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Compaq deal under gun
Proxicom is telling Compaq to bulk up its offer to buy the Internet services company or take a hike.
Late last month, Compaq made a bid to buy the troubled company for $266 million. However, last week, Proxicom notified Compaq that it had re-ceived a “superior proposal” from another company, Dimension Data Hold-ings, of Johannesburg, South Africa. Dimension is offering to buy Proxicom for about $347 million. Compaq had until 5 p.m. edt Monday to make a counteroffer, or Proxicom was to accept Dimensions deal. If the Dimension offer was accepted, then Com-paq would receive a $10 million termination fee.
Homepage sweeps globe
Despite the warnings about e-mail attachments carrying .vbs suffixes, many computer users still cant resist the temptation to open them.
That was illustrated last week as another virus-called the Homepage vi-rus and patterned after the Anna Kournikova worm and the Love Bug be-fore it-swept through the United States, Europe and Asia. A day after it was detected, one virus-tracking company had stopped more than 7,600 copies.
Homepage uses a Visual Basic script worm that, when executed, accesses a users Microsoft Outlook address book and sends itself to all the ad-dresses it can find. It also opens a pornographic Web page.
Jury tells Rambus: Pay
A federal jury in Virginia last week found Rambus guilty of fraud in claiming rights to the memory technology synchronous dynamic RAM and ordered it to pay $3.5 million to Infineon Technologies. The court had dismissed Rambus claims that Infineon infringed on pat-ents related to dynamic RAM. Infineon countersued, saying Rambus based its patents on information from industry meetings to develop open standards.