According to a statement posted on its website, Stage6, a site that hosts videos made by users, has decided to shut down on February 28, 2008 because they no longer have the resources to keep it online.

“Why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it’s really as simple as that,” said Tom, who is also known as ‘Spinner’ in the statement on the website and an employee of DivX which is a host of the website’s service.

Videos can no longer be uploaded, but will be able to be watched and downloaded until February 28.

Stage6 made its debut in 2006. They hosted movie clips, television shows and music videos along with content made by the site’s users.

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IBM has announced a new project called Kittyhawk, which entails constructing a global-scale shared supercomputer capable of hosting the entire Internet on one platform as an application. Currently the Internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks.

IBM has prepared a white paper detailing the project. The Kittyhawk will be based on the previously developed IBM supercomputer called Blue Gene. In theory the Kittyhawk will have up to 16,384 racks, providing a maximum of 67.1 million cores with 32 petabytes of memory.

According to the introduction of the white paper, “Project Kittyhawk’s goal is to explore the construction and implications of a global-scale shared computer capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application. This research effort is in an early stage, so this paper describes our conjectures and our ongoing work rather than a completed set of results.”

The Kittyhawk project has created much discussion in the technology community. One of the main topics of discussion is the comparison of Kittyhawk to Skynet the fictional supercomputer, in the movie series Terminator, which attempts to destroy all human life and take over Earth.

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United States software giant Microsoft has launched a bid to buy search giant Yahoo! for $44 billion or $31 a share.

The deal, which is half in cash and half in stock, if accepted by Yahoo’s shareholders would end up creating a major competitor to Google, the search giant that currently dominates the Internet search market.

Additional Details Here

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Service to millions of Internet users in the Middle East and Asia has been disrupted, following damage to undersea cables.
The cables, SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG, which provide communications services for various countries - including India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia - is believed to have been damaged by a ship attempting to moor off Egypt on Wenesday 30th January.

One day later, on February 1, 2008, the FALCON cable was also reported cut 56 km off Dubai.

Additional Details Here

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