SMTP must go, says its creator

The protocol that has defined e-mail for more than two decades may have a fatal flaw - it is too trusting. Developed when the Internet was used almost exclusively by academics, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP, assumes you are who you say you are, reports CNet.

The site reports that Suzanne Sluizer, a co-author of SMTP`s immediate predecessor and a visiting lecturer at the University of New Mexico, said in an interview that technologists should "sit down and think about what [they] want and come up with something new".

A New Jersey teenager used his cellphone camera to take pictures that led police to his would-be kidnapper, reports CNN. The quick-thinking and snap-happy 15-year-old boy used his Sprint cellphone camera to snap a man who allegedly tried to lure him into his car, leading to the man`s arrest, police say.

The boy, who escaped from his alleged captor after a struggle, gave pictures of the man and his car licence plate to police in Clifton, New Jersey. A suspect was arrested the next day.

Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) gained a pinch of US market share year-on-year against rival, Intel, in a market that seems to be improving, reports ZDNet. AMD saw its market share in the second quarter of 2003 inch up to 15.7%, a tenth-of-a-point increase from its market share of 15.6% in the same period a year ago, according to statistics compiled by Mercury Research.

Intel, meanwhile, saw its market share slip to 82.5% in the second quarter, from 82.8% in the same period the year before. Other manufacturers, a grouping that includes Transmeta, increased their collective market share from 1.7% to 1.8%.

French researchers claim to have pinpointed a problem in wireless LAN (WLAN) technology that could severely impair the performance of newer high-speed networks, reports Armnet.

Engineering experts at France`s Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris have demonstrated how a slow device connected to a WLAN hotspot can cause an entire network to drop to a slower speed, citing a common channel access method as the cause, according to researcher Andrzej Duda.