The Nokia phone defects saga, which has generated much user talkback and wide-ranging coverage, appears to be reaching a resolution of sorts. Last week, the Finnish parent company confirmed a batch of Nokia phones did, in fact, contain faults. Nokia Australia, who has continued to deny reports of phone defects--despite a large number of user complaints and an ongoing investigation by NSW government Department of Fair Trading--has issued statements that these faults apply to Finnish phones only.
Also making headlines in the telco space this week was junior player Dingo Blue, which announced plans to cease trading in June, 2002. The spokesperson for AGL-owned Dingo Blue put the closure down to loss of profitability, but assured punters that staff would not suffer a One.Tel plight, but would be well looked-after financially.
Security was at the IT forefront this week with the release of several new worms, and the discovery of a few more vulnerabilities. Virus-writers took another shot at Microsoft.Net with the release of the Sharpei worm, a Britney Spears photograph wormed its way onto the Web in an attack similar to last year's Anna Kournikova virus, the Klez worm promised to infect computers, but failed to deliver in Australia, and a clever worm, Gibe, posed as a Microsoft security update. However the biggest news of the week was not any of the worms, but a report which stated that a million Web sites are vulnerable to a set of newly-discovered scripting flaws.
Peer-to-peer sites made their way into the news this week, with a number of reports on the trials and tribulations of Morpheus, StreamCast Network's file-swapping service. Days after millions of people had been locked out of the network, the company released a new software tool, based on open-source Gnutella technology. Competitors and industry experts jumped into the media fray to give opinions on why the service had failed, and was struggling to regain its footing. The spotlight on music trading also opened the doors to media success for Sharman Networks, a mysterious Australian company that recently bought Kazaa Media Desktop, and now carries bragging rights as the world's largest file-swapping network. Several smaller services have also attempted to cash-in on the media attention with claims of user increases.
However, this week, the spotlight of public awareness shone most brightly on none other than the 'Optus hacker'. The former Optus employee, who allegedly hacked the Optus database, revealed in an exclusive interview with ZDNet Australia that he would not be attending the court appearance related to the allegations. The 21-year old claimed the charges leveled against him by the carrier were an attempt to scare him away from an earlier unfair dismissal claim.
