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Friday’s Tech News Grab Bag
By admin | February 1, 2008
This is Friday, so no tech article. Instead I’ll be dropping a few comments on the biggest Technology news of the past week. In my mind three items topped the news this past week. The first item was of course the Fiber Optic cables that have been cut around the middle east and Asia.
The current situation is that three cables have been cut, two initially and now a third. For the details on the cuts head over to MarketWatch. Iran is completely cut off from the internet. Egypt, India, and many other parts of the mid east are experiencing huge traffic jams. A quick jaunt over the Internet Traffic Report shows 100% packet loss to Iran. It could take weeks for the cables to be repaired and India’s technology outsourcing firms are taking a big hit trying to reroute their traffic. This is a big test of the Internet’s ability to route around failure and I’m interested in seeing how it shakes out.
The second big issue that caught my attention was Microsoft’s bid to purchase Yahoo. A purchase of this magnitude would put Microsoft in solid shape to challenge Google as the reigning king of the search engine market as well as add yet another revenue stream to the MSFT powerhouse. What it would mean to the rest of us is not yet clear, though you can be certain it would involve Yahoo Toolbar being pre-installed with IE in the future. Regardless, the deal requires EU and US approval so we won’t know anything more for at least a few days, and likely not for several weeks.
The last item I picked up on this week was the fact that we apparently know the identity of the Storm Worm Network operator, and he is supposedly being protected by the Russian government. At least they don’t seem to be cooperating in bringing him to justice.
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