Shoreditch to pilot 5Mbps broadband community programme

One of London's poorest areas is to pioneer a new online community programme. Shoreditch, in the borough of Hackney, is to get a raft of new services on their televisions via a set top box. On completion, the scheme will cover over 20,000 homes and businesses within the area with connections either via a PC or a television fitted with a set top box and keyboard. ...more

NEC machine out-calculates US-bred super-pooters

An NEC supercomputer has retained the number one spot in the top 500 list, traditionally dominated by US-built machines. NEC's Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan ranked as the fastest computer in the world, racing along at 35.86 trillion caculations per second. ...more

Freeserve wont let AOL's tax-status lie

Freeserve starts legal attack on Customs and Excise over its failure to make AOL account for VAT in the UK. The French-owned ISP has long had AOL in its sights for the perceived benefits it enjoys - as a UK ISP - under the British tax system. Essentially, while the formally Dixons-owned Freeserve is having to pay VAT, AOL has claimed a non-EU, American status to avoid similar payments. ...more

Fantasy football virus strikes

Hackers are capitalising on World Cup Fever, says security company Sophos, and a new macro virus hidden inside an Excel formula posing as a quick way to create a fantasy football league has been discovered. Once run, Yagnuul-A copies itself into every open Excel worksheet on the target computer and creates files of the form 'LuuNGayDD-MM-YYYYORIG.xls', where DD-MM-YYYY is today's date and ORIG is the name of an legitimate file on the system. ...more

ISPs see pay as you go broadband as solution to bandwidth hogging

NTL is playing down talks that it is testing pay-as-you-go broadband services. Various newsgroups, including hthell:world, are claiming that the cable provider is testing two potential services: pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and pre-pay. However an NTL spokesperson told us that it is merely an 'infrastructure and technology trial'. ...more