Monday, October 8, 2001		Newsscape

A hacker had rather easily entered Yahoo! news pages and inserted phoney quotes and wrong information on stories, according to AP. The hacker, 20-year-old Adrian Lamo of San Francisco, said he wanted to show Yahoo! that it needed to fix what he considered a basic mistake in its network set-up. Lamo said he was troubled by how easily he got access to Yahoo!’s news pages. He exploited a flaw that let its corporate network be tricked into thinking it was communicating with an internal computer. Lamo tinkered with an August 23 story by the Reuters news agency about Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian computer programmer charged with circumventing copyrights on Adobe Systems Inc. software. The converted piece said Sklyarov could face death penalty if convicted (the real maximum is five years in prison), and included a fake quote from Attorney General John Ashcroft. Lamo alerted Yahoo! to what he had done by telling SecurityFocus.com, which reported the hacking last week. Reuters spokeswoman Nancy Bobrowitz said Yahoo! has given the agency "strong assurances" that its news pages could not be hacked again.

China’s software industry is expected to grow to $30 billion over the next four years, mainly driven by the domestic demand, an ESC report said. Between 2001-2005, the Chinese software industry will grow to $30 billion and the export target is one billion dollar, according to a report by Electronics and Computers Software Export Promotion Council as reported by PTI. Of the total domestic market, the contribution of the software industry will be around 60 per cent, it said. The Chinese software industry is primarily catering to the growing demands from the 10 million enterprises for digitalisation, the report said, adding software market and computer penetration grew at 27.7 and 29.92 per cent respectively during 1996-2000."This growth was mainly possible by increased demand for computer applications from many industries like finance, insurance, tax, commerce, water resources, power, railways and aviation", it said.

Net ID system

Sun Microsystems and 32 technology, communications, financial and other companies are launching a project for the Internet identification and better Web commerce, Sun said last week, according to The Times of India. Microsoft, which said last week it would expand its own Passport Net identification system to other enterprises, is in talks to join the alliance, Marge Breya, the chief marketing officer of Sun’s iPlanet E-Commerce group, said in a telephone interview. Scott McNealy, chief executive of Sun, said in a conference call launching the project that Internet services provider America Online had also been invited to join.

CEBIT 2002, one of the world’s biggest infocommunications exhibitions, will showcase the latest technology on the Internet, mobile telephone and e-commerce when it is held in Hanover, Germany, in March next year, The Straits Times reported.The exhibition, which is due to take up floor space equivalent to about 100 football fields, will involve more than 8,300 exhibitors. Mr Jorg Schomburg, managing director of Deutsche Messe AG, the show’s organiser, said: ‘For many years, the Asian infocomm industry has used CeBIT to access world markets and to gain an insight into the latest market trends. Speaking to reporters here, he noted that 1,058 exhibitors from the Pacific Rim region would be participating in the event, which runs from March 13 to 20.