23-02-2002 Essential news of the week

Brought neatly together and presented on a plate, here is a roundup of some of the week's main news stories from the world of IT. Nikon extends digicam range Oftel calls for unmetered Internet price cut The Cornish way to rural broadband Symbian OS 7.0, building for 3G Be joins Microsoft court queue Instant Messaging, courtesy of a Genie Microsoft ordered to release Windows code HP's new office kits HP and Compaq - the internal wrangles continue Don't forget, we welcome your comments. ...more

One in five adults 'not considered using the Internet'

The latest figures from National Statistics reveal that a core group of UK adults have no interest in going online. The April 2003 National Statistics Omnibus Survey reports on adult use of the Net in the three months from January to March 2003. While general use is up 5 per cent - 60 per cent of us claim to have accessed the Internet, with 54 per cent having done so at least once during the three months prior to the interview, and 17 per cent of households use a broadband connection - there remained a stubborn 40 per cent without modem. ...more

IE rivals stride ahead in browser stakes

Safari and Firefox both doubled their share of global browser usage during 2005, although Internet Explorer remains overwhelmingly dominant. According to the December 2005 figures from NetApplications, Safari accounted for three per cent of Web usage compared to 1.56 per cent a year earlier. ...more

Wanted: dead or alive

A website is offering a $25,000 (?17,000) bounty on a malicious hacker who shutdown its website for two days. Online auction website BidBay is putting up the bounty for information leading to the conviction of the hacker who caused the damage. The company believes that it was not the target of the attack as the intruders did an aggressive port-scan that rendered the service unavailable. ...more

Yahoo! gets personal with DRM-free download

Yahoo! is hoping that personalised versions of the new Jessica Simpson single will herald the introduction of DRM-free music downloads. The US-only service is offering Simpson's single as an MP3 file stripped of any copy protection, into which the buyer can choose to have their name inserted, provided that it is on the expanding list. For the privilege of personalisation, Yahoo! is charging $1,99, twice what you might expect to pay for a DRM-restricted, bog-standard download, but according to Yahoo! Music's Ian Rogers that is not the point. ...more