Italian Senate laid low by gay porn virus

According to the Italian news site ANSA, the Italian Senate has been plagued by a computer virus that displays pornographic images on computer monitors for the past two days. The attack was discovered on Monday morning, when a variant of the Rbot worm caused unusual traffic volumes across the network and blocked access to a number of resources. More unsettling effects included some computers of the displaying gay hardcore pornography on the monitors situated in the Senate's offices in Palazzo Madama. ...more

Symantec buys Relicore to boost enterprise offerings

Symantec has bolstered its position in the enterprise, announcing it is to acquire Relicore, a company specialising in managing and configuring data centres. Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed, but it is expected to close by the middle of the month. Relicore's flagship Clarity product searches through a network to determine the hardware and software components used by each application, mapping the network and tracking any changes made to the way it is run. ...more

Palm OS - now we are five

Palm has released the next version of its operating system for handheld PDAs to hardware and software developers. Palm OS 5 marks a crucial stage in the development of the Palm platform - used by handheld makers such as Palm itself, Handspring and Sony - as it comes under increasing pressure from Microsoft's rival PocketPC system, favoured by the Compaq for its popular iPaq. This release abandons support for the 68000 processors used in current devices in favour of faster ARM processors. ...more

University of Tokyo sets two new Net speed records

The University of Tokyo has broken two of the Internet2 Land Speed Records and has now set or broken 10 records for the highest-bandwidth, end-to-end networks. The first record was set over a next-generation IPv6 network path over 30,000km long and crossing six international networks (over three-quarters of the circumference of the Earth). The Tokyo team successfully transferred data at a rate of 7. ...more

Two men arrested in connection with Zotob attacks

Police in Morocco and Turkey have arrested two men in connection with the 'Mytob' and 'Zotob' worms which caused chaos in computer systems around the world earlier this month The two men are Farid Essebar, 18, a Moroccan citizen originally from Russia who went by the screen name 'Diabl0' and 21 year old Atilla Ekici, who goes by the name of 'Coder,' from Turkey. The arrests follow co-operation between Microsoft, the FBI and local law enforcement agencies in Morocco and Turkey. W32. ...more