Bad times keep rolling for Dell

Just a few days after recalling more than four million fire-hazard laptop batteries, Dell has announced results that show profits have fallen by more than half. The computer giant released its second quarter results for the period ending August 4 yesterday. Profits slumped to $502 million, which is 51 per cent lower than this time last year. ...more

McAfee signs up for Skype certification

McAfee has signed up to go Skype-certified, ensuring its products are officially approved for security communications made over the Net phone software. Skype chat and voice communications are already encrypted as part of the application. But McAfee software will also scan files sent using the file transfer function for malicious content. ...more

OSDL paper lambasts SCO as 'shyster'

The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) has published a paper by Eben Moglen, Columbia University law professor, that challenges both the evidence that SCO has publicly offered to validate its claims, and the legal basis on which it seeks to do so. In the paper, Moglen describes SCO's claims as 'irresponsibly inflated', its attacks on the GNU General Public Licence as 'absurd' and fully expects 'an attack on the umpire' as SCO's next move. At SCO's SCOForum 2003 show in Las Vegas this summer, company CEO Darl McBride offered a presentation that apparently showed two instances of where his investigatory team, using their pattern-matching techniques, had found code in Unix System V that had been misappropriated into the Linux kernel. ...more

Friends Reunited geared for telly debut

ITV is turning the Friends Reunited website that it bought last year into a TV show. For television, the site will be turned into a show called The School Run, where old schoolmates will be reunited to compete in a trivia quiz. It will be shown on the new ITV Play channel, a Freeview channel that will be broadcast on the Internet from next month, and later on cable and satellite. ...more

Blue Coat takes anti-spyware measures to the server level

As the amount of spyware - and the hype surrounding it - increases, companies are looking for ways to counter the threat of spyware beyond scanning and prevention at the user level. US-based Blue Coat says it has updated its proxy server solutions to come up with, what it claims to be, the industry's first anti-spyware measures which works at the server level. Spyware is a broad term that covers a range of software that secretly installs itself on a user's machine. ...more