May sees 380% rise in virus-carrying e-mails
The number of e-mail messages infected with viruses soared in May,
with an increase of more than 380% on April, according to managed
e-mail service provider Postini. It said it had intercepted nearly
184 million virus-ridden e-mails in May, with more than 75% of
these carrying the Sober worm.
IT experts called in to help Catalist
programme
The government is to sign up computer consultants for contracts
with Whitehall departments and agencies, the police, NHS, local
councils, education organisations and charities. The consultancy
required will range from one-off knowledge-based advice to the
delivery of extensive reports. The move is part of the Catalist
programme, an online purchasing system designed to replace the
government IT catalogues run by the Office of Government Commerce.
'Network storm' halts NY stock exchange
A "network storm" hit communications systems and forced the New
York Stock Exchange to halt trading last week. The exchange blamed
the shutdown last Wednesday, four minutes before the scheduled
close of business, on "a communications problem". Trading did not
resume until 9.30am the following day. New York Stock Exchange
chief executive John Thain said an error message was created and
then duplicated millions of times, overwhelming the network.
Intel unveils Yonah dual-core Pentium M
chip
Intel last week revealed details of Yonah, its first dual-core
version of the mobile Pentium M chip. The chip has twin processor
cores that increase notebook performance and help preserve battery
life by shutting down one core to cut power consumption. Yonah has
a shared memory cache for quicker memory access. Called Smart
Cache, it allows one processor core to access the chip's 2Mbyte
Level 2 cache to boost performance.
Lawson spends 246m on Swedish firm
Intentia
Lawson Software is to buy Swedish software firm Intentia
International in a 264m deal. The merged company will provide
business applications for the services, manufacturing, distribution
and maintenance sectors to 4,000 users in 40 countries.