Monday, March 26, 2001		Latest in IT world

School dropout targets celebrities

THE police accused a restaurant worker of breaching bank accounts and credit card reports of America’s rich and famous in a case reported to be the largest theft of identities in Internet history. High-school dropout Abraham Abdallah, 32, broke into accounts of 217 people listed in Forbes magazine, mainly by using the Internet and credit-reporting agencies, New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said. The New York Post said those affected included Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, director Steven Spielberg, CNN founder Ted Turner, financiers George Soros and Warren Buffett, Disney CEO Michael Eisner, media mogul Oprah Winfrey and Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone.

India’s most venerable industrial group, Tata, is planning to defy the gloom that has enveloped technology stocks by floating its successful software wing. The company is considering making an initial public offering for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Asia’s largest software exporter. The move would see Tata selling a 10 per cent stake in the TCS. The new firm’s shares would be simultaneously listed in the local and US Nasdaq markets, a source that asked not to be identified said. The Tatas have always maintained they were in no hurry to give TCS a public listing. The issue is expected to hit the markets in the second half of this year. Before that, the Tata group will spin TCS into a separate company. Analysts said the offering would enhance TCS image abroad, improve growth prospects and provide another way of compensating key staff through stock options.

In one of the largest technology unveilings Sun Microsystems, Inc introduced the highly anticipated Sun Fire servers. The new systems redefine the profile of traditional midrange servers and challenge the conventional economics of uptime with prices that start below $ 75,000. With this new arsenal of systems, Sun increases the competitive pressure on HP, IBM and Compaq and is poised to widen its existing market share gap and capture more of the $60 billion server market. Called mid-frame servers because they incorporate features from the traditional mainframe — long known for robust features that made it highly reliable, but extremely expensive — the four new systems, available now, rewrite the rules for this class of system. The new Sun Fire servers are designed to deliver unprecedented levels of system availability, real-world application performance, flexibility and investment protection in a server line.

— Agencies