Blueyonder afflicted by service outage

Most of Telewest's Blueyonder Internet services were unavailable for some time yesterday and continue to be affected after a 'network fault' blocked access to the company's servers. Blueyonder services including Selfcare, webmail and email were affected, though the company said that since then access has 'greatly improved' but could still be 'slow and intermittent'. Telewest added that the fault causing this would also be affecting other ISPs. ...more

MP3 goes to your head

I know that MP3 players are getting a little long in the tooth these days, but the new Sharp E-mus?e is a player that can be worn around the head like a headband, leaving your pockets free for loose change... ...more

Apple facing pressure for music download dominance

The music industry is gearing up for an explosion in downloading at its annual get together in Cannes. Download services such as Napster, record labels and mobile phone manufaturers all predict that 2005 will be the year in which Apple's dominance of the market for both music downloads, through its iTunes Music Store, and portable devices on which to play them, such as the iPod, will come under real pressure. Some observers believe that where downloaded music is played - on a computer, portable player or phone - will not be the key issue of the year; rather, the battle will be between subscription-based services and those like iTunes which only offer paid-for-downloads. ...more

Tiny worm catches out lazy adminstrators

A tiny worm only 367 bytes long is set to cause chaos in the internet today. SQL Slammer, also known as "Helkern" is claimed by one anti-virus company to be `one of the biggest dangers threatening the normal operation of the Internet to come along in recent years`. The worm doesn't infect end user machines and is not a mass-mailer but instead targets the in-memory process of unpatched Microsoft SQL server machines. ...more

Jeeves takes on Google AdWords and Overture

Search engine Ask Jeeves has launched its own 'Sponsored Listings' service to its customers even though it still displays Google Adwords. To encourage Ask Jeeves advertisers to go with the new system, Sponsored Listings advertisers will be placed above the Google Adwords. As with Google Adwords or Yahoo's Overture, the system works by an open-ended auction system. ...more