2-12-2000 Essential news of the week

Catch up on the essential news of this week and find out what the movers and shakers of the IT industry have been up to by clicking on the stories below. A breakthrough for encryption and authentication Stay at home and watch Java on the (interactive) TV First dot-com success for unions? A guide for Children to navigate the Internet Oftel investigates BT Surf and Talk pricing 3dfx cuts prices for Christmas Cheap plastic chips on the horizon Don't forget, we welcome your comments. Just click on a story and go for the 'Comments' link on the right-hand side of the screen. ...more

Can Deep Fritz 7 emulate Deep Blue

Four years ago the chess world was shocked when Deep Blue, an IBM RS/6000-based parallel computer, beat the then world champion Garry Kasparov. Now Deep Blue's successor, Deep Fritz 7, is to challenge Kasparov's successor, Vladimir Kramnik, in what has become known as the Brains in Bahrain. Kramnik took Kasparov's unofficial though widely recognised world title in November 2000 but Deep Fritz 7 will be a different proposition, capable of analysing over six million moves per second and already victorious over Deep Blue, Kasparov and official world champion Vishwanathan Anand. ...more

And also today (17-August-2001), for the record...

Here, in brief, are some of the day's other stories. No delay, MS told A US federal appeals court has rejected Microsoft's bid to have the anti-trust hearings delayed, pending its bid to have the case heard before the Supreme Court. The case will be sent back to a lower court in a week's time to see what "remedy" should be applied to Microsoft. ...more

Logitech buys out Labtec

PC peripheral specialist Logitech announced yesterday that it has agreed to purchase fellow computing accessories company Labtec. The cash and shares deal sees Labtec valued at $125 million and the exchange is expected to start in two weeks time and will be completed during late March or April. Labtec's operations in Vancouver will remain and the company president, Bob Wick, will be made a senior vice president and general manager of Logitech's new Audio Business Unit. ...more

Blackberry maker faces new lawsuit

The makers of the Blackberry are being sued over an alleged infringement of a patent on text input. Specifically, US company Eatoni Ergonomics claims that the Blackberry 7100's predictive texting technology, SureType, infringes the patent that it registered to protect its own predictive technologies: LetterWise and WordWise. The patent, Eatoni claims, covers the deployment of predictive text using a keyboard on a mobile device although the wording is not quite so precise. ...more