1999
Konami releases Castlevania 64 for the Nintendo 64. Castlevania 64 is the eleventh game to bear the Castlevania name, but the fifteenth game in the series, all of which are loosely based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. Castlevania 64 is the first game in the series to implement three dimensional graphics. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: T (Teen)
2000
China’s State Bureau of Secrecy issues a twenty-article circular banning discussion of state secrets over the Internet, through e-mail, in chat rooms, or on bulletin boards. All content and service providers are required to undergo a “security certification” prior to operation.
Sun Microsystems releases the Solaris 8 operating system.
The W3C releases Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML).
2001
Hackers deface the official Vatican Radio website.
Scientists announce that they have successfully sequenced the 430 million base pairs of the rice genome. Rice is only the second plant genome to have been successfully sequenced, following the Arabidopsis, a mustard-like weed related to cabbage sometimes called “the laboratory mouse of the plant world.” However, it’s the first important plant to have its genome decoded, as rice is a staple food for a large portion of the world’s population. The Arabidopsis has a much smaller genome than rice, with only 125 million base pairs. In comparison, the human genome is about 3.1 billion base pairs long.
Season 1.0 of BattleBots premieres on The Comedy Network in Canada. Visit the official Battlebots website.
2003
The chess match between Garry Kasparov and Deep Junior 7 begins in New York with Kasparov winning the first game. Deep Junior will win the third game, and the other four games will end in draws, leaving the match a draw on February 7, 2003. This match is the first competition between a man and a machine sanctioned by FIDE (World Chess Federation). Deep Junior was programed over ten years by Amir Ban and Shay Bushinksy of Tel Aviv. It is capable of evaluating three million moves a second, fifteen moves deep.
2004
Mydoom, also known as Novarg, is first detected at approximately 13:00UTC. It will rapidly become the fastest-spreading e-mail worm in history, shattering the record previously held by the Sobig worm. For a few hours in the morning in North America, the worm will spread so rapidly that the entire internet’s performance will be effected. Web page load times will be slowed by roughly fifty percent at one point. Security firms will later estimate that Mydoom accounts for roughly one in ten e-mail messages at this time. Once infected, approximately a quarter of infected computers become part of a massive distributed denial-of-service attack against the SCO group. Many will later speculate that the worm was written on commission, by a profession Russian programmer, in retaliation against the SCO Group for its recent legal actions again Linux, though none of this speculation will ever be definitively confirmed. The worm is named by Craig Schmugar of McAfee, one of the first professionals to discoverer the worm. He named it for a line of code that included the word “mydom”. He will later be quoted in Newsweek as explaining that, “It was evident early on that this would be very big. I thought having ‘doom’ in the name would be appropriate.”
Version 3.0.1 of the Fermi Linux LTS operating system, “Feynman,” is released. Visit the official Fermi Linux Website.
2005
Sun Microsystems releases 1,673 patents to open-source developers working on OpenSolaris, following the release of the source code to Solaris 10. It is the largest single release of patents into open source in history. Read more at the official Sun Microsystems website.
2006
The city of Los Angeles files a lawsuit against Take-Two Interactive, the publisher of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, accusing the company of failing to disclose the game’s sexual content, particularly the Hot Coffee minigame.
Jeffrey Brett Goodin, age 45, is arrested on federal charges alleging that he sent thousands of e-mails to America Online users that appeared to be from AOL’s Billing Department which prompted subscribers to send personal information and credit card numbers, which were later used by the defendant to make unauthorized purchases. Read more at the U.S. Department of Justice’s website.
Sony announces that it will discontinue production of the AIBO (Artificial Intelligence roBOt) robotic pet dog.
Western Union discontinues its telegram service.
2007
The consumer electronics retailer Best Buy opens its first location in China with a grand opening. The company claims that it is the largest Best Buy in the world. The move comes on the heels of Best Buy’s 2006 acquisition of China’s fourth-largest appliance chain, Jiangsu Five Star Appliance Co., Ltd.
Gen Con announces that it is canceling its annual Anaheim show, Gen Con So Cal, due to a lack of growth in the event’s attendance in the face of competing shows’ growth. Visit the official Gen Con website.
MGM releases the fantasy action film Blood and Chocolate, directed by Katja von Garnier and starring Agnes Bruckner, Hugh Dancy, Olivier Martinez, and Bryan Dick, to 1,200 U.S. theaters. In it, a young teenage werewolf is torn between honoring her family’s secret and her love for a man. The film will be a financial failure at the box office, grossing only US$2,074,300 domestically in its opening weekend. Visit the film’s official website. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hr 38 min
2010
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, accuses the U.S. of attempting to use the Internet to confront the Islamic Republic and denounces such tactics as a sign of Washington’s frustration. “This decision shows the height of the enemy’s frustration. They have spent tens of billions of dollars in the past (in confronting Iran), but have achieved no results,” he said in a speech. The remarks come after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton challenged Beijing and other foreign governments to end Internet censorship, naming China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others as leading suppressors of on-line freedom and after the U.S. Senate ratified a plan to help curb “censorship in the Islamic Republic” in the wake of the 2009 Iranian presidential election. The Victims of Iranian Censorship (VOICE) Act allocated US$50 million to fund measures “to counter Iranian government efforts to jam radio, satellite, and Internet-based transmissions” by expanding Farsi language broadcasts, supporting Iranian Internet, and countering government efforts to block it. Read more about The VOICE Act.
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