France mulls tough copyright laws

France is considering new copyright laws that could make the ripping of CDs and the transferring of music to an MP3 player illegal. The country's parliament will consider extensions to the European Union Copyright Directive (EULA) that would criminalise numerous activities that could lead to copyright infringement. According to French opponents of the proposals these include creating your own compilations from a CD, extracting your favourite piece of music to listen to it on your computer, transferring it to a MP3 player, lending a CD to a friend, or reading a DVD with free software. ...more

Demon seeks further Whois controls

Nominet has denied allegations by Thus, owner of Demon Internet, that the Whois register of domain name owners may be in breach of data privacy regulations. Under new UK and European legislation, the .uk domain registrar Nominet is obliged to compile the Whois register, containing certain details about the domain name holders. ...more

BT plugs SDSL into 150 exchanges

BT has announced that following successful trials SDSL broadband services will be available at 150 exchanges in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffiled, York, Birmingham and 'key locations' throughout Scotland. SDSL provide equal bandwidth both up- and downstream and is aimed squarely at business customers, as the prices reflect: ?170 per month for 512Kbit/sec, ?230 for 1Mbps and ?345 for 2Mbps. The connection charge is ?595, not including a router. ...more

IBM unveils latest high-performance disk drive

With a speed of 15,000 revolutions per minute, IBM is claiming its new 36Gb disk drive - the Ultrastar 36Z15 - will be the best performer on the market. There are other 15K RPM models available, for example from Seagate Technology, but IBM asserts that with a media transfer rate of up to 647Mb/sec and a seek time down to 3.4 milliseconds the Ultrastar will be in pole position. ...more

Hacker gets access to largest reported loss in business history

We wouldn't normally write about the North American telco JDS Uniphase, but throw in massive business losses and a hacker gaining privileged early access to the horrific figures and you have an attention-grabbing story. The US/Canadian company has reported what is believed to be one of the biggest losses in business history - writing off $44.8bn from the value of companies it had acquired in recent years. ...more