$100 Laptops for Children

The first $100 laptops are to reach children in the developing world in the next few days, the consortium developing them has said.

The One Laptop Per Child laptops, produced by a group of designers and engineers led by Nicholas Negroponte – co-founder of the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology – would begin arriving “within the next week,” the project’s chief technical officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, explained.
The design for the $100 Laptop is very innovative, centering on a CPU, or processor, that saves power by knowing when to turn itself off.

The reason the CPU is usually on on a laptop is simply to refresh the screen, so in the timing controller chip for the display we put some memory – so when nothing’s changing on the screen, it goes into self-refresh mode to save power,”the project’s chief technical officer, Mary Lou Jepsen told BBC news.

Possible Mac Virus

The federal US computer security watchdog has issued a warning about a bug in Apple’s OS X operating system.

The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US Cert) issued the alert after security researchers produced code that could exploit the DMG bug.

The flaw involves the way OS X handles disk images and could be used to crash or take over a vulnerable machine.

So far the DMG bug has only been shown to work under laboratory conditions and has not been seen in the wild.

The DMG bug came to light during a month-long project run by the Info-Pull research group that aimed to find one “kernel” bug a day. The kernel is the heart of an operating system.

The bug has only been proved to work under laboratory conditions. No cases of it being exploited in the wild are known and no users are thought to be at risk. The availability of the exploit code might tempt some malicious hackers to craft webpages that take advantage of it.

Users of Apple Mac computers are far less likely to suffer security problems because the vast majority of viruses are written to exploit Microsoft’s Windows operating system. There are also differences in the way that OS X works which help to prevent malicious code taking hold.