Betfair issues DDoS rallying call

The gambling industry has warned that businesses must work more closely with ISPs to prevent hackers from launching successful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against websites. Rorie Devine, chief technology officer at online gambling group Betfair told delegates at a conference in London that businesses need to ensure co-operation with ISPs to successfully combat attacks designed to take websites offline. Most DDoS attacks are caused by hackers using botnets, large numbers of compromised computers used to send massive amounts of data to overwhelm a webserver. ...more

Nintendo online future still shaky

Online gaming is set to be 'fairly niche for a long time' - that's the damning verdict of Nintendo's US vice president of corporate affairs Perrin Kaplan, speaking at a press event in Las Vegas recently. Kaplan reiterated Nintendo's stance, namely that online gaming, so enthusiastically seized upon by Sony and Microsoft, does not appeal to a wide enough audience to make for a profitable business model. 'I think some of our interests instead lie in building community on the wireless play front as opposed to the online one,' said Kaplan, when questioned on the future of online games. ...more

LaCie announces faster back-ups

LaCie has announced a new AIT tape drive capable of backing-up or archiving 200Gb of compressed data onto one tape. The AIT3 drives have twice the capacity of existing AIT2 drives and double the transfer rate, reaching a maximum of 24Mb per second. The drives are back-compatible with AIT1 and AIT2 media, so no existing back-ups will be redundant. ...more

First nationwide 'fast' ADSL services announced

Internet Central has announced the UK's first 1Mbit and 2Mbit broadband services available through BT's 1100+ ADSL-enabled exchanges. The Midlands-based ISP is offering the wires-only ADSL connections in four flavours, starting at ?29.99 per month for 1Mbit and ?39. ...more

BT's 3G roll out delayed till Autumn

BT's proposed launch of a 3G mobile-phone network on the Isle of Man will be delayed till late summer or early Autumn, the company said today. The project, to be conducted with BT's wholly-owned subsidiary Manx Telecom as well as Siemens and NEC, was to have been the first 3G roll-out in the world when it launched this month. It may still be, if it manages to beat NTT DoCoMo's roll-out in the Autumn. ...more