Microsoft Ireland has lined up five Irish firms to provide local content for the "push" channels in the latest version of its Explorer Web browser. Fusio, Ireland On-Line, Radio 2FM and Trinity Solutions will provide various Irish entertainment, business, news and lifestyle guides. Creative Online Media will run a Northern Ireland news service based on media including the Belfast Telegraph and Irish News, plus flight information live from Belfast airport. Microsoft's "browser war" with Netscape heated up again last week after it released "beta" test copies of version 4.0 of Explorer.
Netscape's Marc Andreessen predicts that Microsoft will capitulate within 18 months on Corba, the rival to Microsoft's standard for software component architecture. Andreessen was talking at last week's Catalyst conference in San Francisco.
NET CRASHES: Expect buckets of scare stories about the Net's shortcomings after Thursday's crash of InterNIC's "routing centres". When an e-mail is sent it makes its way first to a regional computer, which then asks a router whether it recognises the address; corrupt data on InterNIC's root servers caused them to send incorrect addresses. The crash - at 11.30 a.m. Irish time - made most US sites unusable for over four hours. E-mail and Web pages were affected, as well as those Irish and other non-US companies unfortunate to have ".com" domain names. "It was as if the phone book stopped working," says Michael O'Dell, chief scientist at UUNET Technologies. "If directory assistance isn't working and you don't have a phone book, then the phone isn't very useful."
ICT AT TCD: Trinity College's Department of Computer Science has launched a four-year honours degree course in Information and Communications Technology. Students who have applied to the CAO for other courses may also apply for it (and can subsequently choose between the two offers). Besides software development and designing networked systems, the course includes the study of French or German. - info: tel 01-608-1133, e-mail spower.tcd.ie
WHAT'S A FAT AGNUS?:The Amiga Users Group Of Ireland (formaly CUGI) has just established a telephone helpline for Ireland's Amiga users at 01-6235903. - info: http://www.iol.ie/
abarton/amiga.htm
ONLINE LIBEL CASE: Norwich Union is to pay £450,000 in damages to private healthcare insurer WPA after a London High Court case about how its employees had spread false rumours about WPA on its own internal e-mail system.
IRISH FIRST: Dublin-based software house Baltimore Technologies has become the first European company to offer a full-strength secure e-mail product based on S/MIME, the broadly accepted standard for e-mail. It has begun shipping MailSecure at £50 per user, and its Web site (http:// www.baltimore.ie) has evaluation copies.
EUROPEAN SLOWDOWN: Intel expects European growth for PCs to lag later this year: its second-quarter sales in Europe rose only 3 per cent to $1.43 billion - compared with a growth in its worldwide sales of 29 per cent.
IN BRIEF. . .Network Solutions has pulled the plug on NASA.com, a porn site whose domain name was similar to a certain space agency's. . . Apple reported a smaller-than-expected $56-million loss for this quarter. . . Thomson Consumer Elec- tronics has introduced a "Web TV" set-top box device that turns a television into a low-cost Internet access device via a phone line. . . Paraguayan customs officials have seized counterfeit Nintendo software and gamepads worth $1 million. . . Yahoo! Chat users will soon be able to talk to stars from NBC TV shows in regular online chat sessions. . . Cisco Systems has a new Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) module designed for the Catalyst 2820 series of Ethernet switches. . . Black Dirt Software (www.blackdirt.com) has released Convert 1.1, a Visual Basic to Java converter. . . Lernout & Hauspie will introduce a voice-controlled software editor for Microsoft Word next autumn, aimed at pathologists. . . EUnet Ireland is to offer ISDN services for small office/home office PC users for £35 per month. . . the European Space Agency has awarded a contract worth over £500,000 to Dublinbased Bocom International to design a satellite-based multimedia information network. . .