The Great Geek Manual

1994
A second court hearing is held concerning the Microsoft consent decree.

1996
The Swedish website of AIK is hacked by “Zero Cool & Acid Burn” of the hacking group “World Domination”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The Swedish website of IT-Kommission is hacked by “Zero Cool & Acid Burn” of the hacking group “World Domination”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

1998
SyQuest Technology Inc., a manufacturer of removable storage devices, suspends operations to consider filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Version 5.2 of the Red Hat Linux operating system, Apollo, is released. Visit the system’s official website.

Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Employment.

1999
EBay is forced to take down their auction website for about an hour for the third day in a row due to “malfunctioning computers.”

Lucent Technologies, Inc. announces plans to cut 1,500 jobs from its United States operations of about 153,000 employees.

Threats of violence found on the Internet compel officials to cancel classes at Eastlake High School near Seattle, Washington.

A United States Federal Appeals court stops prosecutors in New Mexico from enforcing a law that describes transmissions of sexually explicit materials to juveniles as illegal. The court rules that the law “was too broad.”

2000
An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts become the first crew and residents of the International Space Station (ISS), at the start of their four-month mission. After the Soyuz spacecraft links up to the station at 11:00am GMT, William Shepherd, Sergei Krikalev, and Yuri Gidzenko board the station, turned on the lights and life support systems, and proceeded to set up a live television link with Russian mission control. They will remain confined to two of the station’s three rooms until Space Shuttle Endeavor arrives in early December with giant solar panels to power the station.

2001
Microsoft and the US Department of Justice reach a settlement in their anti-trust case, in which Microsoft will be obligated to license Windows uniformly among all of its distributors, to provide third-party developers with application programming interfaces (or “middleware”), and to refrain entering into exclusive partnerships that prohibit other companies from using software alternatives. Under the agreement, a three-person panel would be appointed to monitor Microsoft’s compliance with the agreement. A year later, on November 1, 2002, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly will release a consent decree accepting the agreement, which would remain in effect for five years. Read more at the BBC.

Version 2.2.20 of the Linux operating system is released.

2002
Version 0.1 of Desktop Light Linux (DeLi Linux) 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 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
Intel releases the 3.46GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor, featuring a 1.066GHz bus speed, 2MB cache, and a 800MHz front-side bus. Price: US$999

2005
District Judge Kenneth Grant of the Wimbledon Magistrates Court in London, England rules that an unnamed teenager had not violated the U.K.’s Computer Misuse Act when he launched a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on his former employer, further discrediting the already controversially antiquated 1990 legislation. While the act does explicitly prohibit “unauthorized access” or “unauthorized modification” of computer data, the judge ruled that the five million emails the youth sent where not technically illegal under the wording of the law. Judge Grant stated, “In this case, the individual e-mails caused to be sent each caused a modification which was in each case an ‘authorized’ modification. Although they were sent in bulk resulting in the overwhelming of the server, the effect on the server is not a modification addressed by section 3 (of the CMA).” He noted that “the computer world has considerably changed since the 1990 act,” and that there were few other precedents to refer back to in such matters.

Version 2.1 of the NetBSD operating system is released.

2006
The documentary film Hacking Democracy, directed by Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels and starring Bev Harris, Kathleen Wynne, Andy Stephenson, Harri Hursti, Herbert Hugh Thompson, and Ion Sancho, premieres on HBO. The film explores the hackability of Diebold Election Systems. To demonstrate the system’s vulnerabilities, the filmmakers alter the Microsoft Access database file used to store votes, use a Visual Basic program to alter the system’s alternate vote recording system, and alter the actual code used in the Diebold Accu-Vote memory cards. IMDB listing Visit the film’s official website.

Google begins offering a mobile version of Gmail for mobile phones capable of running Java applications.

Microsoft and Novell hold a press conference to announce a collaboration aimed at improving the inter-interoperability between the SUSE Linux and Windows operating systems. The agreement will be in place until 2012. Read Microsoft’s press release.

Oracle announces that it has agreed to acquire Stellent, Inc., a global provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software solutions, for approximately US$440 million. Visit the game’s official website.

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