Jeremy Kirk

The British government has proposed sharply increasing penalties for computer crimes that are taking a financial toll on U.K. businesses. The Police and Justice Bill would amend the Computer Misuse Act of 1990, a Home Office spokeswoman said Friday. It would increase the maximum penalty for unauthorized modification of a computer from five years to 10 years, a provision that would cover all forms of DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, she said.

With Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerrys in danger of a shutdown for patent violations, Microsoft Corp. is ready to exploit the opportunity with its own push e-mail offering. The timing of the court struggle could help Microsoft, which has been manoeuvering its own Direct Push Technology for e-mail for the Pocket PC and smartphone market. Microsoft says the technology should be available by the middle of the year.

The European Commission has given Microsoft Corp. an additional month to comply with a part of its antitrust ruling that requires Microsoft to provide information allowing competitors' server products to interoperate with its software. Microsoft now has until Feb. 15 to provide documentation that will allow non-Microsoft workgroup servers to interoperate smoothly with Windows clients and servers, a Commission spokeswoman said.

Computers and mobile devices using wireless networks are posing increasing threats to their organizations

Microsoft Corp. has issued a patch for a preliminary version of its Vista OS for the same graphics-rendering problem that raised concerns about current versions of the Windows OS earlier this month.

The wildly successful pixel-powered Web page of a British university student is coming under increasingly intense DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks trying to knock down the profitable brainstorm. Alex Tew, who created The Million Dollar Homepage to finance his schooling, has been selling pixels for US$1 each since September and auctioned the last 1,000 pixels earlier this week on eBay Inc. The technicolor site resembles a well-traveled suitcase covered with stickers, ranging from Che Guevara's image to a stop-smoking ad to a yellow smiley, all leading to paid links.

The U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) is defending its IT restructuring program after a new survey found doctors in clinics were not well informed and had little enthusiasm about it.

China's smart tag market is projected to grow around 33.2 per cent per year, buoyed by government support and promotion, according to a report released Wednesday by Analysys International.