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March 23, 2003
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Four More Succumb to Killer Virus
Four more people died in Asia on Monday from a mystery pneumonia virus, bringing the death toll worldwide to at least 22, and Hong Kong's hospital chief was taken ill with symptoms of the disease.
A nurse and a doctor died in Vietnam and at least two people succumbed in Hong Kong as Singapore said it would quarantine over 700 people in a bid to contain the illness in the city-state.
The virus, spread swiftly around the world by air travelers, has infected hundreds in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, Canada and Germany after first showing up in southern China late last year. Suspected cases have been reported in the United States, Britain and Australia.
A senior Hong Kong doctor blasted the government for not doing enough to control the disease, which has taken a heavy toll on tourism in parts of Asia.
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Critics Blast Cuban Crackdown
Cuba's move to arrest more than 70 dissidents this week was timed to coincide with the focus of worldwide media attention on the Iraq conflict, U.S. government and media watchdog groups charged Friday.
The wave of arrests throughout the country started on March 18, when police rounded up the Communist regime's most vocal critics at their homes and seized computer equipment and printed literature.
In a statement, the government accused the detainees -- who include 26 online journalists -- of being traitors and paid operatives of the United States government.
"The Cuban authorities are clearly taking advantage of the war in Iraq to crack down while the world looks elsewhere," Robert Ménard, the director of the media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders, said in a statement.
Ménard called the arrests "one of the first cases of collateral damage in the second Gulf war."
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Microsoft asks colleges to teach hacking
Microsoft is working with a number of universities in several countries to set up courses that teach students how to write secure code, the company said Friday. The University of Leeds in England is the first to announce such a course.
As part of an 11 week module that will start in January next year, third-year undergraduates at the University of Leeds will be asked to hack into software and fix any security bugs they find, Nick Efford, senior teaching fellow at the School of Computing, University of Leeds, said.
"We are going to get our students to think about software in a different way and look at software with a different perspective. We will give them examples of software and will ask them to perform a security audit of it and identify things that are insecure and then ask them to fix the problems," Efford said.
Students will be confronted with security vulnerabilities such as buffer overruns and taught how to prevent those when writing software. That focus on security in software engineering and the hands-on experience makes the course different from most existing security classes, which typically focus on network security and cryptography, according to Efford.
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Dispute divides key open-source group
A schism has struck the XFree86 movement, an open-source graphics project key to Linux and several other operating systems, resulting in the expulsion, by the core group in charge of the project, of one of its members.
The six-member Core Team of the XFree86 project announced Thursday that it had ejected former member Keith Packard for trying to create a parallel XFree86 project and refusing to discuss reasons for the radical move with the rest of the core team. The core team disclosed the ouster in conjunction with an announcement of a new mailing list to discuss XFree86's future.
In an interview, Packard didn't comment on specific actions but indicated that he was trying to make it easier for interested and qualified programmers to contribute to the XFree86 project. "XFree86 is not currently a friendly place to play," he said.
XFree86, which sends graphics commands for tasks such as drawing windows to video cards, is a crucial part of Linux and several other operating systems. Packard has been leading improvements to font technology.
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AMD claims Intel chipsets cause system crashes
Chip firm AMD has quietly dissed its much bigger competitor Intel by claiming that the latter's 845G/GL chipset crashes peoples' machines.
According to a competitive notice on its website, aimed at its resellers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), Intel's "extreme graphics" technology "struggles and even fails" to run some popular software packages.
The firm did not say which software applications caused the crashes nor did it provide evidence for its claim, but said: "If Intel technology can't handle the needs of today's applications, how will it manage to run the applications of tomorrow?".
A page on its web site captures a screen which claimed that the display device driver "was unable to complete a drawing operation".
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Interactive Internet sends news flashes from 'control room'
Spectators of the US-lead attack on Iraq are being offered an extraordinary virtual coverage from breaking e-mail news flashes to an interactive Internet "control room."
Heavyweight US television networks such as ABC, CNN and CBS, and magazines such as Newsweek are joining battle with Yahoo, America Online/Netscape and MSN.com to bring frontline action to the Internet.
Users pay about US$10 a month for ABCnews.com's premium service, with an interactive control room linked to four cameras: one trained permanently to the destruction in Baghdad.
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Gateway moves into digital projector market
Gateway said on Monday it will introduce two digital projects in the second quarter as the personal computer maker diversifies its product line further, part of its strategy to try to halt more than two years of revenue declines.
Gateway said the two projectors, the Gateway Model 205 SVGA and the Gateway Model 210 XGA, are aimed at the small- and-medium-size business and education markets. The projectors each weigh 3.5 pounds and have the dimensions of a medium-sized book about 2.5 inches thick.
Gateway is not making the projectors itself and has engaged a contract electronics manufacturer to produce them. A Gateway spokeswoman declined to name the manufacturer.
The projector announcement come on the heels of Gateway's third restructuring since 2000. The company said on March 17 it would reduce its staff of 11,100 by 17 percent, or 1,900 positions, and close more than a quarter of its remaining 80 retail stores.
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