NetFlash: Zippo.com flames out

Was it the politically correct faction run amok or a genuine concern for public safety? You decide: A story in the Washington Post this morning notes that lighter giant Zippo has extinguished its Zippotricks.com Web site. Not that I have ever tried any of this stuff, but people tell me “tricking” with lighters involves basically flipping, twisting, throwing or just generally being silly with lit lighters. 

A visit to the site, which had been around since 1996, says: “Dear Fellow TrickHeads: I have some very bad news for you all. For the past couple of months Zippotricks.com has been under tremendous scrutiny from various U.S. groups, organizations and even political figures concerning the potential dangers involved with tricking.” In its defense, Zippo.com had taken precautions with the site, requiring credit card numbers of visitors (however, they didn’t use the numbers for anything other than to discourage kids from accessing the site) and restricting tricks to reasonable acts (if anything done with a lit lighter would be reasonable).   Still, you can pretty much find way more destructive things on the ‘Net than this. What do you think?

SCO Web site hit by denial-of-service attack

The SCO Group’s Web site was accessible again this week  after being down for about three days, the victim of a denial-of-service attack launched by a “senior” member of the open source community, according to open source advocate Eric Raymond.

https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0825scodds.html

IBM offers FAStT600 turbo-charge

IBM next month will offer some new enhancements to its FAStT600 storage server that it says will improve its performance and double the amount of data that the system can store.

https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0826ibmfast.html

Sanctum focuses on QA, Web services with Appscan

Sanctum announced latest versions of its vulnerability testing tool that are targeted at quality assurance  engineers and those who perform software security audits of Web services deployments.

https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0825qasanctum.html

Sun, Hitachi extend storage pact two more years

Sun this week said it will continue to resell storage hardware from Hitachi Data Systems for an additional two years, extending an agreement that was slated to expire next year.

https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0825sunhit.html