Report says WorldCom layoffs loom

As many as 11,500 WorldCom employees -- about 15% of the firm's 77,000-member workforce -- are expected to be laid off as part of a company restructuring, a published report says. WorldCom plans to report fourth-quarter earnings this week and could announce the layoffs then, according to The Wall Street Journal. In November, WorldCom announced plans to reorganize to fine-tune its operations, including its intention to create two publicly traded tracking stocks, one to measure businesses the firm considers high-growth, such as data communications, the other to reflect the performance of consumer and long-distance services.

Microsoft, Sun settle Java battle

Microsoft has agreed to pay Sun $20 million to settle a bitter, three-year legal battle over Microsoft's use of Sun's Java programming language. Microsoft says it reached an agreement to settle the October 1997 breach of contract lawsuit that Sun filed, as well as a countersuit filed by Microsoft against Sun shortly afterward. Under terms of the settlement, the Java licensing agreement signed between the companies in 1996 is now terminated, Microsoft says. The license had been due to expire in two months. Microsoft can continue to ship existing products that use Sun's technology, as well as those currently in beta-testing, for seven years. However, all future versions of those products must pass Sun's Java compatibility tests.

EDI transactions seen surging

NACHA, the Herndon, Va., organization that establishes electronic payment rules with input from its 12,000 financial institution members, last week said financial electronic data interchange grew to 96 million EDI transactions last year, up from 79 million in 1999. William Nelson, executive vice president of NACHA, says the rise of online business-to-business systems was contributing to the growth of financial EDI because "payments still need to be made no matter how the transaction is originated."

Security panel gets new members

Just before leaving office, former President Bill Clinton appointed 21 individuals to the National Infrastructure Assurance Council (NIAC), the organization under the Commerce Department set up to advise the White House on how best to protect the nation's information infrastructure from attack. The appointments include Wellington Webb, mayor of Denver; Lawrence LaRocco, a lobbyist and former Democratic congressman from Idaho; and Jack Quinn, co-chairman of consulting firm Quinn Gillespie & Associates in Chevy Chase, Md., and once counsel to Clinton and former chief of staff to former Vice President Al Gore. Allen Paller, director of the security consultancy SANS Institute in Bethesda, Md., and a newly appointed NIAC member, says he wasn't aware of negative fallout from the appointments, but added that asking "well-meaning, nontechnical people to guide the actions needed to solve a thorny technical problem" was questionable.

Travelocity hits a privacy pothole

Travelocity.com last week inadvertently exposed the names and addresses of 44,000 contest participants on its Web site by mistakenly leaving a work file with the contestants' names on an older server that was converted into a Travelocity.com production server. "I'm embarrassed to say that a file that should have routinely been deleted was not," says Jim Marsicano, executive vice president of sales and service.

Illinois taps Entrust for PKI

The state of Illinois last week awarded public-key infrastructure product vendor Entrust a multimillion-dollar government contractt to provide PKI certificates and servers to Illinois agencies. Mary Reynolds, Illinois CTO, says the state this year plans to distribute free digital certificates to citizens as a form of online identification for signing documents electronically. The state is finalizing what will be one of the first online applications to make use of digital certificates for citizens and Illinois government employees.

Bush taps Powell to be FCC head

President George W. Bush last week nominated Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Michael Powell as chairman of the agency. He is the son of the new U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. The younger Powell has been a commissioner since November 1997, and his nomination was expected. Powell will succeed William Kennard.

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