A former employee of an American Internet press-release distributor was arrested by the FBI on Thursday and accused of making $241,814 by putting out a fake release that sent a high-tech company's stock plummeting. The suspect was identified as 23-year-old university student Mark Jakob of El Segundo, California, who had been an employee of Internet Wire until a week before the press release about Emulex Corporation was sent to Internet Wire for distribution.
Jakob was charged with securities fraud and wire fraud. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison. A civil complaint was also filed against Jakob seeking repayment of all profits he made in subsequent transactions. Emulex lost more than $2 billion in market value when its stock fell as low as $43 from the previous day's closing of $113.063. The stock eventually recovered most of its ground after the company denied the reports.
COMPUTER BABIES: A computer has given birth to baby robots . . . almost. Following the rules of evolution a computer has produced offspring by designing and making simple robots with minimal help from humans. The 8-inch "babies" could only crawl across a tabletop, exactly as they were digitally bred to do, said Jordan Pollack, an American computer scientist. In other words, the chance of computers taking over the world remains a remote possibility.
GET WEBBED: Developments in e-commerce and the new Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are not only of concern to "whiz-kids", Public Enterprise Minister Mary O'Rourke said on Friday. "Nothing could be further off the mark," she added. Speaking to the Small Firms Association O'Rourke said small Irish business had a poor record in their use of the Web compared to European counterparts. In the light of this, the Government, in conjunction with IBEC and the Information Society Commission, is to roll out an information and education campaign targeted at small and medium-sized enterprises, she said. "The campaign will aim to provide clear guidance for companies on how to apply the appropriate technologies to enhance their business capabilities," O'Rourke said.
HANDY VIRUS: The first virus attacking hand-held personal digital assistants (PDAs) using the Palm operating system has been detected on the Internet, software companies reported. Experts called the new bug a "Trojan horse" virus that deletes applications on the Palm operating system, but poses little threat to computer users. Software firms said the bug was inserted in pirated software purported to emulate a Nintendo Gameboy on Palm PDAs.
CLASS OF ITS OWN: A San Francisco judge on Tuesday certified a private antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft as a class action. The action, representing millions of California consumers, could cost Microsoft billions of dollars if successful because of laws that triple the damages in antitrust cases. The lawsuit, one of a number of such cases in various state and federal courts around the US, alleges Microsoft used its dominant market position to overcharge Californian consumers for a number of products, including Windows and Word programs.
WORLDWIDE FRIENDS: A group of virtual friends met for the first time in the flesh over the weekend at an organised event in Dublin. Thirty people from Europe, the US and Canada - who met over the Web - gathered in the Clarence hotel having originally met on the IrishAbroad.com website's chatroom.
BIG COST: Big Brother fanatics may be costing business in Ireland thousands of pounds a day by accessing the website of Channel 4's television house experiment, according to data released last week. Websense Inc says that workers accessing the website www.bigbrother.terra.com are costing British companies £1.4 million a week and it is suspected that a similar level of cost is being burdened on companies here.
BIG MOTHER: The first virtual creche is to be opened near Paris so parents can keep an eye on their kids via an Internet video link-up. Parents will receive a secret access code allowing them access to the site, which will show them clips of their kids.
WEB'S ON FIRE: It seems the only winners during the Moscow television tower fire were news websites. The fire, which started last Sunday, crippled most of the Russian capital's television services meaning Muscovites opted to get their news online instead. RBC, a financial wire, reported six million visitors to its site on Monday, six times the usual number, and Lenta.ru, an online newspaper, said it had 65,000 visitors on Monday, double the normal traffic flow.
FRAUD COMPLAINTS: Online auctions are the greatest source of complaints about Internet fraud, according to the Internet Fraud Complaint Centre (www.ifccbi.gov) in the US. The body, which will be fully up and running in November, predicts it will receive 1,000 complaints a day by then. Online auction companies have rejected the idea that fraud is a problem for their customers.
IN BRIEF . . . Intel said today it was recalling its new Pentium III chip because it had discovered it could fail under a certain combination of circumstances . . . A federal appeals court in the US said it would hear oral arguments in the Napster case in the first week of October . . .