PCIN.net Update

From CNet:

The European Commission on Friday held out the possibility that Microsoft may be fined up to 5 percent of its average daily turnover unless it complies soon with a European Union antitrust decision.
Last month, Microsoft lost a months-long court bid to suspend sanctions for breaking the law and said it would offer a stripped-down version of Windows and share some protocols with rival makers of servers by early February.
‘We obviously expect the remedies to be complied with within a matter of weeks–measured from last December–rather than months,’ EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said Friday.

From TechRepublic:

A federal judge on Friday sentenced a 19-year-old Minnesota man to 18 months in prison for unleashing a variant of the MSBlast worm.
Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, of Minnesota was ordered to serve his time in a minimum security prison and participate in 10 months of community service.
FBI agents arrested Parson at his home in Hopkins, Minn., in August 2003, just two weeks after his ‘MSBlast.B’ variant began to tunnel into Microsoft Windows-based computers. His variant of the worm infected approximately 48,000 computers that had not yet applied an earlier released patch.

From USA Today:

The FBI’s failure to roll out an expanded computer system that would help agents investigate criminals and terrorists is the latest in a series of costly technology blunders by government over more than a decade.
Experts blame poor planning, rapid industry advances and the massive scope of some complex projects whose price tags can run into billions of dollars at U.S. agencies with tens of thousands of employees.
‘There are very few success stories,’ said Paul Brubaker, former deputy chief information officer at the Pentagon. ‘Failures are very common, and they’ve been common for a long time.’