Half-price no frills

BT Retail has cut the start-up price of its 'no frills' broadband offering to just ?30, until 20 September. No frills is a wires-only service; BT Retail, unlike most other ISPs, leaves the customer free to buy their own modem or router. On top of the start-up fee, which is half the normal price, BT retail charges ?27 per month, making it cheaper than AOL, BT Openworld and Freeserve, though not as cheap as many of the smaller ISPs. ...more

Microsoft and Yahoo! to agree on IM chat

Microsoft and Yahoo! have struck a deal to link their free instant messaging services together, sources say. An announcement about the joint venture, which will allow MSN and Yahoo! Messenger users to communicate directly for the first time, is expected to be made The Wall Street Journal reports. In the past people using Yahoo! Messenger could only communicate with other Yahoo! users and not with instant messengers using MSN or other software. ...more

IBM in the process of getting smaller

IBM is taking the plunge along with Sony and Toshiba to start development on a processor based on a sub 0.10micron process, which could bring systems more powerful than Deep Blue to the home. The companies have committed more than $400m towards the project, which aims to produce a teraflop-class consumer CPU over the next five years. ...more

DDR output tops SDRAM for first time

DDR has officially surpassed SDRAM in output for the first time, according to DRAMeXchange's global September DRAM shipment statistics released on 1 October. September DDR output worldwide totalled 172.44 million of 128Mbit-equivalent die and took a market share of 49. ...more

Word suffers highly critical flaw

A buffer-overflow vulnerability has been detected in Microsoft Word, according to a new advisory issued by Secunia. Denial of service attacks are possible due to an input validation error when processing documents. The potential buffer overflow, reports Secunia, can cause the process to crash when the user opens a specially crafted document. ...more