US spammer faces years in the slammer

One American bulk-emailer has fallen foul of new laws to prevent the use of spam. Howard Carmack is the first to face charges under New York state's new identity theft laws, reports Reuters. Dubbed the 'Buffalo spammer', Carmack has just been found guilty on 14 counts of identity theft and forgery. ...more

Gates announces Media2Go at CES

Bill Gates unveils Microsoft's venture into portable media players at his CES keynote with the Media2Go device platform. Working together with Intel, who were already working on a PVP (Personal Video Player), a Media2Go device sports WindowsCE embedded operating system, Intel's XScale processors (as used in many PocketPC devices), a 4in LCD screen and a 20Gb hard drive. Using Microsoft's Sync & Go software, users will be able to set up the device to grab selected video, audio and image files, including favourite TV programs, from an XP-based PC. ...more

DOM Level 2 Becomes a W3C Recommendation

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) yesterday released the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 specification as a Recommendation. It might sound a bit of a mouthful, but the Document Object Model is the basis for presenting and accessing electronic document data. It provides a standard API (Applications Programming Interface) for manipulating documents and data through programming languages such as Java or VB. ...more

Xbox console gets hard

It looks as if Microsoft's Sony-busting console, the Xbox, is to get a hardware upgrade in the form of a 20Gb hard disk drive. Western Digital has been awarded a multiyear contract to supply drives for the console and will beginning shipping to Microsoft in June 2001. The drive will be a single-platter, 3. ...more

China to promote peer-to-peer

The Chinese government has announced an initiative to promote commercial exploitation of peer-to-peer technologies. The P2P Application Promotion Alliance has been set up by the Internet Society of China and will encourage the development of P2P technologies, regulate their use and protect intellectual property rights. In other words, no file sharing. ...more