Monday, September 11, 2000		Latest in IT world

Don't click mouse — avoid Donald Duck

Donald Duck is a yet another virus originating from Philippines. Earlier deadly love bug originated from Philippines and shook the world by paralysing a number of computers. According to the National Infrastructure Protection Centre (NIPC), the new virus is named "Donald Duck" based on the popular Disney character, and comes in the form of e-mail attachment in the computer with the subject line "erap estrada"--the nickname of Philippine president Joseph Estrada. This is actually a Trojan, which activates DonaldD.trojan on opening the attachment. The damage caused by this virus is similar to the Lovebug as it can collect the user names and passwords from the computer to send unsolicited e-mails. Currently this Trojan horse is active mainly in the Philippines and is considered to be a low threat to the world. However, experts have asked computer users to exercise caution while accepting mails with the aforesaid subject line or file names using Disney like characters.

World leaders in the laptop market, IBM and Dell Computers, are in a hurry to launch their wireless laptop in the market. After the Apple's launch, this would be first Windows-based wireless laptop to be offered by any laptop manufacturer. It is worth mentioning here that Apple computers launched this technology on its Mac notebooks more than a year ago at a very attractive price. However, the price tag of Dell or IBM is likely to be higher than the Apple's Mac. As per the reports, Dell and IBM will not be competing against each other in this segment, as both of them want a piece of one of Apple's core markets, i.e. education. Dell is focusing more on the corporate and education markets; while IBM will concentrate more on consumers, small businesses and schools. IBM plans to market its ThinkPad I series notebooks with fully integrated wireless networking for connecting to computer networks or the Internet without cables by the end of October. Both IBM and Dell will use integrated wireless networking, using an internal antenna and IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (local area network) component to connect over the air at 11megabits per second.

Security bug in Internet Explorer

Microsoft is once again under the focus over a security bug in its Internet Explorer. The company is investigating security vulnerability in its Internet Explorer browser, which could have an impact on computers by allowing access to attackers to access some files. This one is the latest bug to come into picture, which involves the use of Web scripting languages, like Java script, to attack the browsers' security parameters.