NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 15 April
15-04-2009
by Emmet Cole
Xilinx to shed Irish jobs | Amazon rejects Phorm
Microchip manufacturer Xilinx in Citywest, Dublin is to shed 130 jobs, with some jobs being moved to the company's facilities in Singapore and others being outsourced. The figure amounts to about one quarter of the firm's Citywest workforce. The majority of jobs will be shed from the company's high-end manufacturing and test engineering workforce. Some administrative and support jobs will also be lost.
Microsoft's latest monthly security update addresses 23 security vulnerabilities with eight different bulletins. Five bulletins have been deemed critical. The fixes include a bulletin to address two flaws in Excel. Other fixes include updates to address bugs in Office, DirectX, Internet Explorer and the Windows HTTP Services component.
Google has released a preview of the next version of its Android mobile operating system for developers. The update includes new application programming interfaces to support features such as soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders and speech recognition. The Android 1.5 SDK is expected to be released at the end of April.
Amazon has announced that it will not allow controversial online advertising company Phorm to scan its web pages to produce targeted ads -- and has opted out of the Phorm system completely. Phorm scans the sites each user visits and produces targeted advertisements. In March, privacy advocates, the Open Rights Group, wrote to the chief privacy officers at Microsoft, Google/Youtube, Facebook, AOL/Bebo, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay urging them to opt-out of Phorm. Amazon is the first company to respond, although there are numerous reports suggesting Facebook is set to follow Amazon's lead on the issue. Phorm is currently under European scrutiny with EU regulators commencing legal action against Britan for not applying EU data privacy rules that would restrict Phorm from watching how users surf the web.
Citrix Systems has unveiled a 'Web 2.0 Push technology' as an integrated feature of its NetScaler product line. Specifically designed to address the demands of Web 2.0 applications, the new NetScaler technology speeds application performance and, Citrix claims, reduces server costs by five to ten times. According to Citrix, NetScaler reduces overall Web 2.0 TCO (total cost of ownership) by up to 90 percent and server capacity needed for Web 2.0 application by up to 10 times.
Three Ireland has launched a weekly golf podcast show presented by Shane O'Donoghue. The T 2 Green podcast went live on the official tournament website at midday on Wednesday.
Avaya, the business communications software and systems company, has appointed Lee Shorten to the role of managing director for the UK and Ireland. Shorten previously worked at Irisys, a technology company focused on the retail sector. Shorten also worked at Symbol Technologies as EMEA industry lead for the manufacturing sector.
Security firm Eset's ThreatSense.Net has identified the WMA/TrojanDownloader.GetCodec Trojan as the most prevalent virus currently on Irish computers, featuring in approximately 6.5 percent of all virus detections. The malware converts all media files found on a computer to the WMA format and adds a field to the header that includes a URL pointing the user to a new codec, claiming that the codec has to be downloaded so that the media files can be read. Globally, the Trojan ranked fifth on Eset's threat list with 1.45 percent of detections. ThreatSense.Net analyses the global trends of virus infections.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 