Stories by Howard Dahdah

WorldCom Australia: 'Business as usual'

WorldCom Australia has stressed that services to its local customers will not be affected after the decision by its parent company to file for bankruptcy protection in a US court overnight.

PC/camera combo puts scientist on cloud nine

Building an infrared telescope that takes detailed shots of galaxies requires lots of time, planning and nous. And for the University of New South Wales' School of Physics such a project starts small: with a 100mm cube PC/104 486 Intel machine buried seven metres under Antarctic ice.

Gaffe gifts online traders unexpected booty

Some users of the CommSec share trading site Friday were asked to hand over unexpected profits made earlier in the day, after it was discovered shares for mining giant BHP Billiton were undersold.

CA stock plunges on report of accounting probe

For those of you who don't remember Iridium, its history (barring the past 12 months) has been an impressive disaster. Iridium was launched in 1992 and is a low earth orbiting system. Specifically, there are 66 satellites orbiting the earth at 780 km which provides voice/data coverage at any given time to anyone anywhere on the earth Iridium was initially backed by Motorola to the tune of $US4.4 billion but after all the marketing hoopla, and no customers -- largely because it found too few people willing to pay high prices (as much as $11 per minute) for global phone service as well as using clunky satellite phones -- the satellite company started nose-diving quickly and soon was out of pocket.

Iridium finds its element in the south

For those of you who don't remember Iridium, its history (barring the past 12 months) has been an impressive disaster. Iridium was launched in 1992 and is a low earth orbiting system. Specifically, there are 66 satellites orbiting the earth at 780 km which provides voice/data coverage at any given time to anyone anywhere on the earth Iridium was initially backed by Motorola to the tune of $US4.4 billion but after all the marketing hoopla, and no customers -- largely because it found too few people willing to pay high prices (as much as $11 per minute) for global phone service as well as using clunky satellite phones -- the satellite company started nose-diving quickly and soon was out of pocket.

Optus confirms hack

Optus has confirmed that police have arrested a former Optus employee who broke into an Optus program database.

DoS attack cripples BigPond network

Telstra's BigPond Cable and ADSL services were running smoothly on Monday after its broadband network was struck by a Denial of Service attack over the weekend.

SQL flaw uncovered: servers sniffed out by worm

Servers housing Microsoft SQL are being actively manipulated by a new worm to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against IRC servers and various other sites according to a posting on the Incidents.org Web site.

MySQL training comes to Sydney

As an indication of the growing popularity of MySQL, one of the more popular open source databases, MySQL AB, the company behind the MySQL database server, is holding its first MySQL training session in Sydney this week.

Win XP security fears raised

Despite Microsoft saying its Windows XP operating system is markedly more secure than previous efforts, IT security firms have warned users they will not have to wait long for the first XP-targeted virus attacks.

It's official: HP to buy Compaq

A press release just posted on the Hewlett-Packard Web site has confirmed earlier press reports stating the company has entered into a $47.5 billion (US$25 billion) agreement to acquire rival IT vendor Compaq.

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