A racist website sitting under the banner: "Say no to black Ireland" has been forced to remove links to at least one Irish political party after being threatened with legal action. Solicitors acting for Fine Gael contacted the website which, they said, was "dedicated to anti-racial propaganda in its vilest form" and expressed the party's extreme concern about "the linkage made by this abomination to Fine Gael". The solicitor's letter went on to describe the sentiments expressed on the site as "heinous and detestable". It is understood the hyperlink to the Fine Gael site was removed within 24 hours of receipt of the letter.
At the time of writing, the site continued to carry links to other Irish organisations which have no connection with the content being disseminated on it. These include the Irish army, Fianna Fail, UCD and a link to the Government website. The site, created on July 9th of this year by a London-based individual who chooses to remain annonymous on the site, contains a handful of discussion forums and very little else.
Phone Watch: The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has begun legal action against the British government because of alleged tapping of telephone calls between Ireland and Britain over the last ten years. In their submission, the ICCL and two other groups claim the British government's interception of private calls was "at no time in accordance with the law". The action follows the disclosure two years ago, in a Channel 4 documentary, that the British Ministry of Defence operated an electronic test facility at Capenhurst, Cheshire, which intercepted telephone, fax, email and data communications from Ireland between 1990 and 1997.
Tried In Secret: China has secretly put on trial for subversion an Internet publisher who posted information on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, a New York-based journalists' rights group said on Friday. Huang Qi was tried on August 14th by the Chengdu Intermediate Court in the southwestern province of Sichuan, the Committee to Protect Journalists said. Huang published the website, www.6-4tianwang.com, which contained articles about pro-democracy activism in China and the banned spiritual group Falun Gong. The site is hosted on a US server and remains accessible outside China.
Flirting With Email: Office workers in Britain use email at work to gossip about rivals and flirt with colleagues, according to a new study. The survey of 500 workers by UK marketing company edesigns.co.uk said companies could be losing hours of work time daily because of misuse of email. Men were the worst offenders for trying to kindle an online office romance, with 27 per cent admitting to using email for flirting compared with 13 per cent of women.
Lastminute Revival: Online retail site Lastminute.com says it is on track for break-even at an operational level in Britain and France in nine months' time. Lastminute reported a net loss for the third quarter ended June 30th of £8.9 million sterling, down 16.8 per cent on the previous quarter, on goods sold on its site worth £29.3 million.
Open Up: Adobe Systems is to open access to the Community Server source code and protocol for Adobe Atmosphere. According to the company, this open access will give developers a powerful platform for the creation and customisation of immersive, interactive 3D communities on the Web.
linux goes to hollywood: Linux is being feted by Hollywood movie moguls and as the studios move to embrace the software for their special effects and animation needs, technology giants are taking notice. Last week IBM announced its Linux Digital Studio package, made up of workstations, server computers and data storage machines. Linux has already helped create special effects-laden blockbusters like Titanic and the animated hit Shrek.
Big Blue's Speed: A US government laboratory has unveiled the most powerful computer in the world, programmed to simulate the explosion of a nuclear bomb. ASCI White, a $110 million computer squeezed into enough refrigerator-sized units to fill a couple of basketball courts, was officially unveiled by scientists aiming to simulate nuclear tests the government has promised not to carry out for real. The machine built by IBM from off-the-shelf processors with a souped-up version of its commercial operating system, AIX, weighs as much as 17 full-size elephants, takes as much cooling as 765 homes, and can do in a second what a calculator would take 10 million years, IBM says.
Manx Move: The long-awaited arrival of high-speed mobile Internet access in Europe has come a little closer after the successful completion on the Isle of Man of the first data call over a third generation (3G) network. The Internet Protocol packet data call on Manx Telecom's network provided fast, high bandwidth access to the Internet and other data applications.
New Deal: EBay and America Online have announced they have expanded their partnership to boost the online auction site's promotion across AOL Time Warner's network. The companies, which have had a partnership since 1997, said the three-year alliance will promote eBay across AOL's range of online, print and television services, including its magazines People and Time and Turner broadcast channels TNT and the TBS Superstation.