Week Ending April 25, 2002

Bill Gates Personally Donated US$5 BILLION Since Jan 2000

From all the Bill is the 'Antichrist' news, you would expect that upon closer inspection, he gives money to organizations that in some way support Microsoft but it does not appear to be the case, unless CARE, Aids Alliance, and dozens of Vaccine and Infectious Disease Institutes are part of some evil master plan.   Check HERE for a list details on 2000 donations.

NewsFactor - Apple, AOL and Netscape Take on Microsoft
Ben Wilson, www.NewsFactor.com

America Online is moving to the Gecko rendering engine in its latest Mac OS X (news - web sites) client, and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL - news) has partnered with Netscape to develop a joint start page that browsers on all new Macintosh (news - web sites) computers initially will access by default.

But Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - news) is not stepping away from the Mac plate. The company is planning to release a service update to its best-selling Office v.X package and a new OS X version of its Internet Explorer Web browser.

...Despite forging closer relationships with both Netscape and AOL, Apple must guard against damaging its relationship with Microsoft. Arguably the most important applications Apple offers Mac buyers are OS X versions of Microsoft's Office suite and Internet Explorer Web browser.

At a recent Silicon Valley Speaker Series, Microsoft general manager Kevin Browne pledged support for Mac OS X and promised both a new version of Internet Explorer and an update to Office v.X.

A new OS X-compatible version of MSN Messenger is also planned.

...Regarding the overwhelming importance of Apple's uneven relationship with Microsoft, Jupiter's Gartenberg said, "It is unlikely that Apple will overwhelmingly embrace AOL/Netscape at Microsoft's expense.

ITWorld Canada - Bertelsmann buys Napster for US$8 million
By Scarlet Pruitt

After a long and torrid courtship, Bertelsmann AG said Friday that it has agreed to purchase Napster Inc. for US$8 million, and is reinstating Konrad Hilbers at the helm of the troubled song-swapping service.

The move comes just days after Hilbers quit the company out of frustration that he could not secure financing to keep the operation running.

Hilbers will now regain the title of chief executive officer and will also chair the company's board of directors. Napster founder Shawn Fanning will take the post of chief technology officer, Bertelsmann said.

The $8 million Bertelsmann is paying for the embattled startup will go toward paying Napster's creditors, the company said.

Toms Hardware - MS Billion Dollar Bet on XBox Live

Microsoft habitually announces billion dollar bets that aren't really, but Xbox Live really is one. That's not to say the stated billions are correct of course, but if this one flops it'll still cost Redmond a pretty penny. In the event of failure Microsoft would be left clutching four datacentres, a sophisticated broadband voice, data and messaging network waiting for clients that aren't coming, and - bizarrely - some kind of online Disneyesque experience.

And it's risky because - as was not the case in the pre-XP hype period - Microsoft is trying to carve its way into and dominate an entirely new market that it doesn't already own. As The Register has been known to observe in the past, Microsoft is actually not very good at this kind of stuff, so don't get your hopes up (or do, depending on your inclinations).

PC Magazine OnLine - New Celerons Are On P4 Cores
By  Konstantinos Karagiannis

It looks as if the time has finally come to bury the desktop Pentium III. With the rollout of the new 1.7-GHz Celeron chip, Intel has moved its entry-level cpus to the more advanced NetBurst architecture, which underlies the company's flagship Pentium 4 line. Now the only remnants of the PIII core are in the Mobile Intel Pentium III Processor-M chips found in entry-level and ultraportable notebooks.

The good news for PC buyers is that now they won't have to sacrifice as much performance to save money when opting for a Celeron over a pricier Pentium 4 model.

The Celeron remains a somewhat crippled version of Intel's top-of-the-line chips. Certainly you wouldn't want a Celeron-based PC for hard-core gaming or 3-D content creation. Although the L2 cache hasn't gone up from 128K (leaving the 1.7-GHz Celeron well behind the P4's 512k), the chip's newfound SSE2 instruction set and NetBurst architecture enabled the Celeron to do significantly better on some of our multimedia benchmark tests...

PC Magazine OnLine - SQL Server Worm on the Loose
By  Dennis Fisher, eWEEK

A new worm that attacks a popular Microsoft Corp. database product is spreading rapidly on the Internet and is showing no signs of slowing down, security experts say.

The worm began spreading Monday afternoon and is attacking servers running any version of Microsoft's SQL Server database software, according to officials at SecurityFocus, a provider of threat management systems. The company first began seeing infections late Monday afternoon and has seen a total of about 1,400 to 1,600 so far, with new infections coming at the rate of about 100 per hour.

Riptech Inc., a managed security services provider based in Alexandria, Va., said it has seen a 100-fold increase in the number of unique IP addresses scanning for SQL machines in the past 24 hours.

The worm scans the Internet for machines running SQL Server that don't have a password specified. It then either takes a guest account or creates a new account and gives it administrative privileges. The worm then changes the password.

It also collects the IP addresses and whatever interface information about the network it can find, dumps the machine's password file from the registry and sends it all in an e-mail to an account that SecurityFocus officials say the worm's creator is likely monitoring.

Although the worm shares some characteristics with other notorious malicious programs such as Nimda and Code Red, experts say it is unlikely to spread as quickly or as broadly.

"There are a lot fewer SQL machines out there than there are machines running IIS [which both Nimda and Code Red attacked]," said Elias Levy, chief technology officer at SecurityFocus, based in San Mateo, Calif.

However, Levy pointed out that SQL is installed by several of Microsoft's other back-office applications, so there may be a number of administrators who don't realize they have a machine running SQL.