eWEEK EDITORS

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A congressional bill regarding online surveillance that is scheduled to be voted upon today was unexpectedly delayed Monday afternoon by an influential politician, pushing back passage of the antiterrorism bill by at least a week. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., chairman of the Houses Committee on the Judiciary, had planned to have his […]

WorldCom will get precious billing relationships with 83,000 customers and access to the midsize-business market if its $40 million offer for most of Rhythms NetConnections assets is accepted. “It can be a great deal at $40 million,” said Robert Saunders, senior analyst of Eastern Management Group, which covers telecommunications. The bid was disclosed in a […]

To help developers link Java applications to SQL Server 2000, Microsoft Corp. has licensed a downloadable software driver from connectivity specialist Merant International Ltd. Using the Java Database Connectivity Driver, built by Merants Morrisville, N.C., DataDirect division, Microsoft will offer the beta download for free, most likely by the end of this week, with the […]

Oracle believes it lost seven employees in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, but has declined to announce their names until families have a chance to confirm their fate. The employees were believed to be visiting customers or prospects who were tenants of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. Oracle maintains no […]

Trying to anticipate enterprise storage management needs ahead of the end-user demand, CommVault Systems Inc. will announce a new version of its flagship software early next month, CEO Bob Hammer said today. The software, Galaxy 3.7, is “the last phase. Its the last major release of our data protection strategy,” Hammer said. The new features […]

A federal bankruptcy judge in Delaware will hold a hearing tomorrow to determine whether ICG Communications should be allowed to pay up to $500,000 to cover due diligence costs of a potential new lender. Judge Peter J. Walsh will hear arguments that ICG should reimburse the costs of investigating the companys financial condition, in order […]

In the high-end Unix server market, size matters, and market leader Sun Microsystems Inc. today unveiled its biggest, most powerful system to date, the 106-processor Sun Fire 15K. Designed to handle massive amounts of transactions or computations simultaneously, the Palo Alto, Calif., company is touting the server not only as the successor to its top-end […]

In a physical attack, disabling communications in the U.S. would be a frightfully simple task because both voice and data traffic move through as few as four buildings in some cities, and many are far less secure than they probably should be. Take out the main central office, cable headend, telecom hotel and carrier-neutral peering […]

The most serious threat to wireless networks is call volume. Wireless architecture has enough redundancies built in that a failure along any point wouldnt significantly cripple an entire network. If one cellular base station or antenna – a node of the network that receives calls – were brought down, wireless phone and network devices would […]

By far the most unstable, vulnerable and insecure portion of any network today is the loose agglomeration of systems that hang off the edge of the Internet. The millions of desktop PCs and servers that connect to the Internet and corporate data networks are susceptible to a long – and constantly growing – list of […]