Offender system gets late release date
There has been a delay in the delivery of a common national IT
system designed to make it easier for the prison and probation
services to assess the risk that offenders pose to the public. The
Electronic Offender Assessment System was originally due to be up
and running last March, but the Home Office has said it will not be
delivered until autumn 2005 at the earliest, following problems
with the pilot project and the need to make changes to support new
sentencing guidelines.
Spam rises by 40% to make up 90% of e-mail
Spam traffic has risen by 40% over the last three months, an
analysis by Email Systems has revealed. Spam accounts for just
under 90% of e-mail traffic, the security supplier said. Forty per
cent of spam e-mails offer medical products, and 20% are
pornographic. The proportion of scam e-mails fell from 7.5% to 4%
in January and spams offering financial services fell from 20% in
December to 10% in January.
ITputs trust in XMLbut business remains cool
Nearly 60% of UK IT managers are using the XML data exchange
standard, according to a Microsoft survey. In addition, 71% of the
126 IT directors questioned said they were using XML technology as
part of web-based services. However, the survey also found that
many managers in the general business are unaware of XML or are
sceptical about its benefits.
HP puts the squeeze on business downtime
Hewlett-Packard has added three products to its Storageworks
business continuity software line to improve the way its midrange
storage systems react to system failures. The data replication and
automatic failover features of HP's new Metrocluster,
Continentalcluster and Storageworks Cluster Extension EVA products
will enable HP-UX and Windows users to reduce downtime, HP
said.
Users get test centres for hybrid
processors
Microsoft technology centres will now let
users assess migrating applications to hybrid 32-bit and 64-bit
systems through a tie-up with AMD and HP. Under the agreement, the
technology centres will offer users a way to migrate, test and
validate 64-bit applications using AMD Opteron-powered HP Proliant
DL145 and DL585 servers.