1994
The Walt Disney Company creates the Disney Interactive division, to develop and license interactive multimedia products on CD-ROM for computers, and cartridges for Sega and Nintendo video game systems. The products will be distributed by Buena Vista Home Video. Visit the company’s official website.
1997
Fastcomm Australasia is hacked by “Magica de Oct”. View an archived version of the webpage here.
Texas Instruments announces that it has developed a manufacturing technique to create integrated circuits using copper wiring made of a material called “xerogel” rather than the traditional aluminum to connect transistors in chips. The company predicts that the approach could lead to processors that are ten times faster than current chips, while using less power. The announcement comes just weeks after International Business Machines (IBM) announced the development of the first such technology and Motorola announced a similar, competing technology.
Tourne.com is hacked by “Claire Danes.”
The Sydney University of Technology’s physics server is hacked by “Magica”.
1999
The Financial News reports that the Yangzhou Intermediate People’s Court in the eastern Jiangsu province of China has rejected an appeal of Hao Jingwen and has upheld his death sentence. Hao and his brother, Hao Jinglong, hacked into Industrial and Commercial Bank of China computers and transfered 720,000 yuan ($87,000) into accounts they had set up under phoney names. In September of 1998, they withdrew 260,000 yuan of those funds. Hao Jinglong’s original sentence to death was suspended in return for his testimony.
Reuters news agency reports that the first of an anticipated wave of Y2K worms and viruses has been discovered. The W32/Mypics.worm is passed along unbeknownst by unsuspecting e-mailers. It is designed to entice recipients to open the file and instructs infected computers to disable themselves.
2000
Amazon.com crashes for forty minutes as a result of an “internal software mix-up.”
Apple Computer announces that slow holiday sales will contribute to its first quarterly operating loss in three years.
2001
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission issues a statement saying the games industry has “made substantial progress in ending the marketing of violent content to children”.
2005
Using nanotechnology, scientists at Bar-Ilan University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology produce a polyyne comprised of acetylene units, which is forty times harder than diamond, which was previously the hardest substance known to man.
2006
Apple launches iTunes in New Zealand.
NASA announces that it plans to build a permanently occupied station on the Moon, and shuttle persons to it regularly by the year 2020.
Version 1.2 of the Pandora FMS (Free Monitoring System) is released. It is a free set of programs, licensed under the GNU General Public License, that analyzes the status and performance of several parameters of various applications, hardware systems, operating systems, and servers, such as databases, firewalls, proxies, routers, or web servers. Visit the application’s official website.
2008
In Australia, Ericsson and Telstra successfully place the first “data call” ever made over a commercially deployed 21Mbps Evolved HSPA (eHSPA) network at 4:00pm AEST on the 21Mbps eHSPA/HSPA+/HSPA Evolution network. Previously, such technology has only been demonstrated in laboratories. Read more on ITWire.
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