Beijing Olympics to break IT records

The Beijing Olympics are the most IT-enabled yet, with 4 000 IT staff ‑ compared with 3 600 in Athens four years ago ‑ managing venues across cities up to 2 340km apart, reports Computing.co.uk.

The event will attract four million spectators and an estimated four billion television viewers. It has produced a 200 000-strong "Olympic Family" that includes, as well as judges and coaches, 10 500 athletes and 21 600 accredited media representatives.

The 1 000-server IT infrastructure is based on an IT master plan defined in February 2005.

Mozilla warns that a malicious program inserts adware code into a Firefox plug-in that has been downloaded thousands of times over the past three months, says IT World.

Because of a virus infection, the Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 was polluted with adware, says Mozilla security chief Window Snyder. "Everyone who downloaded the most recent Vietnamese language pack since 18 February 2008 got an infected copy. Mozilla does virus scans at upload time but the virus scanner did not catch this issue until several months after the upload."

Mozilla is now going to add additional scans of its software to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, she notes.

The US must develop a communications plan to counter radical Islamic messages on the Internet, according to a Congressional report released yesterday, reports The Associated Press.

Because the Internet's easy access makes it possible for al-Qaida and other terrorist sympathisers to spread their beliefs and recruit new followers, the government needs a co-ordinated and thorough response that it currently lacks, said the senior senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Committee chairman Joe Lieberman said al-Qaida is better at communicating its message to Americans than the US government is at communicating its message.

Responding to the momentum around data portability, MySpace has launched its own "Data Availability" effort with big-name partners Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, and fellow News Corporation unit Photobucket, says PC World.

The initiative's goal is to let MySpace members share their public profile data outside of the walls of the social networking site.

"Today, MySpace no longer operates as an autonomous island on the Internet, by allowing the data that creates the engaging and collaborative experience that is MySpace to now be shared across all the sites our users visit," says Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace.