Monday, April 9, 2001		Latest in IT world

$ 65-m fine for cyber usurping

A federal judge has awarded $65 million to an entrepreneur whose Internet domain name, "sex.com" was usurped by an online pornographer, marking the largest verdict ever in a cyber-squatting case. The US District Judge James Ware found Stephen Cohen liable for fraud and forgery in the five-year battle over sex.com, hitting him for $ 40 million in compensation for lost profits and an additional $ 25 million in punitive damages. Ware’s order also ordered that a warrant issued for Cohen’s arrest remain in effect until he surrenders all of his property to the court. Cohen, who has previously served time in federal prison for bankruptcy fraud and impersonating an attorney, lives in Tijuana, Mexico, and has shielded his multimillion dollar fortune stashing it in offshore accounts, lawyers said. The judge’s award nevertheless marked a victory for Gary Kremen, the San Francisco entrepreneur who had the foresight to register the http://www.sex.com address in 1994, at the dawn of the Internet age.

Children at a Singapore school will need to think twice about playing truant after a mobile phone text message broadcast system that automatically alerts their parents kicked off last week. Teachers will mark the names of absent students in an electronic database. The mobile phone text message or Short Message Service (SMS) broadcast system, supplied by a local technology provider, WorldRemind, taps into the database and automatically sends out a message to parents telling them their child is missing from class. Parents can choose from one of four pre-set SMS replies providing an excuse for the child’s absence or stating they are unaware of their child’s whereabouts.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a 10-year initiative to make nearly all of its course materials — from lectures to problem sets — freely available over the Internet. The MIT said the aim of the project, MIT OpenCourseWare, was to freely share the prestigious university’s knowledge. While the course material would be free, there would be no credits or MIT degree. Under the program, over the next decade MIT would post the Web course syllabuses, lectures, recitation notes and problem sets —"but not the solutions," a university spokesperson said.

A spurned lover will spend a year in a Singapore jail after bombarding his ex-girlfriend with obscene e-mails and hijacking her account. Chief Justice Yong Pung How called Lim Siong Khee a "nasty piece of work" during his appeal and increased his sentence from the original five months, the Straits Times newspaper has reported. Lim, a freelance computer consultant, was convicted of illegally accessing an e-mail account last year. Lim, 30, began sending obscene e-mails to his journalist ex-girlfriend and eventually hijacked her account after a two-week relationship during a trip to Europe in March 2000. He read her messages and used the account to send lewd e-mails to his former lover’s friends.— Reuters