A round-up of this week's other stories in brief

Criminals steal virtual rewards

Malicious hackers and crime gangs are increasingly using trojan horse software to steal passwords to virtual games such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, according to a leading security expert. Randy Abrams, director of technical education with security firm Eset, said trojans were being written to steal anything that could be sold for hard cash - including goods in virtual worlds.

Mr Abrams was in Dublin last week to present a seminar on Eset's heuristic anti-virus technology. Heuristic software is capable of identifying and removing viruses based purely on the characteristics and so is effective against new viruses - so called "zero-day" threats.

Independent tests have shown Eset's NOD32 has an 86 per cent detection rate using heuristics alone.

NUI Galway breakthrough

Researchers at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway have made a significant breakthrough in semantic web technology, also known as Web 3.0. Semantic web technology aims to make information on the web more structured so that it can be understood and manipulated by software.

This week the institute announced its Semantic Web Search Engine can answer queries with more than seven billion RDF statements in fractions of a second. RDF is one of the key technologies underpinning Web 3.0.

"These results enable the creation of web search engines that really deliver answers instead of links and is able to combine information from the web," said Prof Stefan Decker, director of the institute. "For example, the engine can list all partnerships of a company even if there is no single web page that lists all of them."

Last Mile to bid for tender

Last Mile Broadband, a wireless broadband supplier whose existing network potentially covers 100,000 homes and businesses in the midlands, west and north of the country, has confirmed it intends to bid for the National Broadband Scheme (NBS) tender announced this week.

Last Mile was founded by ex-Ericsson executives in 2002 and successfully won funding under the NBS's predecessor the Group Broadband Scheme.

Separately ComReg has announced that it intends to reserve radio spectrum in the 3.5Ghz band for use in the NBS.

10Mbit/sec pilot begins

Strencom has begun a pilot of a 10Mbit/sec. broadband product which it claims is the fastest service available to small to medium enterprises. The service is initially available in Cork and uses the Metropolitan Area Networks managed by E-net. Strencom managing director Tim Murphy said he expected the service to be rolled out nationally in the next 12 to 18 months.

TV on Web gets popular

A survey by mobile phone maker Motorola has found that 45 per cent of Europeans with broadband watch television online, with 59 per cent of French internet users doing so. The news comes in the week when the BBC announced plans to allow UK residents to catch up with popular shows on the web. The survey also found that a third of respondents want control over live broadcasts by being able to pause, rewind or fast-forward them. 57 per cent would like to be able to go online during a broadcast in order to get such information as sports statistics.

Upsurge in spam emails

Web hosting and email filtering company IE Internet claims that over 60 per cent of emails delivered to Irish internet users last month were unsolicited spam. Phelim O'Connell, managing director of IE Internet, said the US and Korea were the main sources.