17-03-2001 Essential news of the week

Brought neatly together and presented on a plate, here is a roundup of some of the week's main news stories from the world of IT. Tiny squeezes PC, TV, hi-fi into one .NET to be Linux friendly Hercules announces new graphics card The future looks bear for hi-tech stocks IR35 goes to Judicial Review Music comes to DataPlay IBM in the process of getting smaller Microsoft casts its . ...more

InfoSec 2006: SMBs the poor relation for info security - DTI

Small businesses are the poor relation when it comes to information security, according to the latest DTI survey on breaches within UK PLC. Chris Potter, Information Security Assurance Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, which ran the survey, described it as 'a tale of two cities'. The figures show small businesses are investing less, suffering more incidences and are less aware than their large-scale counterparts. ...more

More sacked for e-mail abuse

Following on from the recent story concerning two men who lost their appeal of unfair dismissal over e-mail abuse, it has come to light that six more people from a different company have been dismissed. The former employees at the Birmingham sales office of Cable & Wireless were dismissed and six other staff were disciplined for sending offensive e-mail. It is believed that a number of those concerned will be appealing against the dismissal and claim that they have been victimised and that abuse of the computer system is rife in the company. ...more

Napster shows revenue surge as ad-supported music attracts audience

Napster managed to cut its losses by $10 million in the last quarter, despite a seven per cent fall in subscriber numbers. Napster CEO Chris Gorog attributed the decline to the launch of a free service in May. However the income from advertising on the new site underpinned record revenues for the digital music business as a whole. ...more

Google still leads Web search but rivals catching up fast

Google remains the world's favourite search engine although rivals Yahoo! and MSN are catching up fast according to analysts Keynote Systems. 'Google is the king of customer experience in the search engine industry, but Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves are improving,' said Dr. Bonny Brown, director of research and public services for Keynote. ...more