Router start-up Allegro Networks last week tapped industry veteran and former Bay Networks CEO Dave House as its new chairman, president and CEO. House was also president of Nortel Networks following Nortel's acquisition of Bay Networks in 1998, and one of the key architects of microprocessor development and marketing at Intel. House assumes his new position at Allegro immediately. He was one of the key drivers behind the "Intel Inside" marketing campaign that made the microprocessor company a household name. Allegro was founded last year to develop a new router platform that would offer service providers an alternative to capital-intensive infrastructure build-outs.

UUNET seeing management shifts

WorldCom is attempting to better integrate its UUNET division with the entire company, according to a company spokeswoman. But these management shifts may have cost WorldCom two key executives. Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist Michael O'Dell, and COO Kevin Boyne have left the company, Boyne in December and O'Dell just recently. Both were with UUNET for more than six years. Former UUNET CEO Bob Hartnett is now WorldCom's president of business markets. Hartnett, a 19-year WorldCom veteran, was named UUNET CEO only six months ago.

DDOS culprit pleads guilty

The 16-year-old Canadian computer hacker who calls himself Mafiaboy last week pleaded guilty to having launched last February's crippling distributed denial-of-service attacks on the CNN, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon.com Web sites, among others. According to lawyers close to the case, he pleaded guilty to 64 out of 72 charges brought against him, including breaking into computer systems across the U.S. and the world to install the distributed denial-of-service agent code that let him launch several denial-of-service attacks at once from his computer. Mafiaboy is free pending sentencing in about three weeks. Predictive Systems vice president of cyberlaw, Mark Rasch, says it's likely Mafiaboy will serve two years in a juvenile detention center under Canadian law. Mafiaboy had originally pleaded innocent to the distributed denial-of-service and hacking charges, but when faced with trial last Thursday in Montreal, he changed his mind. Last year, Canadian and U.S. law enforcement agencies began investigating Mafiaboy after he bragged in an Internet chat room he had launched the distributed denial-of-service attacks in February.

Radnet closing its doors

Portal software maker Radnet took a third strike last week, closing its doors in Wakefield, Mass., and laying off 95 employees. Founded by former Lotus executive Don Bulens in 1995, the company originally tried to offer a Web-based alternative to Lotus Notes called WebShare. Radnet was sued by Lotus for allegedly stealing executives away from the groupware giant. The company regrouped in 1999 attempting to gain a slice of the hyped corporate portal market, but burned through its $43 million in financing.

Palm CTO leaving the company

Palm's Chief Technology Officer Bill Maggs has resigned. A replacement for Maggs, who left Internet infrastructure company Inktomi to join Palm about a year ago, has not been named, says Palm spokesman Paul Rogers. "We do not know exactly when and where Bill will be going, but we do know that he won't be going far," Rogers says. Maggs will serve as a consultant for the Santa Clara firm. Maggs' resignation was announced by Palm CEO Carl Yankowski in a company e-mail distributed last week, in which he said Maggs will "pursue outsside opportunities related to the next phase of the Internet."

Melissa redux

Computer virus watchers are warning of a variant of the infamous Melissa virus that slips by detection software because of an altered file format. McAfee, a division of Network Associates, has rated this variant of Melissa as a "low to medium risk," which means it is not yet considered as threatening as the original version of the virus, which is still rated "high risk." Melissa was first discovered in March 1999. The virus quickly spread by forwarding itself using the address book of Microsoft's Outlook e-mail program installed on the victim's computer. The variant spreads in exactly the same way.

Verizon sued over slow provisioning

A group of dissatisfied Verizon DSL customers sued the regional Bell operating company last week over lengthy provisioning periods. The class action suit, filed in the U.S. Superior Court for the District of Columbia, says Verizon used false advertising to lure customers to its DSL services. The suit alleges Verizon knew it would be unable to provide services in a timely manner and that the service provider's infrastructure is unable to cope with the 3,000 new customers it adds each day.

Network World

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