ShadowRAM: IT industry rallies for sick kids; The Shadow not on poor Paris’ list

COMMENTARY: Rumours, Truth and Innuendo in the IT channel.

IT industry rallies for sick kids

IT companies are once again being asked to contribute to this year’s IT Fund for Kids ‘Putting IT back’ campaign to raise funds to help seriously ill and autistic children. The campaign will be held in March and has two key components.

First, people who work in the IT industry are asked to donate a day’s pay (or nominated amount) through their payroll and each organisation is asked to match their employee’s contributions.

And a new ‘Know IT All’ Challenge will ‘pit IT industry minds together’ in an online IQ test that is followed up by an industry dinner on 1 April where company teams and individuals can put themselves to the test.

The IT Funds for Kids wants to raise at least $350,000 in 2005 and reverse the trend of falling contributions over the past four years.

The money raised would be a drop in the ocean given that the total income in the Australian IT industry in 2002-03 was a fat $90 billion, according to Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) figures. C’mon guys, help out!

Amanda Wood at the Starlight Children’s Foundation has the details and can be contacted on
(02) 9437 4311 or at awood@starlight.org.au.

The Shadow not on poor Paris’ list

The Shadow was very distraught at being left off Paris Hilton’s hacked-and-put-on-the-internet T-Mobile telephone address book to care much about anything recently.

The star of television and bootleg internet videos -- who had the phone numbers for Vin Diesel, Twiggy and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom -- had all her data thrown open for public consumption.

The US Secret Service was all over the case and had its agents contacting one offshore web host after another to have the personal information of the rich and semi-famous taken offline.

What the agents didn’t take into account, though, was that even though web hosts were quick to take down the hacked phone numbers from various websites, Ms Hilton’s hacked data remained in plain view on the web for most of the week through the magic of Google cache. Oops.