The week that was 5 years ago: StarOffice open sourced, Intel undercut and digital TV

Five years ago the high-tech world was a very different place. Here we take a look half a decade back and see what the budding issues of the time blossomed into today. Microsoft received a wake-up call on security at the end of October 2000, when it discovered it had been hacked, reportedly from St Petersburg, and with the possibility that its Windows source code had been nabbed. ...more

Gates announces Internet Explorer 7.0

Bill Gates has announced that the release of Internet Explorer version 7.0 has been brought forward. Originally intended for release with the next version of Windows (Longhorn) next year, Microsoft has decided to launch a more secure version of its browser this year instead. ...more

Corel spurs development of SVG with Smart Graphics Studio

Corel has released its Smart Graphics Studio software. It is a development environment for building SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) applications, supporting the combination of graphics with Web Services and XML data sources. Smart Graphics is Corel's terms for applications that use SVG, an open standard for rich graphics and dynamic, interactive documents. ...more

Hacker takes all

There's a lot in the news about hackers trying to bring down the Internet and distributing computer viruses to all and sundry, but a new competition launched by eWeek magazine could see one hacker scooping a big prize. The OpenHack III competition could see a lucky winner getting their hands on a cash prize of $50,000, if they can successfully perform a series of four hacker-related tasks over a two-week period. A security product called PitBull, produced by Argus Systems, will protect the systems. ...more

The Windows Java runtime dispute runs and runs

The long running legal battle between Sun and Microsoft has taken another turn. The dispute over how the Java runtime system should ship with Windows has received another court edict. Yesterday, Microsoft said it would begin shipping an updated version of Service Pack 1 for Windows XP, one that includes a more current version of the Java runtime environment from Sun Microsystems. ...more