internet.quillem.com

Tim Berners-Lee, recognised as the father of the Wolrd Wide Web, has been made a Knight Commander of the British Empire (sic), in a function on Friday.

Berners-Lee never cashed in on his invention, instead opting to work as an academic in the United States and run the not-for-profit industry standards-setting body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

He used the occasion to thank fellow Web collaborators. "Everyone in the Internet community should be recognized by this honor," he said in a statement released through the W3C.

"As the technology becomes even more powerful and available, using more kinds of devices, I hope we learn how to use it as a medium for working together, and resolving misunderstandings on every scale."

Reuters has this article.

Reuters is reporting on Microsoft's victory in it's case against a spammer targetting Windows and Hotmail users.

Among the orders issued by the judge in a summary judgment, Khoshnood and Pointcom were told to "refrain from including the domain names "hottmail.com," "wwwwindows.com," "microsoftc.com," "wwmsn.com," "bcentrals.com" and windowsupdatenow.com,"" according to court documents.

In one spam campaign, e-mail recipients got messages with statements such as "WINDOWS SECURITY WARNING!!" or "A VIRUS HAS BEEN DETECTED ON YOUR COMPUTER. IN ORDER FOR YOUR COMPUTER NOT TO CRASH YOU WILL NEED TO GO TO WINDOWSUPDATENOW.COM" in the subject line, Microsoft said in a statement.

Read the full story here.

The eminent physicist Stephen Hawking has conceded that information can escape from black holes after all.

Hawking has always stuck resolutely to the idea that once information goes into a black hole, there is no way out. Until now. When news@nature.com asked about his change of heart, Hawking smiled and wrote: "My views have evolved."

The answer lies in one of Hawking's greatest discoveries: that black holes slowly evaporate into space by losing particles from the very edge of the gravitational precipice at their rim, called Hawking radiation. The black hole eventually shrinks to a tiny kernel, at which point a growing torrent of radiation begins to leak out, potentially carrying the lost information with it.

Nature has this article.

Reuters reports that Aura, NASA's science satellite, has finally been launched.

Aura will fall into an orbit trailing another of NASA's Earth observation satellites, Aqua, which studies oceans and was launched in 2002. Four more U.S. and French satellites should be launched over the next several years and take their places between the Aqua and Aura, forming a flotilla of environmental monitors that NASA has dubbed the A-Train.

NASA has been trying to launch the satellite since Sunday but a variety of technical problems kept it on the pad. Thursday's launch was flawless, NASA said.

Click here for the full story.

Microsoft's Live Communication Server software, which offers instant messaging services in a corporate environment, is all set to include inter-operability between MSN IM, Yahoo! Messenger & AOL's Instant Messenger.

Microsoft will pay AOL and Yahoo a royalty for connecting to LCS. The companies declined to elaborate on whether these payments will be based on the number of LCS users connecting to AOL and Yahoo.

However, the three public IM clients will still not connect with one another for public users. Instead, it means corporations that use LCS will allow employees to chat with the Big Three public IM services as well.

News.com has this story.

A group operating under the moniker "The Source Code Club", is offering confidential source code to commercial software to willing buyers, assuring perfect anonymity in all dealings.

The group, which calls itself the Source Code Club, is offering what seems to be the stolen source code for an older version of Enterasys Networks' Dragon intrusion detection system and Napster's client and server software. The price: $16,000 and $10,000, respectively.

"If you are requesting something from a Fortune 100 company, there is a good chance that we might already have it," the group said. "If we do not have what you are looking for already, we will consider getting the said data for you, for a price. This could take our team up to two months to complete."

News.com is covering this story.

The final version of PHP 5 was released yesterday, and is currently available for download.

Some of the key features of PHP 5 include:

• The Zend Engine II
  with a new object model and dozens of new features.
• XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now
  focused around the excellent libxml2 library
  (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).
• A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as
  PHP objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa.
• A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services.
• A new MySQL extension named MySQLi for developers using MySQL 4.1 and later.
  This new extension includes an object-oriented interface in addition to
  a traditional interface; as well as support for many of MySQL's new features,
  such as prepared statements.
• SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite,
  please visit their website.
• Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access
  low-level socket operations on streams.
• And lots more...

Internet News is also carrying a story.

Microsoft founder, Bill Gates in an interview with a German newspaper predicted that DVD's would be obsolete in 10 years at the latest.

Asked what home entertainment would be like in the future, Gates said, "DVD technology would be obsolete in 10 years at the latest. If you consider that nowadays we have to carry around film and music on little silver discs and stick them in the computer, it's ridiculous."

He also gave a blink into his vision for mobile phones. "With cell phones, we will be able to read bar codes to retrieve information about a certain product. With a camera phone we will be able to translate a restaurant menu in a foreign country."

Click here for the full article.

ZDNet is carrying a report on news that hackers operating out of China have carried out attacks on South Korean servers using two virii (sic).

Two viruses, the Peep Trojan and Backdoor Revacc, have assaulted 278 computers in South Korea, and the attacks are spreading, the National Intelligence Agency (NIS) said.

Hackers have stolen 122 passwords for e-mail IDs owned by parliamentary staffers and lawmakers.

The extent of the damage is not yet known.

Click here for the full story.

Microsoft Corp. today issued two "critical" software updates for its Windows operating system, bringing to 12 the total number of critical software fixes the company has released so far in 2004 and putting the focus once again on the security of Microsoft's widely used Internet Explorer Web browser.

The two patches deal with security holes in the Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems. The first involves a flaw in "task scheduler," a program that allows Windows users to run applications at scheduled intervals. The other resides in Microsoft's built-in "HTML Help" function, which offers tips on using Windows programs.

Microsoft also released five other patches today, including a fix for the software it makes to power Web sites. Rated by the company as "important," the patch fixes a flaw that could allow hackers to seize control over Web sites powered by Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server version 4.

The Washington Post has this story.