Austrian 3G auctions suffer Italy's fate

Austria has failed to raise expected returns from its 3G mobile comms auctions, with the bidding closing after only two days after 16 rounds. The problem seems to stem from the fact that having the same number of bidders as there are licences available inevitably dampens competition. The first set of licences up for grabs was for 6 pairs of 5Mhz frequency packages. ...more

UK record industry to launch legal offensive against file sharing today

The BPI will today announce the first wave of litigation against individuals it believes have illegally made copyrighted music files available for download. The UK record industry's main body will release details later this morning. On Tuesday, the BPI intimated that action was imminent against what it calls serial uploaders - 'the minority responsible for uploading the majority' of files using p2p applications such as Kazaa and Acquisition. ...more

3G licence bids will take 15 years to recoup cost

A report released by Arthur Andersen Consulting and investment bank JP Morgan predicts that it will take the five winners of the UK auction of 3G licences 15 years to recoup their costs. The TIW, Vodafone, BT, Orange and One2One, which put in winning bids ranging from ?4bn to ?5.96bn, now face the prospect of establishing the network that will allow mobile devices high-speed access to the Internet. ...more

Abit dual AMD 64-bit Opteron SU-2S shows prowess as UT2K4 game server

Abit has now unveiled its latest server board for the gaming community, its SU-2S dual-AMD-Opteron server, which, according to the director of marketing at Abit, Scott Thirlwell, has now been running Unreal Tournament 2004 (UT2K4) game server for six weeks straight, with no problems. The server is using the AMD Opteron 246 series CPU and is running under Red Hat Linux Advanced Server edition, said Thirlwell. Currently, the company is working with a local Taiwan ISP that has two servers online, and Thirlwell expects a US server to be set up within the next few weeks. ...more

Researcher sacked for Microsoft monopoly attack

A computer security firm has sacked one of its employees for contributing to a research paper which claims that the dominance of Microsoft's Windows operating system is to blame for the increased vulnerability of computers to attack. Dan Geer was principal author of the paper entitled 'Cyber Insecurity: the cost of monopoly' - available as a PDF, which was backed by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA). He argues that, 'As fast as the world's computing infrastructure is growing, vulnerability to attack is growing faster still. ...more