Microsoft boss receives knighthood

Bill Gates received his honourary knighthood yesterday for his business skills and his charitable work. He will not be able to use the title 'Sir', as he is not British, but will suffix the letters KBE after his name. He arrived in London yesterday with his wife Melinda to receive an insignia, making him a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. ...more

And also today (17-July-2001), for the record...

Here, in brief, are some of the day's other stories. Microsoft bought out of Expedia USA Networks have paid $1.1bn for Microsoft's 75 per cent stake in the online travel company Expedia. ...more

IT contractor sacked from key UK e-government project

The British government has terminated an ?83 million contract with ITNet for the Datacentre Housing Project which was awarded less than a year ago. The project is seen as a cornerstone for the development of e-government. ITNet was responsible for providing the migration of the Government Gateway, an authentication and routing service; the Knowledge Network, a government information sharing facility; and DotP, a pan-government content management system, from the existing arrangements to a single, secure managed service. ...more

Time Warner sets aside $500 million legal fund over AOL Europe accounts

Time Warner has set aside a $500 million legal war chest to tackle pending Federal investigations into accounting practices related to AOL Europe in the run up to the merger with the ISP. The company says the $500 million is the company's best guess at the amounts needed to resolve these investigations. Time Warner says that some of this cash will be used to settle lawsuits brought by shareholders, although it admits that no official amount for such litigation has been earmarked because yet as it has no idea how much it is likely to come to. ...more

Microsoft site felled by denial of service attack

Microsoft has said its Web sites were down for 100 minutes on Friday due to a Denial of Service attack. It said that the attack had no 'association with any known vulnerability in Microsoft software' and the its Web sites are back up and running. It described the attack as 'a malicious flood of site requests that results in exponentially higher-than-normal traffic, and overwhelms the server capacity'. ...more