IBM peps up its PHP support

IBM is putting its weight behind the popular PHP scripting language with a new educational suite and development environment. Its developerWorks online resource will now include technical articles, forums and tutorials for PHP, which IBM estimates to make up around 40 per cent of the programming language market. 'Our partnership with IBM further cements PHP as the language of choice for business-critical Web applications,' said Doron Gerstel, CEO and President for Zend. ...more

Content owners welcome fast Internet2 connections

The US record and movie industries have thrown their collective weight behind the next-generation, high-speed Internet2. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) will collaborate with the Internet2 Consortium to study 'advanced content distribution' and related digital rights management technologies. Internet2 CEO Douglas Van Houweling explained that the technology provides MPAA and RIAA an innovative test-bed for examining future networking and secure distribution capabilities not possible on today's commercial Internet. ...more

War to boost online spending

Forrester Research predicts consumer fears will mean shopping from the safety of a computer. The effect of war for the Internet is the subject of the latest research from Forrester. It predicts consumers will spend more time and money online as they clamour for immediate coverage of the war's progress while fear of terrorist retaliation will see them desert shopping centres for the safety of shopping online. ...more

Broadband usage overtakes dial-up says National Statistics Office

Broadband has eclipsed unmetered connections in the UK, according to the latest figures from the Government's National Statistics Office. Always-on connections rose to 31 per cent in July of this year, compared with 29 per cent for unmetered access. Broadband connections were up from 29. ...more

BlackICE Defender personal firewall open to attack

Denial of Service and remote access vulnerabilities for Windows 2000 and XP. Internet Security Systems has released a series of patches for its BlackICE range of security applications. A recently-discovered hole means that an attacker may crash or, at worst, take control of Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems running the BlackICE Defender personal firewall and intrusion detection system. ...more