Also: Microsoft blogger downplays renamed RSS; spammer convicted; Finland battles wireless security; Googel stock sell kicks off speculation
A report issued by UBS Investment Services last week backed off statements in an earlier report that Cisco would release an upgrade to its Catalyst 6500 switch Supervisor module over the next few months. The updated report said that the investment firm was “premature” in its assertion that Cisco would release a product it called the Supervisor 1440 module, which would provide 1.4T bit/sec of switching bandwidth, doubling the performance of the previous Supervisor 720. UBS maintains that this product will come out, but not until 2006. Cisco last week confirmed that it had no plans to launch an upgrade of its Catalyst 6500 Supervisor blade this year, but would not comment on speculation about product plans for 2006.
A well-known Microsoft Weblogger last week downplayed the proposed use of a new name for RSS in the next version of Internet Explorer following several days of intense discussion in the online community about the notion of rebranding RSS. Robert Scoble, a Microsoft technical evangelist and writer of a popular Weblog, said the company had not made a final decision as to whether it would rename RSS “Web feeds” in the final version of IE 7 the way it has in the beta version now available. “We never said Microsoft has decided [to rebrand RSS],” Scoble said. “It’s a year ahead of [Windows Vista] being released, and we’re trying to work with the community to get some consensus.”
A jury in Little Rock, Ark., has convicted Scott Levine of Boca Raton, Fla., who ran a now-defunct bulk e-mail marketing firm called Snipermail.com, of stealing more than 1.6 billion customer records from customer information management company Acxiom by breaking into its computers. In a criminal investigation jointly conducted by the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service, Levine was charged July 21, 2004, with breaking into Acxiom’s databases, where he and other Snipermail.com staff downloaded around 8.2G bytes of personal data. Levine faces sentencing in early January.
Finland called on its citizens to take more care securing their Wi-Fi networks after a report last week that about $245,400 had been stolen from a local bank using an unprotected home network. The Helsinki branch of global financing company GE Money called on police to investigate the theft in June. The money, which has since been recovered, was stolen from one of GE Money’s accounts at a local bank, said Jukkapekka Risu, investigating officer for the Helsinki police. The police now believe that the company’s 26-year-old head of data security in Helsinki stole banking software from the company along with passwords for its bank account, Risu said. Accomplices then accessed the account from a laptop computer using an unprotected network at a nearby apartment building in Helsinki’s Kallio district. They used the passwords to transfer the money to a different corporate account that they had set up six months earlier, Risu said.
Google last week made known its intent to issue and sell 14 million shares of its stock, a move that set off a flood of speculation. Analysts fretted about the effect of Google’s new offering and speculated on why a company with a $2.9 billion cash pile is eager to raise several billion more. In its filing, Google attributed the need to “general corporate purposes.” Some suggested that acquisitions are one likely expenditure. The company’s string of buys to date include Brazilian search company Akwan Information Technologies, Web analytics developer Urchin Software, social network service Dodgeball.com, and a stake in Chinese search engine Baidu.com. Google’s stock debuted at $85 per share last year. It topped $300 for several days in July and now hovers around $280. The second offering should add about $4 billion to Google’s coffers.
