Tiscali suffers week-long email outage

Tiscali is struggling to fix a problem that has prevented some of its customers from sending emails for over a week. A mammoth 21-page thread on Tiscali's support forums reveals that dozens of unhappy customers are struggling to send outgoing messages. The complaints started on Monday May 21 when one user found that emails he'd sent the previous Friday had been returned undelivered. ...more

Yahoo! posts financial results and warns of future growth

Yahoo! has posted its quarterly results, and they met the expectations of Wall Street analysts, but it has sounded warnings about future growth. For Yahoo!'s last quarterly results, although the figures were healthy and met expectations, general gloom about the future of online advertising meant the value of its stock fell. Mixed reactions are again likely, with Yahoo! itself now expressing concern about the "realignment" of its client base, ie dot-coms going under and traditional companies cutting back their online spending. ...more

MPs bid to tackle online extortion

The All Party Internet Group (APIG) is to put forward a bill to update the venerable 1990 Computer Misuse Act. The amendments, if accepted, would explicitly make a crime of distributed denial of service attacks and raise the punitive measures for hacking from six months to two years. The amendments are mainly directed at tackling the rising incidence of blackmail and extortion against online services, such as bookmakers, where organised gangs demand sums of money or threaten to take the service offline with such an attack. ...more

Quark 5 beta released

Quark has released a beta version of QuarkXPress 5 that can be downloaded from the company's Web site. You can try and get it from the download site, though as I write (Friday afternoon) the site isn't responding at all to download requests. Key features new to XPress in version 5 include Tables, enabling the creation of complex tables with text and graphic elements, and a Layers palette. ...more

Five new flaws from Microsoft

Microsoft has released a security update for Internet Explorer that tackles five new flaws as well as including previous MS patchwork for the browser and email program. The vulnerabilities receive the aggregate stamp of Critical from Microsoft and affect all supported versions of Windows: from 98 and NT 4.0 to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, including 64bit versions. ...more