Bill Gates, Time Magazine “Person of the Year”
Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, were named Time Magazine “Persons of the Year”. He was joined in this honor with Irish rocker Bono-all being named for being “Good Samaritans” who made a difference.
The Return of the Commodore?
A Dutch consumer media company is hoping it can tap the power of the VIC 20, the PET and the Commodore 64 to launch a new wave of products, including a home media center device and a portable GPS (Global Positioning System) unit and media player. They’re talking about Resurrecting Commodore.” From the article: “Commodore is far from the first company to try to revive a once-popular tech brand. The Amiga, Commodore’s onetime PC brand, has had its own decades-long history as fans tried to preserve both the computer’s operating system and brand despite the lack of strong corporate backing.
“Dasher” Worm Brings Christmas Keylogger
A worm called ‘Dasher‘ is exploiting a flaw in Windows that Microsoft issued a patch for in October, dropping keyloggers on infected machines, according to F-Secure. The SANS Internet Storm Center warned earlier this week about the weird traffic generated by the first version of this worm, which apparently was crippled by programming errors. Washingtonpost.com has some information that indicates the worm appears to have originated in China. It appears from the Microsoft advisory that Dasher is a threat mainly to Windows 2000 users, although it could impact Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP users who aren’t running SP2.
Blog Services Outgrow Their Data Centers
The growth of the blogosphere is straining the infrastructure at popular service providers. TypePad is having serious problems again today, the latest in a series of outages and malfunctions as it switches to a larger facility. Bloglines is also apologizing for performance problems, and says it too will move to a larger data center to accommodate growth. There’s been no sign of a mass migration from either service. Are bloggers and blog readers willing to accept rocky performance from popular services?
Google To Purchase Stake In AOL For $1 Billion
It appears that Google may be on the verge of purchasing a 5% stake in AOL.” From the article: “A tie-up with Google would make sense. Time Warner has been losing out online to rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo. For its part, Google may be interested in getting access to AOL’s e-mail and instant messaging service. It would strengthen Google’s hand against rivals Yahoo and Microsoft, who have well-established webmail and instant messaging services. Google is a relative newcomer to this area with Gmail and Googletalk.