Monday, February 4, 2002		Latest in IT world

Net free day

A British campaign group used a Website to call for Internet users to log off and enjoy a Web-free day in the open air yesterday. Organisers urged people to use its International Internet Free day on Sunday to meet friends and family and rediscover life in the real world. "It is not hypocritical to be using a Website to tempt people away from the Web," a spokesperson for DoBe.org, a not-for-profit body which campaigns for people to take part in group activities said in a statement. "The Internet did not start off as a vehicle for social isolation and damaged eyesight. It began as a medium for communication." They have arranged a day of theatre, poetry music and walks along London's South Bank. A recent survey for UK online bank Egg said 19 million Britons or 42 per cent of the adults use the Internet outside work.

Attacks on computer networks worldwide jumped dramatically in the second half of 2001, a computer security firm reported last week, according to AFP. As per the computer security firm Riptech, based in Alexandria, Virginia, hacker attacks on corporate computer networks jumped 79 per cent between July and December, 2001. A substantial percent of attacks (39 per cent) appeared to be deliberately targeted at a specific organisation, the report authors found. High technology, financial services, media or entertainment, and power and energy computer networks garnered the highest number of attacks per company. The report found that the largest number of attacks originate in the USA. France, together with South Korea and Thailand, the report found, ranked at the top three countries that topped both the percentage of network attack origins and attacks per capita Internet users. The study also found "a small number of nations were the source of the vast majority of the attacks" with 30 per cent of computer hacking originating from the USA, followed by South Korea (9 per cent) and China (8 per cent). The report is based on the actual number of detected attacks in a sampling of 300 companies in more than 25 countries.

The enterprise integration software (EIS) market grew 88.4 per cent from 1999 to 2000, confirming the importance of integration solutions for enterprises. Although growth rates will slow over the next five years due to economic conditions, IDC (International Data Corporation) believes that this market will continue to outpace the overall software industry through 2005 with a compound annual growth rate of 43.9 per cent. Despite economic downturn, the corporation says enterprises will continue to engage in integration projects because application integration enables organisations to extract more value from complex heterogeneous systems and the need to connect legacy systems with newer applications has not diminished. Further, mergers and acquisitions continue to force enterprises to integrate heterogeneous IT systems.

Indian software giant Satyam has opened an office in Shanghai. The official launch in mainland China comes in the wake of Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji's visit to India two weeks ago, where he stated the countries should become economic partners and not rivals, especially in IT. The decision by Satyam Computer Services, India's fourth largest software exporter, to set up an office in Shanghai, has begun what many in China hope will be a new wave of Sino-Indian software links. While India has powered ahead to become a world centre for outsourcing software development and produces some of the globe's best software engineers, economic giant China has lagged behind in the technology stakes.