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A Year Ago Today: UK government e-tags convicts

By Dominic Maher

Published: Monday 17 January 2000

A year ago today, the UK government launched an electronic tagging system for prisoners in a move to free up much needed space within prisons.

Up to 4,000 inmates were released to serve-out the last two months of sentences remotely. To qualify, offenders had to be over 18 and serving sentences of under four years.

Meanwhile, Network Solutions - the US group responsible for the world's top-level domain names - admitted to delays in its registration process. Whereas it normally took hours to register a name, the process was taking days.

Staying with domain names, German carmaker, Porsche, filed charges against 130 Web sites for infringing on its trademarks. Submitted to the US District Court of Virginia, the sites could even be deleted without the owners being informed. Network Solutions also agreed to hand over domain name certificates to be held by the court throughout the trial.

On the contract front, Wang Government Service won a $453m, 10-year deal with Lockheed Martin Space Operations to consolidate various WANs at NASA. Part of a £3.4bn relationship with Lockheed called the Consolidated Space Operations Contract (CSOC), the deal become one of the first WAN outsourcing deals with the US government.