1999
The stock of operating system developer Be, Inc reaches an all-time high of US$39 a share (a US$1.4 billion market cap), however, the stock’s value will soon after plummet following the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Visit an archive of the official Be website.
2003
Pepper Computer, Inc. releases the Pepper Pad, a mobile computer with Internet capability that doubles as a handheld game console, in the US. It features a 533MHz AMD Geode LX800 CPU, 256MB RAM, a 20 or 30GB hard disk, a SD/MMC Flash memory slot, a WVGA 7 inch LCD touchscreen, and both Bluetooth 2.0, and Wi-Fi connectivity. Visit the company’s official website.
The space tourist company Space Adventures announces that two American customers have paid to journey aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on its ten day mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
US President George W. Bush“>George W. Bush signs the CAN-SPAM Act into law. The Act makes the sender of unsolicited commercial e-mails (“spam”) liable for penalties of up to US$250 per individual e-mail. Penalties can also be incurred under the Act by falsifying e-mail header data or failing to provide opt-out instructions in legitimate commercial e-mails.
Version 0.5 of Desktop Light Linux (DeLi Linux) operating system is released. DeLi is particularly optimized to run on older personal computers. DeLi Linux requires only a 386 processor with 8MB RAM. However, it works best with a 486 processor and 16MB RAM. A full installation with the full package installed requires nearly 400MB of hard disk space. Visit the system’s official website.
2004
Apple sells its two hundred millionth song through the iTunes Music Store to Ryan Alekman of Belchertown, Massachusetts. The download is a part of The Complete U2 album.
Microsoft acquires GIANT Company Software, Inc., the developer of GIANT AntiSpyware.
Symantec and Veritas Software announce plans for a merger. The US$13.5 billion purchase of Veritas will be the largest acquisition in software industry history.
2005
Google releases a version of Gmail for mobile devices. Gmail Mobile offers most of the features of Gmail developed specifically for smaller, mobile screens. Visit the official Gmail Mobile website.
Eric Lichtblau and James Risen publish an article in the The New York Times entitled “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.” The article alleges that, in response to 9/11, “President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the boarders of the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying” as part of the War on Terrorism. The article alleges that, “Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible ‘dirty numbers’ linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.” The revelation evokes an immediate and widespread debate over the legality of such actions. Many legal experts and politicians conclude that the actions violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), while others contend that the FISA only applies to calls made and received domestically.
2006
Time magazine names “You,” the general public who contribute to such user-generated content websites as MySpace, Wikipedia, and YouTube as its choice for Person of the Year.
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