IN THE PAPERS
In The Papers 13 December
13-12-2010
by Sylvia Leatham
Cork and Galway to get 300 new jobs | ICANN delays new TLD plans
The Irish Times reports that SIPTU president Jack O’Connor says the union will not be apologising for releasing details of the personal mobile numbers of senior Government politicians, which resulted in a number of ministers receiving abusive calls over the weekend. SIPTU published contact details for senior Government politicians as part of a lobbying campaign against the decision to cut the national minimum wage. The numbers appeared in the union's online newsletter. The mobile phones of a number of senior ministers were swamped by text messages, some abusive, concerning the decision to lower the minimum wage. O'Connor said the mobile numbers had been published in error but noted he would not be apologising.
The Irish Independent notes that new revelations surrounding the murder of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane more than two decades ago are expected to be released on Monday by website Wikileaks. Finucane's son Michael said the family knew no more than the fact that information surrounding his father's death would be published today.
The Irish Examiner reports that 300 jobs are due to be created in Cork and Galway by two multinational firms. Cork city will get 200 jobs in the new year when a NASDAQ-quoted cloud computing software company sets up a major European hub in the city. The IDA and the company have yet to make an official announcement but it is understood that official word will come in early 2011. Meanwhile, the IDA is expected to announce over 100 jobs in HP in Galway today. The new highly skilled jobs will be in software engineering, testing and application development.
According to the Financial Times, the global body that controls website addresses has delayed plans to enable the creation of hundreds of top-level domain names, in the wake of objections from the US that the group had not fully examined the economic implications of the move. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted on Friday to seek more information from an advisory committee with representatives of 100 national governments before implementing the plan to allow anyone to apply for a new top-level domain to add to the existing 20 or so generic web suffixes.
The Wall Street Journal notes that Gawker.com and other websites owned by Gawker Media were attacked by hackers over the weekend, causing the sites to stop publishing new material. The hackers appear to have gained entry into Gawker Media's database and accessed information about more than 1 million registered users of sites like Gizmodo and Jezebel, as well as Gawker.com. "Our user databases appear to have been compromised," the company said in a statement. "The passwords were encrypted. But simple ones may be vulnerable to a brute-force attack. You should change your Gawker password and on any other sites on which you've used the same passwords."
The Sunday Tribune reports that the men at the centre of the sexist email incident at accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in October remain suspended and will learn their fate in the new year. The firm's internal probe into the matter has not yet concluded after five weeks of investigation, according to a spokeswoman for PwC.
The Sunday Times reports that British directory firm Yell drafted in its own sales force to write thousands of restaurant and bar reviews for its new social network, Trusted Places. A competition in its Reading office offered prizes to the employees who wrote the most reviews; the winner churned out 795 reviews. The Trusted Places network is based on users' tips and reviews of the best places to visit in various locations.
According to the Sunday Business Post, O2 is to change its practice of automatically moving customers to online billing unless they actively chose to continue receiving paper bills. ComReg found O2's policy to be in breach of its contract and has ordered the operator to contact all affected customers to ensure they are happy with their billing arrangements. For its part, O2 maintains it had complied with its regulatory obligations.
The same paper reports that RTE is to defend its online operations at an Oireachtas Commission on Communications on Wednesday. The National Newspapers of Ireland group has said RTE is unfairly using public money to build a digital presence that affects newspapers' ability to make money online. RTE will reportedly suggest that the real risk to the newspaper industry comes from global brands like Google and Facebook.
The paper also reports that Dublin cloud computing firm Dediserve recorded revenues of EUR700,000 in 2009, its second year of operation. The company also said it plans to create 10 new jobs in its Belfast office over the next 18 months in a bid to expand its presence in the UK market.
In more news of results, the same paper says that an Irish-based unit of VMWare recorded revenues of USD981.5 million in 2009, up from USD884.8 million in 2008. Operating profit was USD8.6 million.
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