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More Good Economic News

In our newsletter last night, we reported Online advertising was up for the fourth quarter in a row, with the third quarter showing 20 percent growth compared to the same period last year, and IT spending to increase next year.

The Register today reports that strong consumer demand for laptop PCs, as well as an upsurge in demand from the public sector, has driven demand for a record 152 million PCs in 2003. This is 8.8 per cent higher than 2000, the previous highest year for PC shipments.

Hooray!

 

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Kazaa Lite shut down by Kazaa

Sharman Networks, who made Kazaa, the most popular P2P file sharing app since Napster, have shut down Kazaa Lite - a copy of its program that removes all the ads, pop-ups and the spyware. Hilariously, Sharman Networks have done this because Kazaa Lite infringes their copyright.

Pot. Kettle.

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Google Upsets Webmasters

Many people are complaining that Google has stepped on their toes after the last round of the Google dance, reports the BBC. Some companies that occupied a place in the coveted top ten searches on a keyword (that is, those found on the first page of a Google search) are finding themselves downgraded. of course, others are finding themselves significantly upgraded, too...

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Accessible Website Awards

The BBC reports that six websites have been given a Visionary Design Award for their efforts to make them easily accessible for people with sight problems.

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November 2003 Virus Chart

According to MessageLabs the Swen virus and the MiMail viruses are at the top. These viruses use malicious code to do real damage.

Read all about it here.

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Macromedia announces "Flex"

Macromedia will share on Monday more details of its plan to get Java developers working with its Flash format. Flex will let J2EE developers create Flash applications using standard, text-based development tools, rather than the complex design-focused tools Macromedia sells, reports Cnet.

Just like the badly-named Flash Professional MX2004 is not aimed at the tradtionional core Pro audience Flash animators, but at people more likely to come from a VB or programming background, Flex is Macromedia's continuing attempt to broaden the base of Flash developers away from "eye-candy" and to real on-line applications.

Here's the official Macromedia press release.

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New virus disguised as PayPal e-mail

Do not open the attachement!

The virus appears as an attachment--"www.paypal.com.scr"--to an e-mail that claims to be from PayPal.

"PayPal would like to inform you about some important information regarding your PayPal account," the message reads. "This account, which is associated with the email address will be expiring within five business days. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause, but this is occurring because all of our customers are required to update their account settings with their personal information. We are taking these actions because we are implementing a new security policy on our website to insure everyone's absolute privacy."

When you open the e-mail attachment, a window appears bearing the PayPal logo and asking for credit card information. The virus stores any information provided by the victim in a file called "ppinfo.sys" and the file is sent to four e-mail addresses stored in the program.

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Bug Fixes for Flash MX 2004 available

Macromedia have released a free bug fix updater for Flash MX 2004 which has "34 crash bugs found and fixed! ". The cynical might wonder why it was ever shipped with that many bugs; the pragmatic will install the patch and breathe a sigh of relief.

Let's hope there's one for Dreamweaver soon .....

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Run multiple versions of IE/ Win for testing

The big trouble with testing your web sites for backwards compatibility has always been that you can't install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on Windows. Until now! Joe Maddalone has discovered how to run different versions of IE on the same windows box in order to test. And here's downloadable Internet Explorer versions 3, 4 and 5.

Hooray for clever people!

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It's not just Windows with security flaws..

An unknown intruder attempted to insert a Trojan horse program into the code of the next version of the Linux kernel, stored at a publicly accessible database, reports ZDNet. Meanwhile, security research firm @stake is warning Macintosh users about three security problems with the Mac OS X 10.2.8 and previous versions, reports Security Pipeline magazine. Read More