Amnesty calls for tech companies to act over Chinese repression

Amnesty International has called on technology companies including Microsoft, Cisco, Nortel and Sun Microsystems to prevent their products being used for repression in China. In a report published today Amnesty says that there has been a dramatic rise in the past year in the number of people who have been arrested and imprisoned for expressing opinions online or for downloading information from the Internet in China. This includes some 54 imprisoned for Internet related activities and an unknown number of people spreading information about the SARS outbreak. ...more

Internet Explorer's market share 'falls below 90 per cent'

Dutch web analysis company OneStat.com is reporting that the market share of Internet Explorer has fallen below 90 per cent. The company says that the current metrics of the sites that it monitors show that IE is currently running at 88. ...more

Quark licenses cross-platform installations

Quark has continued the liberalisation of its licensing terms for QuarkXPress by permitting a single licence to be used on both Mac OS X and Windows machines. Until now, a licence could be used to install the application on two machines - nominally a desktop and portable - but they had to be running on the same platform. Last month Quark introduced a License Transfer feature that lets users deactivate and activate the software themselves, so that licences can be moved from one machine to another without the need to call Quark Technical Support. ...more

City of Bath to host wireless experiment

The City of Bath, more famous for its Roman Spa and Jane Austen than the cutting edge of the information society, is to host a series of experiments to test new city-wide services based on wireless technology. The University of Bath is to conduct a research project which will see the historic city offer a range of technologies that could affect the direction of future wireless applications. Costing $1. ...more

April showers backdoor viruses

Trend Micro has issued its virus roundup for April, indicating that virus numbers continue to escalate and increasingly use backdoor components to allow attackers access to personal information. The antivirus company said that it had detected 1700 new viruses in the month - 500 more than in March and 1300 more than in December. Perhaps more cncerning however is the increased proportion that install backdoors on infected systems to give attackers remote access - some 60 per cent. ...more