The Weekly Round-Up: 04.07.03

Anyone for tennis?

Welcome to today's play on Wimbledon's centre court, with number one seed Bill Gates taking on a gaggle of security experts. Watching the game from Henman Hill are a throng of concerned system administrators.

Mr Gates to serve: Microsoft has bought Romanian anti-virus firm GeCAD and is planning to enter the security market as a player, possibly bundling the software with Windows. 15 - love.

Murmurs of discontent from Henman Hill.

Network Associates president Gene Hodges comes straight back with a baseline winner: "A lot of consumers are going to have real concerns about the company which is creating all the holes becoming the company which is patching and protecting these holes." Fifteen all.

Roar of approval from the system admins.

News breaks that the company plans to offer subscription-based update service as Paul Wood, chief information analyst at MessageLabs, suggests: "For small to medium sized businesses any Microsoft product could be a good one-stop solution."

30 - 15 and a pause in play as the umpire waits for a Rusedski-esque tirade of abuse from Henman Hill to die down.

Quickly, Wood bravely rallies with: "The enterprise players however are still going to want to shop around... I'd be very surprised if Microsoft was able to take a dominant position in the enterprise sector. The market is very well established and the major players are all very well known - but stranger things have happened." 30-30.

30 -30. Polite applause from the Hill.

NAI's Hodges rejoins the attack with a lovely drop shot: "Microsoft will make in-roads into the consumer market. But I don't think they're going to find much success working with the large corporates."

30-40. Break point and the system admins are edgy.

Alyn Hockey, director of research at email filtering specialist Clearswift: "A lot depends on the level of education for the user. A lot of home users, who perhaps don't read the press, will just think 'Great it's free, I'll have it as long as it comes bundled in with everything else'."

Deuce. And Hockey unleashes a tricky lob: "There is a cynical view that this acquisition will have appealed to Microsoft for a number of reasons..."

Ears are pricked on Henman Hill as the ball sails gracefully over Bill's head sending him scampering to the back of the court like a tousle-haired, bespectacled gazelle.

"While the acquisition is good for Microsoft in terms of increasing its intellectual property, it is also bad news for Linux users."

A hush from the Hill...

"GeCAD made one of the best Linux security solutions and cynics will say that Microsoft's move was aimed at deliberately scuppering anti-virus development on the Linux platform."

Play is suspended as the system admins, led by the open source contingent, pour off Henman Hill en masse and invade centre court wielding flaming brands and boxed copies of Red Hat Linux.

Things look grim for the Microsoft chairman until he's rescued at the last minute by Steve Ballmer swooping down in a Microsoft .Net-branded helicopter leaving one degree of separation between Bill's snazzy Dunlop trainers and the clutching hands below.

The Round-up will be watching events unfold with a keen eye. Many think that consumers and business users alike may not be able to make the leap of faith required to welcome Microsoft into the market, suggesting the Redmond behemoth is too synonymous with security flaws to be taken seriously when it comes to security solutions.

However, as Network Associates' Wood claims "stranger things have happened", and technology is a lot like tennis in that you can't take anything for granted.

Except for the absolute certainty that having despatched a series of worthy opponents and inflating the British public's expectation levels to unreasonably high proportions Tim Henman will undoubtedly get knocked out by a chap who looks like Otto the bus driver from The Simpsons.

Let us know what you think...

Webmasters around the world who were looking forward to a quiet weekend should think again and shore up their sites' defences.

The US government has warned that crackers (malicious hackers) and script kiddies plan to commit mayhem on the internet this weekend in an organised website defacement content.

The contest sees higher points awarded for sites that are run on less common servers. The winner of the contest will be the group that defaces 6,000 servers in the shortest amount of time. Defacement of Mac and HP-UX systems score higher points than Windows and Linux sites.

Security experts believe the website with the rules was created by Brazilian script kiddies.

How things change. Once upon a time Brazilian youngsters dreamed about emulating Pele, Zico and Socrates and playing in the football World Cup. Now it seems all they want to do is appear in the Matrix...

And finally, the Round-up has been berated a couple of readers in the last two weeks after it wrote stories about computer game madness as well as references to rude domain names. 'Smutty' and 'childish' were some of the allegations made. They hurt but the point is well taken. Thanks for the feedback.

With that in mind we close this week's Round-up with story about a pair of lesbians and a little pot of sperm.

A UK couple have conceived a child using sperm bought from aptly named online sperm bank ManNotIncluded.com - the bank that likes to say "Yes! Yes! Yes!"

Jaime Saphier and Sarah Watkinson purchased their baby raw materials from the company for £830.

ManNotIncluded allows prospective mums and dads, or mums and mums in this case, to delve its database for a designer donor, selecting a candidate based on criteria such as preferred race, eye colour, height and weight.

A second UK couple are expecting to have the service's very first baby in the coming week, while 18 other couples around the world have reportedly conceived babies using sperm purchased through ManNotIncluded.

However, not everyone is impressed by the service and some have taken issue. Dr Anthony Cole, chairman of the Medical Ethics Alliance, told the BBC this week that the situation raises concerns about the true nature of parenthood.

"There is concern that it is wholly undermining some of the building blocks of a stable society," he reportedly said.

It's seems there's nothing you can't buy online these days, with the range of daft things you can pick on auction sites varying from the sublime to the ridiculous. Despite our increasing confidence in ecommerce the vast majority of us would balk at buying the building blocks of our next of kin online.

silicon.com is offering one lucky reader the chance to win a stunning star prize (which may or may not be a mouse mat) for the best suggestion for a name for Jaime and Sarah's little cyber-tyke. We'd also like to know your most extravagant or outlandish online purchase to date.

Answers on a virtual postcard to editorial@silicon.com

Until next week, the Round-up will be glued to the TV, watching Otto from The Simpsons win the world's greatest tennis tournament.