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TECH UPDATE
Solaris 9 for Intel launched
Sun Microsystems on Feb 6 disclosed the availability of its Solaris 9 operating system for Intel servers. The company introduced the Solaris 9 x86 Platform Edition, designed to compete with Windows servers.
Previous versions of Solaris x86 have more than 1.1 million registered licenses, Sun said. The new version includes SunScreen 3.2 software firewall, Sun One Directory Server, IPQoS services for bandwidth management, and management tools.
The software is free for noncommercial usage; pricing starts at $99 for commercial use.
Linux consortium
Several companies have joined to launch a consortium to promote Linux for desktop computers, a significant expansion for an operating system that today fits more comfortably on servers. The consortium’s goal will be to raise awareness of desktop Linux and to speed its adoption.
With the growing interest in Linux, Microsoft is warning that the success of the open-source movement could hurt its sales, potentially forcing the software giant to cut prices and sacrifice both revenue and profits.
IE and XP flaws disclosed
Microsoft is asking users of Internet Explorer and Windows XP to patch security holes.
Microsoft has rated the Internet Explorer vulnerability “critical”. The flaw, which affects versions 5.01, 5.5, and 6.0, requires a web browser to visit a website designed to exploit the flaw. If that happens, operators of the site could steal data from or gain control of the user’s system.
Microsoft has released a cumulative patch that’s available at
technet/treeview/?url=/technet/security/bulletin/ms03-004.asp.
A second flaw, found in Windows XP, and deemed “important” by Microsoft, resides in the Windows Redirector software, which supports access to both remote and local files. The flaw could let an attacker run potentially malicious software or crash the system.
According to Microsoft, this flaw can’t be used by attackers to remotely attack the system. A patch is available at
Goodbye to floppy drives
In what may be the wave of the future, Dell Computer Corp said goodbye to the past when it announced it would stop making floppy disk drives standard equipment on its higher end desktop personal computers.
Austin, Texas-based Dell, the No. 2 personal computer maker, said floppy drives had been overtaken by technologies offering greater storage capacity and would become an option on its Dimension 8250 models.
Other Dell models may lose the floppy by end of the year, depending on customer response, Dell spokesman Lionel Menchaca said.
He said the decision was made because technologies such as USB flash memory offer much more storage capacity than floppies and are more useful with today’s mega-memory computers.
“You insert it right into the USB port, and your computer reads it just like it would read a floppy drive. The benefit is, you’ve got much more capacity — instead of just 1.44 megabytes, at the low end you have 16 megabytes.”
The floppy drive has been the most widely used method of transferring data between computers since the dawn of the computer age.
Dell says the floppy will first be phased out on higher end computers because those users are more likely to be utilizing flash memory, portable hard drives, and other alternative portable storage devices.
Insurance for e-commerce
Do you assume that your general liability insurance covers your online deals? You are wrong! It doesn’t. That’s why some insurance companies have started offering liability protection to financial institutions that conduct e-commerce.
A US-based insurance company offers this insurance under its new CyberSecurity liability policy. Banks, insurance companies, investment firms, credit unions, and other financial institutions are protected from personal-injury and advertising-injury claims resulting from cyber activities, filling many gaps in general-liability products.
The policy also can provide coverage for conduit injury, including system security failures that result in harm to customers’ or other third-party systems. Other areas of liability protection include trademark, copyright and intellectual property infringement; injury to reputations, including invasion of privacy; and disclosure injury, including system security failures that result in dissemination of private information on the internet. — Dawn ScienceDotcom Report
