BUSINESS
Feds Drop Rates 25 Basis Points
With some taking the attitude that something is better than naught, and others bemoaning anything less than a 50 basis point rate cut, the Federal Reserve has cut the federal funds rate to 3.75 percent, a 25 basis points reduction. Really encouraging [NOT!] to the stock market were comments that, yes, the fed is rather concerned over current U.S. economy conditions and that further economic deterioration is expected. There’s business and consumer spending declines, slower global growth, and declining profitability adding fuel to the question of why only a 25 basis point reduction!
BUSINESS
Telecom Manufacturing Cuts
Willing to retain about a dozen or so facilities, Alcaltel is planning to divest themselves of most of their telecommunications manufacturing operations, aiming to become a totally fab–less company. Thanks to the merger talks with Lucent that disintegrated, and Q2 expectations remaining depressed, much of their remaining manufacturing needs will be outsourced. Already the company is planning to retrain the 830 workers at their Illkirch, France, GSM Mobile Terminals manufacturing plant, into a group that produces amplifier subsystems and optical interfaces.
BUSINESS
Lucent Nearing Plant Sale?
Although their plans to divest themselves of everything fell apart recently, Lucent Technologies has made some headway in that the company now hopes to sell to Celestica two of their key plants. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Lucent’s Oklahoma City and Columbus, OH, plants are under discussion with at least two companies, with the deal when finalized possible reaching as much as a $900 million cash infusion for the company. Celestica officials have not commented on the reported deal.
BUSINESS
Wired Groceries
Safeway already has an online home shopping site, GroceryWorks, in which Tesco, Britain's largest grocer, would like a slice of the action. Tesco is willing to pay Safeway $22 million for this piece of the store. Should this transaction occur, Safeway’s GroceryWorks would gain expertise from the folks at Tesco.com, which is the world’s largest and only profitable online grocer — they also recently established a site specifically designed for the blind.
DOMAINS
Newbie TLDs Now Live
ICANNN had okayed "biz" and "info" top–level Internet domains (TLDs) earlier this year and they are now live, being used by NeuLevel and Afilias Ltd. who run informational websites. Starting in September, others can obtain these TLDs through some 90 accredited registrars. Despite criticism that ICANNN’s TLD approvals amount to a monopoly, the organization must ensure that these names will work identically for all Internet users in all locations. ICANN is still deciding the fate of "aero" ".coop", ".museum", ".name" and ".name" TLDs.
LEGAL
AOL Aims for Aimster
America Online filed suit against Aimster. Allegedly, the peer–to–peer file–swapping service has been intentionally piggybacking on the AOL Instant Messenger trademark, and confusing AOL users in the process. The federal court lawsuit comes a month after an arbitration panel sided with AOL in a cybersquatting dispute over the similarity between Aimster.com, A1mster.com, AimsterTV.net, AimsterTV.com and AOL’s AIM brand. Aimster filed a counter–suit against AOL in order to retain its domain names. Aimster’s CEO, Johnny Deep, believes that AOL’s new trademark infringement suit was filed in retaliation.
PERSONNEL
Guru Joins Apple
With the enamorization of Apple for Unix, especially in light of their Mac OS X release, the hiring of Jordan Hubbard to become the Manager of BSD Technologies for the company makes a great deal of sense. He will work within the Core OS Engineering division and will also assist in Darwin development, that being Mac OS X’s open–source core. He will continue to contribute to FreeBSD and other projects.
PERSONNEL
Yahoo! Ops Changing?
Leveraging his contacts within the Hollywood community, the new ceo at Yahoo, Terry Semel, as he chats amiably with various former managers who once formed the core of the now–GOA Enteraindom Internet from Time Warner. CEO Mallett seems to have moved many of his company responsibilities to folk such as Gregory Coleman, the exec veep of N.A. ops, who joined Yahoo last April from Readers Digest. Thanks to the ongoing online advertising market lethargy, Yahoo continues to search for solutions, with solutions rumored to be "in the works" ranging from entertainment–based premium services to outright sale of the service. Expectations are that new execs who could join Yahoo shortly would be from the Hollywood environs.
POLITICS
Hackin’ Probe
You may well recall that several days ago, the Los Angeles Times published a story that a report from the agency that oversees California’s power and electricity grid had found the system had been penetrated by hackers. Although no critical operations were affected, one California state senator is not the least bit enamored by such an occurrence. From Thousand Oaks, Sen. Tom McClintock has requested the California Independent System Operator (ISO) to forward to him a detailed report as to the how’s and why’s of the hack and what this agency is going to do to prevent such from happening again in the future. The illegal entry into the system occurred between April 25th and May 11th and the FBI is also investigating this case, with initial indications being that the hack originated in China during the time of state–wide rolling blackouts and the surveillance plane versus Chinese jet incident.
POLITICS
Bush Tech Spot Search
The current director of the Brookhaven National Lab, John Marburger III, appears to be the Bush administration’s candidate for the position of director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. Marburger has instituted several policy changes at the Lab to rid the site of contaminated soil and water and is considered to have the broad experience and knowledge of practical science issues this position requires. A former president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Marburger also happens to be a Democrat.
SECURITY
AOL’s ICQ Servers Invaded
The Instant Messaging Unit of America Online suffered a defacement this week at two of their web servers: http://icqgroup01.icq.com and http://homepage.icq.com. The first server hosted ICQ interest group data on four Microsoft IIS machines and two hacker groups are claiming responsibility. The first call themselves the Silver Lords and managed to overhaul the AOL home page with one of their own. A second group called Men in Hack then added a separate defaced page to that same sever. The second server hosts ICQ iT which is a web and ICQ.com search engine and was hacked by a group called iNnOcEnT bOys who posted a text message that replaced various links. AOL does not believe any corporate or member info or data was compromised. The investigation continues...
SECURITY
Fraud Fouls To Rise
NGNs (nextgen networks) will experience IP fraud in upcoming years at a level not seen before... this is conclusion of a report from the Aberdeen Group for NetEye Corp. The full report is highlighted in "IP Fraud: A Glimpse Into The Next Wave" published in "Billing World" magazine’s June 2001 issue. New forms of identity theft, DoS attacks, and other misuses will appear as well as new forms of billing fraud. The size of the IP fraud management software market should grow to $682.8 million by the year 2005 from $110 million this year, with switched circuit fraud management software increasing more modestly to $685.5 million from the current $441.3 million. NetEye’s website.
