Check Point Software Technologies on Tuesday unveiled its ZoneAlarm Secure Wireless Router Z100G, its first dedicated home network security device.

The security software company, which largely focuses on corporate customers, has designed its Z100G wireless router to offer home users seven layers of security–from firewalls to intrusion detection and prevention to antivirus technologies.

The Z100G has a potential range of 984 feet indoors and 3,280 feet outdoors with extended range (XR)-enabled wireless computers. It includes parental controls, VPN remote access, wireless encryption and secure remote desktop access. With four Ethernet ports, it supports Super G standards at speeds up to 108 megabits per second. It is also compatible with older wireless technologies such as 802.11b and 802.11g, as well as USB-enabled printers.

Source: News.com

Bill Gates and a Saudi prince are set to buy the Four Seasons hotel group. The surprise move into Bed & Breakfast probably won’t absorb too much of the Microsoft founder’s time.

Gates’s personal investment company Cascade is teaming with Saudi Prince Al-Waleed’s group, Kingdom Hotels International, to make an offer of $3.7bn for the hotel chain. The chain has 71 hotels, mostly in the US and Asia and some in the Middle East and Europe.

Source: The Register

A shortage of information technology graduates from Western universities is leading companies to call on developing countries to meet research demand, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Tuesday.

After the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia’s internationally renowned education system became a cheap talent pool for the West. Now dozens of Russian language Web sites offer computer programming jobs in the United States, alongside visa support and language training.

“Worldwide, a lot of the developed countries are not graduating as many IT students as they were in the past, which is kind of ironic as it does mean it does increase the opportunities,” Gates said.

Source: Reuters

Web search leader Google Inc. is hiring scores of radio sales people and is spending heavily in a bid to expand its position in the $20 billion radio industry.

Google spokesman Michael Mayzel said this week that the company will begin a public test of Google Audio Ads by the end of the year. Advertisers will be able to go online and sign up for targeted radio ads using the same AdWords system they use to buy Web search ads.

Source: Reuters

Israel’s major technical university, Technion, has joined the scientific sphere of the Galileo project. It is the first Israeli involvement with the GPS alternative, and the first contract awarded by the scientific arm of Galileo.

Researchers at the technical institute are part of an international consortium that is developing a traffic management system for satellites.

Source: The Register

The authorities in Chile have arrested four people who the police say are members of one of the world’s most successful groups of computer hackers.

The men are accused of breaching more than 8,000 websites, including that of US space agency Nasa.

One of the men, who has used the alias “Net Toxic”, is alleged to be one of the most prolific hackers in the world.

Source: BBC

Hewlett Packard is teaming up with virtualization vendor VMware to offer enterprises the option of re-centralizing end user desktops on central servers. It’s the prospective rollback of the client/server revolution.

Instead of employees each being given their own computer, they would be served their Microsoft Office applications from a virtual machine in a data center. The application running on a virtual machine would have its interactions streamed down to a user’s thin client, or regular computer if a desktop machine was left in place. But the application logic would be performed on a server in a virtual machine.

“Here’s a way to make sure sensitive information stays inside the company,” says Doug Strain, product manager for virtualization for Hewlett-Packard. in an interview. If the end user isn’t carrying data on a computer hard drive outside the company, that data can’t be lost through a simple laptop theft. But remote end users can access their desktops by dialing up the virtual machine over a VPN connection, he adds.

Source: Yahoo

Patent holding company NTP Inc. said on Monday it filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Palm Inc., maker of the Treo mobile phone, in a U.S. court, sending Palm shares down more than 7 percent.

The suit alleges that Palm’s products and services infringed NTP’s patents and seeks recovery of monetary damages resulting from Palm’s direct and indirect infringement, the intellectual property firm said in a statement.

Specifically, NTP said it is targeting services and systems primarily used or adapted for use in e-mail systems with radio frequency communications to mobile processors and related services.

A Palm spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment.

Source: Reuters

An “extremely critical” vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft’s XML Core Services, according to several security companies.

The vulnerability, which affects only systems running Internet Explorer, is caused by an unspecified error in the XMLHTTP 4.0 ActiveX Control and could be used to seize control of an affected system, according to an advisory from Secunia, a security company based in Denmark.

Some of the software that may be affected includes Windows 2000, Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003.

People running Windows Server 2003 and 2003 Service Pack 1 in the default configuration with the Enhanced Security Configuration turned on aren’t affected, Microsoft said.

Microsoft will determine, based on “customer needs,” whether to release a patch during the company’s monthly release process or an “out-of-cycle security update,” the company said.

Microsoft’s next patch release day is November 14.

Source: News.com

Internet search-engine giant Google has warned that proposed changes to Australia’s copyright laws could drive the country back to “the pre-Internet era”.

The warning came in a submission to Australia’s senate on legislation Google said could open the way for copyright owners to take legal action against search engines for caching and archiving.

“Given the vast size of the Internet, it is impossible for a search engine to contact personally each owner of a web page to determine whether the owner desires its web page to be searched, indexed or cached,” Google said Tuesday.

“If such advanced permission was required, the internet would promplty grind to a halt,” Google’s senior counsel and head of public policy Andrew McLaughlin told the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee.

Source: Yahoo

IBM said on Tuesday it has started selling security software that analyzes data from video surveillance cameras in real time, generating instant alerts of potential security breeches.

The new product, dubbed Smart Surveillance System or S3, can transmit information collected by digital video cameras over computer networks, allowing it to be monitored remotely.

The software automatically combs through those feeds, cross referencing and analyzing the digital information. It issues alarms when it identifies suspicious activity.

In addition to video, the software can integrate information from audio feeds, radar systems and chemical detection units as it analyzes the data.

Source: Reuters

Adobe Systems Inc. is contributing some of the computer code behind its widely used Flash player to the Mozilla Foundation so that it can be improved upon and blended into an upcoming version of Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser.

The donation, to be announced Tuesday at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, represents the largest contribution of code to Mozilla since the Mountain View-based foundation’s 2003 inception. The code covers the scripting language in Adobe’s Flash software, which millions of people use to view online media and other dynamic applications delivered over the Internet.

Source: GazetteOnline