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Virus Creator Gets 20 Months
He let loose a computer virus that did $80 million in damage, and now David Smith will spend the next 20 months in jail for it.
Smith, who created the Melissa virus, pleaded guilty to state and federal charges in 1999 and was sentenced last week for what he called a “colossal mistake.”
The virus, released in March 1999, infected computers via an e-mail marked as an “important message.” The virus created a global disruption of e-mail systems.
Ground Control to Palm M125
When aptly named South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth took off for space late last month as a passenger aboard the Russian Soyuz rocket, he carried with him clothes, toiletries—and a Palm m125 handheld device.
The m125 is the only handheld device approved by the Russian space program for space trips aboard the Soyuz rocket, according to Palm.
The handheld will play a key role in Shuttleworth keeping up with his schedule, thanks to an application for the device created by a South African company called Rafale.
The application enables the Moscow mission control room to send Shuttleworth schedule updates via e-mail. He then can save the information to his laptop and synchronize it to his m125.
.us Domain at Center of Debate
The buying and selling of internet domain names has always been contentious. Now several public interest groups are angry at the way thousands of .us domain names have been sold.
The Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and the Media Access Project sent a letter last week to Congress complaining that various names—including churches.us, charities.us, music.us and freespeech.us—have been sold by Neustar with little or no regard for whether they would be used responsibly.
Neustar, which was tapped last year to oversee the .us domain, said it has held back thousands of names but that it didnt want to be too restrictive.
The groups criticized the way Neustar administered the process, saying the public was not kept informed about it.