News Wrap: World Economic Forum, Sun, Vatican

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has admitted that a security breach to its website may have exposed the credit card details of its 27,000 members, who are mostly political and business leaders. The news came to light after an unidentified group of hackers sent a CD containing the information to a Zurich newspaper, SonntagsZeitung.

Executives who attended the Forum, which was held last week in Davos, Switzerland, and who may have been affected by the breach, include Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. Although the WEF said that all credit card accounts had been cancelled, the stolen data also included telephone numbers, email addresses, payment details, hotels and room numbers, and the arrival and departure times of people usually surrounded by high security.

WEF communications director, Charles McLean, refused to speculate as to whether the hack was part of an anti-globalisation protest. He was quoted as saying: "We are taking this incident very seriously and are bringing in outside experts to clear up what happened."

Sun to reveal ecommerce software plans

Sun is scheduled to unveil its Smart Services roadmap for web services later today in San Francisco, California. SmartServices will be based on iPlanet's application server, Java, and a range of third party components.

The offering will enable developers to build internet-based packages that are accessed using a browser, and which can hook up to standalone systems and also run over a range of different networks. Sun will also unveil new Java application programming interfaces for XML.

The vendor is entering the web services arena hot on the heels of IBM, Hewlett Packard and Oracle, which have already made similar announcements.

Vatican nominates Patron Saint of internet

The Vatican has chosen the internet's patron saint, after narrowing the nominees down from a long list of candidates that have some link to technology.

It plumped for Saint Isidore of Seville, a seventh century researcher who wrote the world's first encyclopaedia, the Etymologies, which summarised medicine, maths, rhetoric, grammar, history and theology.

Other possibles who didn't make the grade included Saint Rita of Cascia, St Phillip the Apostle, Canon Padre Pio and even the Archangel Gabriel.