Monday, January 8, 2001		Latest in IT world

Hackers to prevent hacking

Indian teenage computer hackers would play cyber copy to help the national Cyber Cop Committee tackle Internet crimes. According to Dewang Mehta, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies, a group of 19 hackers, all between 14 and 19 years of age would be used positively to create adequate firewalls to protect national Web sites. These hackers do not possess a formal engineering background but are innovative, creative and technically very sound with source codes. All of them attend schools and none of them have any criminal record. Last year, India passed a landmark digital law to crack down on Internet crimes and enable e-commerce. But vast sections of police and the bureaucracy in the country, where use of computers in governance is limited, have little knowledge of such crimes.

Human rights activists on Wednesday hailed a decision by Yahoo! to stamp out online auctions of Nazi artefacts, saying the move marked a dramatic climbdown by the US Internet giant following a lengthy legal battle. Yahoo! has announced that from January 10 it t would ban commerce in Nazi and Ku Klux Klan memorabilia on websites it hosted, saying that it did not want to profit from items that glorified or promoted hatred. League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA) and the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF) sued Yahoo.com over its auction sites selling items such as Nazi daggers and concentration camp uniforms, saying they broke local laws that forbid the sale or promotion of racist material. The Internet portal argued that the websites involved were aimed at the American market and said the U.S. First Amendment governing freedom of speech prevented it from shutting them. A French judge ruled against the California-based company in November and gave it three months to set up a filtering system to prevent websurfers in France from accessing the auctions. It said it would fine the firm 100,000 francs ($13,000) for each day it exceeded the deadline.

Global trends have shown that sales of desktop computers in retail stores and direct mail companies have declined. In the US approximately 24 percent sales drop was recorded in December, according to preliminary results released today by PC Data. This was the fifth consecutive month of negative comparisons and the second consecutive month of double-digit unit declines. In December, retail and direct mail channels sold slightly more than one million desktop PCs. For the year 2000, unit sales of PCs (sold through storefront retailers, direct mail resellers and Internet resellers) were down 0.8 percent to 10.1 million units.