Samsung named world's fastest growing brand

Samsung has been named the 'Fastest Growing Global Brand' by Interbrand, a global brand consultancy. For a second year in a row the South Korean electronics giant has taken this particular marketing garland. Interbrand calculates that Samsung's brand value has more than doubled from $5. ...more

Wikipedia tells search engines to ignore external links

Wikipedia has implemented a change to the way that it handles links to external websites in an effort to discourage link spamming. The collaborative encyclopedia website will now automatically insert the rel="nofollow" attribute into link tags to tell search engines to disregard the links. The attribute is an instruction for a search engine to ignore the link when it ranks sites in order to produce its results. ...more

Comment: Internet experts face anti-terrorist threat

Internet security professionals everywhere are breaking the law and risk facing prosecution as terrorists. The remarkably non-specific UK Terrorism Act 2000, passed on Monday, makes it possible for the government to target and label network security specialists as terrorists because they hold, and sometimes publish, documentation about system vulnerabilities. While such information can be used by politically-motivated crackers to attack, penetrate or bring down computer systems, it is also essential for systems administrators who need to stay up-to-date with details of the latest software vulnerabilities so they can strengthen their firewalls, e-mail systems and Web sites. ...more

Appeal floodgates to open on Oftel?

Competition decision marks Oftel as fair game for appeals on its rulings A decision to uphold a complaint from Freeserve on BT's marketing practices after Oftel had decided to take no action makes the regulator subject to future appeals against its rulings The case stems from a complaint made by Freeserve in May of this year, that BT Openworld had unfairly benefited from its relationship with BT Retail, which Oftel decided not to take up. However, Freeserve appealed to the Competition Commission Appeals Tribunal (CCAT). The CCAT has now decided that Oftel not taking up the case constitutes a decision that there was no competition infringement, and therefore that this is a decision against which Freeserve can appeal. ...more

Real attacks Apple QuickTime claims

A war of words breaks out over media player downloads. Apple's original claims that the number of QuickTime downloads exceeded those of rivals RealPlayer and RealOne have been described as 'misleading' by RealNetworks. Apple announced last week that there were 80 million downloads of QuickTime Player in 2001 as opposed to 75 million of RealPlayer and RealOne. ...more