Klez, BugBear top month-end lists

No surprise here. The Klez and BugBear topped Central Command`s October virus list. The two together accounted for almost 50% of virus reports for the past month. Klez accounted for 23.4% of reports and BugBear 20.9%. Third place went to the Yaha worm which racked up more than 11% of the reports. SirCam and Nimda are still doing the rounds but at 6% and 4.4% respectively, they appear to be slowly falling off the lists they have dominated for close on a year.

"The highlight of the month was BugBear, whose fast and furious outbreak was felt by computer users worldwide," says Steven Sundermeier, product manager at Central Command. "The large volume of submissions during its first week solidified its position in our Dirty Dozen. There was a brief period during the month where BugBear accounted for nearly 60% of all total infection reports."

Picture this: a 46-inch TFT LCD panel. The product, announced yesterday by Samsung, includes true motion picture quality with a short response time of 12ms, a 1280 by 720 high resolution, and a wide 16:9 aspect ratio that makes it well suited to high definition televisions. Samsung says the giant panel sets a new development milestone.

The company has also included its Patterned Vertical Alignment technology which gives users a 170-degree viewing angle in all directions. Mass production of the 46-inch panels is expected to start in the first half of 2003.

Nokia is planning to launch a new Communicator on Monday which will be GPRS-capable as well as tri-band-enabled. TheRegister reports that the Communicator 9230 may well be the tool to revive the Communicator range of phones which have largely slumped in the past few years. While they were initially seized upon by busy executives and system administrators, they have suffered from an impression that they are vastly inferior to many of the personal digital assistants on the market.

In reality, the Communicator is a highly capable device and in many cases includes more and better functionality than competitors such as some of the Handspring models. The Communicator`s downfall is the relatively slow speeds at which it connects to networks. Until now the Communicator was capable of only 9 600bps over GSM, while many competitors could take advantage of high-speed CDMA or GPRS. The new Communicator could, however, change this and revive Nokia`s fortunes in this area. [TheRegister]

This week`s TechNiche:
Legacy Windows unable to run next Office
Virus writer loses appeal
New Palm, Dell plans PDA
Sun joins WS-I board