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SPAM AND VIRUSES STATISTICS FEBRUARY 2004
Just as it has for the past few months, the spam volume inched up another 2 percentage points in February, accounting for 62 percent of e-mail messages, according to Brightmail’s Probe Network. The mounting volume can make e-mail users yearn for the “good old days” a year ago, when spam only comprised 42 percent of all messages. Valentine’s Day compounded the volume as spammers took advantage of the holiday to send more than 15 million unsolicited messages — compared to just one million in 2003. While filters offer a solution, roughly two-thirds of the more than 500 respondents to a survey conducted by Outsource Research Consulting, LLC for Goodmail Systems, Inc. experienced losing messages to spam filters. Source: ClickZ Stats, www.clickz.com/stats/big_picture/applications/article.php/3321901
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ROBOT TANKS BATTLE IN THURLES
The National RoboCode Final was held in Tipperary Institute’s Thurles campus on March 11th. During the past three months, college and university students have made perfect “battle bots” with on-board intelligence to manoeuvre and fire on screen. WIT programmers went on to win the battle with Deep7, a bot programmed by Bill Malone, Leigh Griffin and Patrick Ffrench. Their Java-powered electronic robot beat entrants from nine other colleges and universities during a day-long event. The winners walked away with a laptop, mobile phones, dogtags and a large trophy for their dominant performance.RoboCode is a game where teams use Java to program one or more robot tanks to battle in an arena against each other. The little graphical tanks need to be programmed to avoid being hit. They need to be smart enough to move around an arena without any kind of manual control. All of their intelligence is part of a single Java file. Details of upocoming competitions are at www.robocode.ie or pbourke@tippinst.ie or web: www.tippinst.ie.
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SUCCESSFUL IT PROJECTS WANTED FOR MEDIA PROFILE
Your successes in putting IT to work for your company deserve recognition. Now they can get the profile they deserve, thanks to a new initiative from the Irish technology publisher ENN.
ENN, producer of Ireland`s only IT and telecoms newswire at www.electricnews.net, publishes a range of e-mail newsletters under the ENN brand and for government and corporate clients. At ENN we are looking for Irish organisations who have successfully implemented an e-business or e-commerce strategy or project. Success stories will be considered for profile in our publications, and will be developed sensitively in line with the company`s own priorities (i.e. confidential or competitive information will not be disclosed).
There is no fee for this service, which provides an excellent opportunity for Irish organisations to receive well-deserved recognition for their use of technology. Application is also open to non-commercial government and charitable organisations. Companies interested in this opportunity should supply the information below and submit it to Sheila M. Averbuch, Editor, at sheila@electricnews.net or by post to ENN, 7 Lower Fitzwilliam St, Dublin 2. . More information is available from tel. 01 676 9995.
1. Company name
2. Irish city where based
3. Approx employee numbers
4. Sector (manufacturing/ internationally traded services preferred)
5. Brief description of your business
6. Is your e-business strategy at an early/medium/advanced stage?
7. Brief description of recent e-business/e-commerce implementation (i.e. website launch/relaunch; use of email; development of Web-based tools for staff or clients; development of IT strategy)
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MEDIA LAB SIGNS RESEARCH PARTNERSHIP WITH AOL
Media Lab Europe, European research partner of the world-renowned MIT Media Lab, has announced a research partner agreement with America Online, (AOL), the interactive services company. The three-year agreement provides AOL with access to new research developments, internal technical reports and unpublished research developed at Media Lab Europe. Established three years ago, Media Lab Europe is a not-for-profit international research and innovation Lab. Partners include AIB, America Online, BBC, BT, Business Lab, eircom, Ericsson, essilor, Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Highlands & Islands Enterprise (Scotland), Intel and the Portuguese Science Foundation.
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Euro Barometer: Relating to Business and Consumer E-Commerce
Download Eurobarometer in our resources/download section
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VIRUS WRITERS BATTLE IN WAR OF WORMS
The Internet has now become the basis of a war of words and worms between virus writers, who are unleashing virus variants to eat one another’s work and spread to more computers. The exchange among virus writers and the release of several variants taking part in the battle — different versions of the Netsky, Bagle and Mydoom worms — does not involve particularly damaging or malicious code, but it is causing chaos, according to virus fighters. The spate of variants has been a burden on the security community. “It’s a huge drain on our resources and on the energy of administrators managing networks and computers and securing the Internet,” Jimmy Kuo, McAfee, said. “It’s keeping us all at our terminals. It’s just a very draining affair.” Ken Dunham, iDefense director of malicious code, told TechNewsWorld that the variants — which he described as trivial to create — all are targeting easy-to-infect computers to try to outdo one another. Source: TechNewsWorld, www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/33042.html.
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VOIP GOES MAINSTREAM IN YAHOO-BT OFFERING
Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) recently announced an offering that will marry its instant messaging offering with British Telecommunications’ (www.bt.com) BT Communicator service, creating a call management package that integrates PC-to-phone calling, Internet call waiting and directory lookup with Yahoo’s Messenger service. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has been slow to catch on in the enterprise so far, but the popularity of instant messaging (IM) is fast changing the landscape. The Yahoo-BT offering blends the two technologies. Source: www.ectnews.com/perl/story/33107.html
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MICROSOFT, AOL, YAHOO, EARTHLINK SUE SPAMMERS
An alliance of leading Internet companies — including AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and EarthLink — has filed a wave of lawsuits against “hard-core” spammers under the new CAN-SPAM law that took effect in the US at the beginning of 2004. The companies said they have filed six lawsuits that name hundreds of alleged spammers as defendants under the law. The lawsuits were filed in four federal jurisdictions across the United States — California, Georgia, Virginia and Washington state — with each company taking the lead against certain groups of alleged spammers. The Web company executives said the alliance and legal actions are necessary because spam is the top consumer problem on the Internet. Source: Ecommerce Times, www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/33086.html
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DOES E-WORK WORK?
Have you ever wondered about working from home, or remote from the office? Has your company considered introducing e-working? There are many advantages to e-working including increased productivity, better personnel relations and economies of space and running costs. The Enterprise Ireland web site www.ework.ie/index.cfm is worth a visit. Its FAQ section will answer many of the questions employers and employees will have. There are many useful links also.
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ESPION WINS EXCLUSIVE PURESIGHT DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS
Security specialist, Espion, has announced it has the exclusive distribution rights in Ireland for the award-winning Internet Filtering Tool, PureSight. Previously branded under the Icongito name, Espion has succeeded in winning the Irish rights for the newly restructured company and its products. PureSight’s Internet content filtering system won the top accolade in the Internet Security category of SC Magazine’s annual ‘Best Of’ product roundup. The publication had already named PureSight a Best Buy” for Internet filtering earlier in 2003. Product details and free evaluation downloads of the PureSight line of Internet content filtering solutions are available on the PureSight website at: www.puresight.com.