NEWS IN BRIEF
For the record 6 July
06-07-2007
by Emmet Ryan
Digital Hub measures environmental awareness | Three partners with Live Earth
IT products distributor MB Technology is re-branding under its original name, Memory Bank, from 1 August as part of a programme to raise the profile of the company in the Irish marketplace. The company is based in Inchicore in Dublin and provides technology products for corporate, SME and retail markets.
Ice Broadband is expanding its wireless broadband services to cover Saggart in South County Dublin. The company is planning to make its services available nationwide by the end of the year. "Our promise when we first built this company was to provide a broadband service to communities and people that were outside the broadband loop," said Yvonne Rooney, managing director of Ice Broadband.
The environmental awareness of children from the Liberties will be put to the test during the iTrek summer project, which will take place next week. The project is the initiative of the Digital Hub and the South West Inner City Network's Computer Club and will see 20 young people, aged between 12 and 16, taking on a new daily challenge to assess their environmental awareness. The use of digital media technology will be integral to the project and, each morning, participants will take part in workshops at the Digital Hub to become proficient in the use of 3G phones and web technology. Each afternoon, four teams will be set an activity which will assess their carbon footprint. A showcase event to celebrate the achievements of the project will take place at the Digital Hub on Monday, 19 July.
Three Ireland has become a partner of Live Earth, the series of music concerts taking place across the globe on Saturday to help combat global warming. As part of the agreement, Three Ireland's customers will be able to watch Live Earth content on their mobiles, with profits going to charity. Three Ireland will offer looped content of all the gigs from around the world in London, New York, Sydney, Hamburg, Tokyo, Rio, Johannesburg, Shanghai and Istanbul. Live Earth will see major acts such as Madonna, The Police, Duran Duran, Beastie Boys and Spinal Tap perform. Unlimited access to all looped streams will cost EUR0.99 for 24 hours of access.
Nearly half of all Americans have broadband internet connections in their homes, according to a new study by Pew Internet & American Life Project. The number of home broadband users in the US now equals the total number of Americans with any type of Internet connection in 2000, the first year the annual survey was conducted. The study showed that minority and lower income groups were using broadband more. Four out of ten African-American adults have broadband access at home, compared to 15 percent two years ago. Nearly one-third of rural Americans have home broadband connections, compared to about half of Americans living in urban areas and the suburbs.
IT security firm BitDefender has warned e-mail users that a new threat, called Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, is using Hotmail and Yahoo accounts to send spam. The trojan uses automatically generated accounts, suggesting that spammers have found a way to bypass the captcha systems, whereby new accounts aren't created until the creator correctly inputs letters that are depicted in an image. Every active copy of the trojan accesses an account, then pulls encrypted spam e-mails from a website, decrypts them and sends them to addresses taken from another website. "There are only about 500 or so new accounts being created every hour," said Viorel Canja, head of BitDefender Antivirus Lab. "But still, we've seen 15,000-plus Hotmail accounts being used so far. It's hard to estimate how many spam e-mails have already been sent." The spam e-mail currently being distributed is trying to lead users to a site that advertises pharmacy products.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 