This, he said, was due to “the significant funding and attraction of world-class principal investigators, which in turn enabled meaningful collaborations to be established with global corporations such as Intel, Huawei, Nokia and Johnson & Johnson”.
“ impact was particularly noticeable in biotechnology and ICT sectors where the initial focus was established,” said Leonard Hobbs, director of Trinity Research & Innovation, of SFI’s early influence. Previously operating as a sub-board of Forfás, Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) was established as a separate legal entity in July.Ī 12-member board, four of whom were from the international research community, was installed and director general Dr Bill Harris emphasised the need to attract top researchers to Ireland. Meanwhile, a new State agency that would have a major influence on Irish R&D stepped out on its own. “As Ireland has achieved a status as a location of excellence for manufacturing we must now achieve a similar reputation as a location of excellence for value-added services,” said Frank Ryan, then executive director of IDA. In the midst of all this, IDA had launched a new Strategic Competitiveness Programme to assist overseas companies undertaking R&D in Ireland. In summer, Intel announced plans for a €18.3m R&D project at its Shannon base and then unveiled a €12m global IT innovation centre in Leixlip. The same month that Google announced its move into Ireland, US semiconductor company Xilinx designated Ireland as its European headquarters. It was a major win for IDA Ireland, helped along by a favourable corporate tax regime and much-needed data centre capacity. The emerging tech giant revealed plans to establish an operations centre in Dublin, creating about 200 jobs. IDA’s FDI winsĢ003 held good news for the Irish tech sector with a decision made regarding Google’s first home from home.
At the close of the year, Yahoo revealed its plans to fight spam with a system requiring authentication of a sender using cryptographic keys. At one point, AOL found the email worm in more than half of 40.5m emails scanned.Ī lot of this malicious effort was done in the name of spam, and the summer of 2003 saw Microsoft take legal action against known spammers. This was followed by Sobig, which broke speed records with its rate of infection.
Then came Blaster, which found multiple ways to infect systems through a Windows vulnerability. Bugbear followed, attempting to steal passwords and other information by accessing keystroke logs. At this point, Slammer had already caused about $1bn in damage through its denial-of-service attacks.Īfter Slammer came Fizzer, a mass-mailing worm that spread through emails, chatrooms and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. In February, it struck out the Dáil voting system. From the start, the highly contagious Slammer worm began spreading in January and was believed to have infected 250,000 computers within a day. In other nefarious online activities, 2003 was a record year for computer worms and viruses. The Irish actor took a case against Jeff Burgar, the cybersquatter known to have registered domains for many celebrities, and won. Though those searching for information on the latest James Bond might have been surprised to find redirected to an unrelated commercial website. To avail of all these new online services, Irish web surfers were finally given options for flat-rate internet access from providers.
Apple’s iTunes Music Store, the first legitimate music download platform, was launched in April and saw more than 1m songs sold in its first week. Speaking of sharing, from the ashes of Napster a new era of legal online file-sharing began to emerge. LinkedIn came to life in May, followed by MySpace in August, and 4chan in October, representing a broad spectrum of online spaces where users could connect and share content. By July, the WHO declared the issue was contained.Ģ003 also saw the word ‘unfriend’ enter the lexicon as something else began to spread rapidly around the world: social media. Originating in China the previous year, a global alert on SARS was issued by the World Health Organization in March 2003. As internet file-sharing becomes a legitimate activity, malicious actors discover that anything can spread quickly when shared online.Īmong the new English words and terms entering the dictionary in 2003 were SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and SARS-CoV, the coronavirus identified as causing the disease.