Network Solutions leaks 85 000 e-mail addresses

The Washington Post reports that Verisign`s Network Solutions - the registrar which controls the lucrative .com top level domain - has leaked the private e-mail addresses of tens of thousands of customers via an e-mail broadcast. The leaked addresses belong to individual users and network administrators who had registered ".org" addresses with the company.

While many of the e-mail addresses on the leaked list are also available from the company`s "WHOIS" servers, they are difficult to gather because they must be extracted from the database one at a time. Network Solutions prohibits, and tries to prevent, wholesale harvesting of addresses from the database.

The broadcast, which sent a list of more than 85 000 addresses all at once, circumvented those protections. Ironically, Verisign, Network Solutions` parent company, uses "The Value of Trust" as its corporate credo, and issues encryption keys and certificates to "secure" Web sites. [The Washington Post]

DivX Networks has unveiled a new version of its compression technology that promises to let Internet users shrink video files on the PC to play back on a range of consumer electronics devices.

The San Diego-based company released DivX 5.0 on Wednesday. DivX 5.0 helps deliver full-motion video over Internet Protocol networks and now also onto DivX-compatible consumer electronics, including DVD players and handheld devices. The code, popular for encoding video files on the PC, is compatible with MPEG-4, an emerging standard for multimedia delivery on applications ranging from downloadable Internet video to satellite radio.

"DivX users can now encode content once using the appropriate profile and be assured that their video will play back on their DivX certified DVD player or portable device at the highest possible quality level," said Kevin Hell, MD of DivX Networks. [ZDNet]

Linux has taken a big step forward in high-end servers with the adoption of software that should help IBM, NEC, SGI and others use the open source operating system better in multiprocessor servers.

The improvement adds some support in Linux for non-uniform memory access, or NUMA, a design for higher-end servers with many processors. Linus Torvalds, the original creator of the operating system, accepted the update this month into version 2.5, the current test version of the software.

The change should help to keep Linux competitive with Unix - many versions of which already include the feature - and with Microsoft`s Windows, which is due to receive it in April. [Cnet]

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