Europe on Wednesday signed off on the so-called Convention on Cyber-crime, a global treaty to harmonise laws against crime committed via the Internet. The approval clears the way for formal adoption by the Foreign Affairs Ministers in November, after which it will be set for signature by the 43 members of the Council of Europe in Hungary later that month. The treaty will become binding when five states, at least three of which are members of the Council of Europe, have ratified it. The convention was drafted as an attempt to set some level of legal and ethical standards for online activity. Ratifying members will be required to pass similar legislation to combat a host of Internet crimes, including copyright infringement and malicious hacking. But consumer and civil liberties groups are concerned that the it could lead to the emergence of an international electronic surveillance network.
Newsbytes Sep 21, 2001	back to top

W3C recommends online accessibility guidelines
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has issued recommendations to ensure that the Internet is accessible to people with disabilities. Called the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, these recommendations complete a three-pronged approach by the W3C to make the Web more accessible. The organisation's other proposed guidelines deal with designing accessible Web content and authoring tools. The guidelines detail how things such as keyboard navigation and communication with specialised software benefit people with visual, hearing, physical, cognitive and neurological disabilities. The W3C, with more than 520 member organisations, develops common protocols that promote Web interoperability. Members of the working group include Adobe Systems, Netscape Communications, Apple Computer, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Nokia, Quark, Sun Microsystems and Xerox.
CNN / IDG Sep 21, 2001	back to top

Infoseek Germany to close after T-Online quits venture
Europe's largest Internet service provider T-Online International has pulled out of the joint venture that operated German search engine and Internet portal Infoseek.Germany. Infoseek.de, which has about 50 employees and is based in Hamburg, will close down October 31. T-Online said that the company was not satisfied with Infoseek.de's technology, which it currently uses on its portal (http://www.t-online.de/). After T-Online decided to quit the joint venture, the other three partners decided to close the company down. T-Online, a subsidiary of former German telephone monopoly Deutsche Telekom, has widely publicised that it will launch a freshly designed portal and strategy by the end of the year.
Newsbytes Sep 21, 2001	back to top

NY disaster highlights need for data storage and back up
Just minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Centre, Comdisco, one of the leading data backup companies, swung into action as the first of its customers called for help. By the end of that day, Comdisco was dealing with 25 disaster declarations. Companies such as Comdisco, data storage companies such as EMC, data back-up companies such as Veritas Software, are in tech sectors that are expected by Wall Street analysts to do well in the coming months. Although corporations have significantly reduced their IT budgets this year, the recent attacks are expected to focus attention on the need for improving the security of company data - core to their ability to continue in the event of a disaster. Gartner Group, a leading IT market research and consultancy company, notes that two out of five businesses do not survive a catastrophic blow to their computer systems and data.
Financial Times Sep 20, 2001	back to top

Giant online newspaper archive planned in US
The Canadian company Cold North Wind, which specialises in creating Internet databases for newspapers, is planning to provide the US' National Newspaper Association with a site called America's Chronicles, which will contain archives of up to half a billion images of newspaper pages, including obituary and birth notices back to the 17th century. There are other newspaper archive websites but none are as large or show the actual newspaper images, according to the company. America's Chronicles will include archived material from the NAA's 3,000 members - mostly newspapers with circulations under 20,000 - and it could cost as much as $100m and take five to 10 years to archive all members' articles.
Ifra Trend Report / Excite / AP Sep 20, 2001	back to top

Researchers ponder bacterial intelligence
Researchers working for BT are studying bacterial colonies to help develop communication networks that will self-organise and self- configure. Soon many people will be using so many small, smart devices that they will not have the time to do their own configuration. Self-organising systems will then be essential to keep networks running. The researchers have turned to bacterial colonies called stromatolites for ways to automatically manage large populations of individual entities. Bacteria in stromatolites self-organise and manage to create a large working community even though no single bacterium is in charge. Bacteria also take on different roles depending on where they find themselves in the colony, and they all share genetic information across species - properties that could be useful for communication networks. By assigning different priorities to data packets passed around a simulated network of 3,000 devices, the researchers have managed to make the communications system self-organise.
BBC News Sep 17, 2001	back to top

Web without the waiting - the computer redesigned
British scientist Geoff Barrall has gone back to the drawing board to make computers that can cope with the Internet age. The machines could be a boon to the Web hosting companies using thousands high-powered PCs to store and serve up information via the Net. The logical layout of the components inside almost every computer is little changed since the first draft shortly after World War II, revolving around a central processing unit (CPU) that acts as the interface between a programme and a computer's subsystems. This configuration means a PC does a tolerable job on many different computational tasks and is outstanding at none of them. Instead of using a general-purpose chip, Mr Barrall has created a machine customised to do nothing but find and pass on files for Web users. The machines, made by BlueArc, can get data across the Web at multi-gigabit rates and can handle databases of information far larger than existing single servers, the company claims.
BBC News Sep 19, 2001	back to top

DoCoMo, IBM Japan develop video transmitter for 3G mobile phones
NTT DoCoMo and IBM Japan said Tuesday they had jointly developed a video transmitter for third-generation (3G) mobile phones. The invention enables mobile phone users to stream pictures onto their handsets - a feature the companies are convinced will become increasingly popular in the future, although the technology is still in the testing phase. But when it became widely available people would be able to access precise images and specific information, DoCoMo and IBM said. The two have been working together since last December, developing multimedia transmission technology for 3G and future generation mobiles. Earlier this month, DoCoMo said it would launch the world's first 3G mobile phone service on October 1, although doubts remain over how successful the futuristic service will be because of the global downturn in demand for mobile communication technology.
Nando Times / AFP Sep 20, 2001	back to top

New from Japan: taking pictures with your mobile
Downtown Tokyo is already full of what are called Purikura photo booths. People dive into them just to catch a moment on film. Is it a phone? Is it a camera? The craze is getting mobile with the help of a new cameraphone from Sharp. The J-SH04 phone allows you to take sneaky shots with a tiny digital camera that is integrated into the cellphone. The phone features a 110,000-pixel camera on the back side of the phone and a large 256-color STN display on the front side. It also has a 500-number phone book, one-button web access, speaker phone, and Li-ion battery capable of 125 minutes of talktime. You compose your pictures by using the onscreen display, or you can flip the phone around and use the self-timer. Then, when you have caught the image, fire up your personal SkyMail service, and you can send the pictures electronically to anybody else who has got one of these phones.
BBC News Sep 19, 2001	back to top

News knocks out sex in Net searches
Osama bin Laden has displaced Pamela Lee Anderson in cyberspace. For the first time in the short history of the Internet, popular search engines report that ''sex'' dropped off their lists of top 10 search terms in the days following the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. ''Popular search terms last week turned almost exclusively to disaster-related information,'' said David Emanuel, spokesman for search engine AltaVista, which tracks top search terms. Sex, a longtime favourite usually in the top 10, dropped to No. 17, Mr Emanuel said. Instead of entertainment and assorted fluff that has for years attracted the bulk of all Internet traffic, it was news, news and more news that people were looking for on AltaVista. CNN, News, World Trade Centre, BBC and Pentagon were the top searches on the site last week.
CNET / Reuters Sep 21, 2001	back to top