East Timor might not exist as country due to the Indonesian invasion, but next month it will achieve independence in cyberspace, thanks to an Irish Internet service provider. East Timor's own top-level domain (".tp") has been taken up and registered, and Connect Ireland will administer it in conjunction with East Timorese people currently living here. They intend to hand over the domain to East Timor on independence.
"We are reserving all appropriate names for the future [East Timor] government such as government, subdomain government and all related activities such as education, health etc," a spokesman for the East Timor Ireland Solidarity Campaign says. The domain's official launch date has been set for December 7th, the invasion's anniversary.
The little-known South Pacific island of Niue has begun selling its domain name ".nu", so expect a plethora of companies with addresses such as "really.nu" and "so.nu". And in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Dutch, "nu" means "now", resulting in sites named "peace.nu" and "musik.nu".
Talks are online: Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams will be making a live Internet broadcast from Belfast at 8 p.m. tonight. This is the fourth in a series of Webcasts by party leaders involved in the peace talks and is being hosted by Ireland On-Line. Opinions/questions can be emailed to the MP at peace- talks@iol.ie. Other participants will include the UDP's David Adams (tomorrow, 6 p.m.), the UUP's David Trimble (Wednesday, 8 p.m.) and Lord Alderdice of the Alliance Party (Thursday, 8 p.m.) Martin McGuinness's public address last Friday to the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government was also relayed on the Web with RealAudio (see www.audionet.com/events/ksg/index.html).
Francophone call: French President Jacques Chirac has pledged 20 millions francs (IR£2.3 million) to boost Frenchlanguage services on the Internet. "Let us defend and impose a linguistic plurality on the information highways," he told the opening of the seventh summit of 49 Francophone countries and regions on Friday.
IBM Megadrives: IBM is to start shipping two drives that use its Giant Magnetoresistive (GMR) heads next month. The Deskstar 16GP will have a storage capacity of 3.2 to 16.8 gigabytes, and the Deskstar 14GXP will provide up to 14.4 gigabytes. PCs with the new drives will be available early next year.
Last country online: With projects now in place for setting up Internet services in Gambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sao Tome e Principe and Cap Verde, only five countries remain in the running for the dubious honour of being the last State in Africa to hook up to the Net (see Computimes, November 10th): Comoros, Eritrea, Libya, Republic of Congo, and Somalia.
Sony/AOL deal: Sony Music CDs by Michael Bolton and Celine Dion are to include America Online (AOL) software. In the marketing arrangement between the two companies, the CDs will include 50 free hours of online access. Fans who put the CD into their PCs can sign on and go directly to related Web sites with access to photographs and videos and other information about the artists. AOL aims to hit Net newcomers.
Relief agencies: Reuters' humanitarian arm, the Reuter Foundation, has launched AlertNet, an online news service for the international disaster relief community. Agencies such as Goal, Trocaire, Concern and the Refugee Trust will be using the service use it free of charge.
Pentium flaw: Many Usenet newsgroups were buzzing last week after Intel's confirmation of another flaw in Intel's Pentium chip. Though Intel emphasises that PC users won't encounter the flaw in everyday use, it could be exploited by malicious programmers to freeze individual PCs and bring down network servers.
Shetland case: The case between two Shetland news organisations about whether links to pages constitute a copyright breach has been settled amicably, without a legal precedent being set. Last year, the Shetland Times objected when the Shetland News linked headlines on the News's Web site to stories at the Times's site.
Year 2000
Copy Cats: Novell Ireland says the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem has highlighted the high level of software piracy here. Simon Swale, its "Licensing Investigator" for Ireland, says most companies don't realise that they have been sold illegal copies. Novell will "legitimise" the software by letting customers purchase upgrades to IntranetWare at upgrade prices.
PC Clocks:A spot check by the Sunday Times of PCs and laptops on sale in British high-street stores (including Dixons, Harrods, John Lewis, PC World and Tempo) found that 23 of the 26 machines had real-time clocks that are not Y2Kcompliant. Affected makers included Compaq, Packard Bell, Hewlett-Packard and Olivetti.
136K Hangover: Thames Valley Police has to replace some of its breathalysers at a cost of £136,000 - because they would give out the wrong date on every test in the year 2000. Expect Y2K-savvy defence lawyers to exploit the situation.
Microfile
Predicted no. of pages faxed through the Net rather than over phone lines in 2000[1]:
5.6 billion, up from 44 million this year
Cost of an Internet account in Vietnam :
Sign-up charge - 450,000 dong (IR£24.37);
monthly subscription costs - 50,000 dong (IR£2.70) per subscriber
Per capita income in Vietnam:
around IR£200 per year
Typical cost of a traditional transaction (such as buying a book)[3]: $1
Typical cost of an online transaction: 2 cents
Total cost of an international mailshot by Kenny's Bookshop in Galway before using email[4]: £200
Total cost after it switched to email: 11 pence
Sources: 1 Dataquest; 2 Reuters; 3 IBM's chief executive Louis Gerstner, talking at the Securities Industry Association convention; 4 Kenny's Bookshop.
Modem World
www.cradle-bosnia.org
Fund-raising organisation Cradle's new site about aiding children in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including news about next Thursday's film premiere in Dublin.
www.rte.ie/celtic98/
Rules, entry forms and other info for next year's Celtic Film and Television Festival.
www.iftn.ie/iwentdown
Award-winning Irish film I Went Down.
www.gamegirlz.com
A new webzine giving the gaming industry insights into what girls want to play - and inspiring female players and designers of multiplayer games.
Textbites
"When a musician sits in the secretarial mode required to work at a computer, the resulting music tends to be very dense. If you tell him to work standing up - which is my only message to musicians lately - he starts moving, which is another kind of mu- sical expression, and he puts much less sound into the music. My reservation about the use of computers now also has to do with the fact that what you often see in studios is a band sitting around leafing through magazines while some guy in the corner is pasting stuff together and basically making the record."
--Brian Eno, in a Los Angeles Times interview, November 6th.
Diary
November 17th-18th: Introduction to Multimedia Production course over two evenings at Arthouse in Dublin 2. Other forthcoming Arthouse courses include Advanced Photoshop 4 for Photographers, and Advanced Web Authoring (both November 21st-22nd).
November 28th: Conference of the Irish Society for Information Technology in Agriculture, Spawell Leisure Centre Templeogue, Dublin 16. Topics include operating a Web site, Geographical Information Systems, and Agtel's use of CD-Roms for interactive distance learning. - info: tel Mick Harkin, (01) 2840335, email: harkin@iol.ie
Computimes is edited by Michael Cunningham. Email only (no faxes please) to computimes@irish-times.ie (private correspondence should be marked NOT FOR PUBLICATION)