Microsoft has caught a break from the European Commission. The body has suspended temporarily an order for the software empire to start offering Windows without a media player. The company said they learned June 27 of the EC decision, giving the Luxembough court time to sort the case out with no pressure for an immediate ruling. Microsoft had already asked the EC to annul a $607 million fine and media player requirement, saying those remedies would hurt both themselves and other software development companies as well as Website developers building products for Windows…
The man who invented American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) and was the first to warn about a Y2K problem, has died. Robert W. Bemer died of cancer at his Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas home June 22. ASCII lets computers see text as numbers, and Bemer developed it in 1963. And, in 1971, he warned that using two digits rather than four to represent years in computer code could cause serious problems for computers around the world. The government's failure to heed Bemer's original warning resulted in spending over $122 billion to fix the problem, even if much of the Y2K hysteria in the years leading up to the turn of the century did turn out exaggerated. "It was the fault of everybody, just everybody," Bemer told a magazine. "If Grace Hopper and I were at fault," he continued, referring to the inventor of the COBOL programming language, "it was for making the language so easy that anybody could get in on the act."…
Only too many, alas, are getting in on the Internet child porn act. Take Kelly K. Bowen, a Portsmouth, Virginia educator charged with child porn possession – authorities have released a number of screen names he has registered online and begun warning parents to contact them if anyone using the names tries to contact their children online. Bowen was arrested June 23 after a search of his home found computer child porn images including one of himself having sex with a child. Authorities reportedly got wise to Bowen when one of his names, HOTLILFLGURL, contacted what turned out to be an undercover officer working an America Online chatroom…
Former Ohio prosecutor Dean Boland has a child porn problem of another kind: he works as an expert witness on behalf of child porn defendants, which has some worrying that the 37-year-old could be sacrificing his reputation. "Dean has gone to the dark side," said Cuyahoga County prosecutor Bill Mason. "If you start to creep into this dirty, unhealthy world, you're going to look like part of that world. In reality, what he's trying to do is help these child predators get off. He's going to have to live with that stain on his reputation." Boland's expertise includes digital imaging technology and how child pornographers use it to enhance and distribute their products – and, whether the images in question are computer images or actual children. "It's easy to demonize me," he told an Ohio television news team, "but from my perspective, I'm not out there testifying about child porn. I'm testifying about the technology of digital imaging."…
Scottish Netizens are being stained by a rash of rogue dialers being installed on their computers surreptitiously, dialers which change their settings and diverts them to premium-rate lines costing as much as about $80 a minute, which – as you might expect – they don't learn about until they get their phone bills. The government is calling for a parliamentary debate on the matter.
