The European Parliament has voted to ask countries with nuclear capabilities to disable their nuclear weapon alert systems over the New Year in order to avoid accidental launches caused by Y2K. The parliament is to appeal to the US and Russia in particular to guard against possible errors in systems unable to recognise the date change. Although US and Russian military officials are to spend New Year's Eve together in an effort to avoid accidental launches, the EU appeal is an attempt to further safeguard against unplanned strikes and is aimed specifically at countries in central and Eastern Europe, Turkey, Russia and members of the former USSR.
VISION VOTE: The Irish Internet Association (IIA) has announced the 10 nominations for its inaugural IIA Net Visionary Award. The nominees include Barry Flanagan formerly of IOL, Fran Rooney of Baltimore, Nua's Gerry McGovern and Seamus Conaty of the Electronic Publishing Division of The Irish Times. Online voting is open to the public at www.iia.ie/events/award.html until 6.00 p.m. this evening.
SOMM MISTAKE: The 1998 conviction of the former head of CompuServe in Germany for failing to block access to child pornography sites on the Internet has been overturned. Felix Somm was convicted of complicity in 13 cases of distributing illegal pornography by not blocking CompuServe customer access to the sites. A state court in Munich reversed the conviction on appeal.
NET PROPHET: Eric Raymond, one of the most influential voices in modern computing through his advocacy of open-source software development, is to visit Dublin this week. He will address TCD's Internet Society in the Ernest Walton Theatre of the college's Arts Building at 7 p.m. on Thursday on "Freedom, Power and Software: What the Internet teaches us about ethics and politics". A collection of his essays, including the open-source manifesto The Cathedral & the Bazaar has just been published by O'Reilly and he will sign copies after his talk. Nonmembers are welcome, admission £3. (See Computimes next week for an interview with Eric Raymond.) Info - www.netsoc.tcd.ie/events/raymonde.html
NEIN KAMPF: Amazon.com has said it will no longer ship Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf to buyers in Germany. This followed a complaint by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and an inquiry by German authorities on whether the shipments violate German law prohibiting the sale of the book.
PRYING GAME: The British government has pulled encryption controls and email spying powers from the Electronic Communications Bill. It would have forced people to give encryption keys to police on demand or face conviction.
ARGONNE FOR LINUX: The US Department of Energy's Argonne National Lab has based its largest supercomputer system - a 256-node cluster - on Intel hardware and the Linux OS. Each node will be a dual-processor server from VA Linux Systems, giving a total of 512 processors.
NEW DEAL: Palm Computing and Sony have announced an agreement to collaborate to expand the capabilities of the Palm platform. They aim to create a next-generation of handheld audio-visual consumer electronics products.
COMDEX WINNER: The Best of Show award at Comdex in Las Vegas last week went to an 11-month-old startup called Wireless Mountain Laboratories. Its Spider system allows companies to track equipment within a building and also off-site.
DIGITAL PRIZES: Xilinx and UCD are to establish a computer science award for hardware/software co-design. The Digital Design Medal will go to the student with the best continuous practical work, including final-year research papers.
EIRCELL GOES COMPAQ: Compaq is to manage Eircell's IT infrastructure and application support for the next five years. The contract will involve over 40 Compaq staff, plus managers.
XL LINK: Esat Telecom is providing a telecoms network to XL Capital worldwide in a contract worth $5 million over three years. It will link 25 XL Capital sites in 10 countries.
IN BRIEF... At the opening ceremony of NetD@ys Europe 99 in Helsinki 3Com announced plans to donate $1 million to schools across Europe to encourage the establishment of educational online projects. . . Bootstrap has completed the installation of a Cisco-based Layer 3 VLAN solution at Banta Global Turnkey in Cork. . . IT Solutions has signed an agreement to become a distributor of Blue Pumpkin workforce management software in the UK and Ireland. . . Denis O'Brien and Leslie Buckley together have taken a majority shareholding in Internet advertising company, ICAN. . . Microsoft has decided that its instant messaging service will no longer communicate with America Online's AOL Instant Messenger. . . Esat Net has bought 51 per cent of Net developer Labyrinth for £3.75 million. . .