Monday, December 11, 2000		Latest in IT world

Babygear.com closes down

Babygear.com, a popular e-tail store, has also gone down in the history of dot.com casualties as it succumbed under financial burdens. The list of dot.com disasters is increasing and swelling to a horrifying number. Babygear.com posted a bleak note on its Web site on Tuesday night, notifying customers that it has shuttered its business and filed for bankruptcy protection. This was a venture of media site iVillage, which sold its iBaby e-commerce to Babygear in July and took a stake in the company. The failure of this site has shaken the confidence of many customers as they claim that Babygear.com owes them either refund or fulfilment of their orders. Besides Babygear, there are many other popular sites also which have laid off employees and reduced the scale of operations during the past few weeks under heavy financial burden, some of them having even closed down.

Major anti-virus companies have issued a fresh warning on a Shockwave virus, which is spreading fast in the USA. Though this virus was detected in Europe and was spreading slowly, it has now become aggressive in the USA. This is an e-mail virus that reaches a computer as an attachment and is concealed in a Net movie. The virus has taken its toll on several companies in the USA and anti-virus companies have pegged the risk associated with this virus at from medium to high. Though the virus, called "Creative," does not carry any destructive payload, it automatically e-mails itself to all addresses present in the address book of the PC that has been attacked. Like other viruses that have been discovered recently, this virus, too, attacks Microsoft Outlook Express and also adds itself in the Windows operating system Start menu. . Anti-virus companies have advised computer users not to open any e-mail that comes with the header "A great Shockwave flash movie," referring to a popular Internet animation format. Creative also has several aliases, including Prolin, Shockwave, W32/Prolin@mm, TROJ_SHOCKWAVE and TROJ_PROLIN. Prolin is short for "Pro-LINUX," so called because the virus inserts harmless messages on victim computers, plugging the open-source operating system.

The concept of wireless networking is fast gaining popularity world over. After IBM, Dell and HP, now Compaq Computer has announced the first modules for adding wireless capabilities to Armada notebooks. The Compaq has launched the notebook with a feature called Multiport, which will be approximately six inches long and less than an inch thick and would be situated on the exterior of the case to accommodate plug-in modules. The new wireless feature will have technology from Intel and Ericsson and will add two hot wireless technologies — 802.11B wireless networking and Bluetooth — to the Armada range of Compaq notebooks. These notebooks will be top-end products, with fast network data access upto 11 megabytes per second without the need for wires or cables.