News Update Place

China and Russia are urging Iran to meet United Nations demands regarding its nuclear programme.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s Hu Jintao jointly said they wanted to find a “mutually acceptable solution” to Iran’s “nuclear problem”.

Both nations - UN Security Council permanent members - said disputes over Iran and North Korea’s nuclear projects should be resolved peacefully.

Iran has refused to cease uranium enrichment, prompting UN sanctions.

Over the weekend Iran in response said it would reduce its co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The statement by Russia and China comes as Mr Hu is on a three day visit to Russia to promote trade and energy links.

The joint statement by Russia and China comes as the US claims that Iran’s nuclear programme is a means to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran rejects this, saying its nuclear programme is aimed at producing nuclear energy alone.

‘Major importance’

In a joint statement, China and Russia said Iran’s civilian nuclear programme should be “resolved exclusively in a peaceful way, through negotiations.”

This emphasis on peaceful talks was echoed for North Korea.

“We have agreed that strategic co-operation between China and Russia has major importance for international affairs in creating a favourable atmosphere, in making relations more democratic and ensuring global peace,” said Mr Hu.

Both nations pledged to work on “bilateral long term strategic co-operation” on energy, but no new deals have as yet been signed.

They also promised to improve “co-operation with Central Asian countries in the political, trade and economic spheres”.

Intel plans to build a $2.5 billion facility in China to make chip wafers using 300-millimeter technology. Work will start later this year and the plant will begin initial production runs in the first half of 2010, the company said. At least initially, the plant will make chipsets that support Intel’s main PC and server microprocessor business lines.

Chipmaker Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) Latest News about Intel announced Monday it would build a US$2.5 billion wafer fabrication facility in northeast China, the company’s latest and largest investment to date in the booming country.

The plant — which will also be Intel’s first fabrication plant, or fab, anywhere in Asia — will be located in the coastal city of Dalian in Liaoning Province in China’s northeast corner and will make chip wafers using 300-millimeter technology.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel said the investment marks the first time since 1992 — when it built a fab in Ireland — that the company has constructed an entirely new fab from the ground up on a new site. Most investments in new production capabilities since then have come in the form of expanded capacity at existing sites.
‘Fastest-Growing Major Market’

Work will start later this year and the Dalian plant — to be known as Fab 68 — will begin initial production runs in the first half of 2010, the company said. At least initially, the plant will make chipsets that support Intel’s main PC and server Back up your business with HP’s ProLiant ML150 Server - just $1,299. microprocessor business lines.

“China is our fastest-growing major market and we believe it’s critical that we invest in markets that will provide for future growth to better serve our customers,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini. In fact, China last year became the largest global market for chips, according to data from research firm iSuppli.

The deal had been in the works for weeks, since the Chinese government cleared the way for Intel to build. Shares of Intel were trading lower Monday in a down market, dropping less than 1 percent to $19.15.
Old Pros

Though Intel has not built a fab in China yet, the investment is far from its first in the country. Intel has had a presence in China for more than 20 years, Otellini said.

“Over that time we’ve invested in excess of $1.3 billion in assembly test facilities and research and development,” he stated. “This new investment will bring our total to just under $4 billion, making Intel one of the largest foreign investors in China.”

It was not clear what type of agreement was made between Intel and the Chinese government to make the investment happen or whether Chinese officials directed Intel toward the city of Dalian. China has been trying to help other parts of the country benefit from the influx of foreign investment that has been focused largely around Beijing and other southern China cites.
Less Waste

Intel noted the plant will use 300-millimeter wafers, which have less waste and are more environmentally friendly than older approaches that used smaller wafers — from which chips themselves are cut.

Still, Intel may hold back some of its latest technology from the fab, using a 90-nanometer manufacturing process rather than 65-nanometer process being rolled out or the 45 nanometer considered next generation. While that decision may have been made to appease U.S. lawmakers and others concerned about outsourcing Latest News about Outsourcing, the more basic, 90-nanometer chips are also better suited for the lower-priced markets prevalent in the Asia region.

Intel has long been known to favor a varied approach to locating its manufacturing capacity, even though it has yet to build a plant in Asia. Intel is already working on three next-generation fabs to built in Oregon, Arizona and in Israel, where the plants will go up alongside existing facilities.
Location, Location, Location

Dalian’s location is a strategic one for Intel as well. Close to China’s borders with Russia and North Korea, the city is also located on a peninsula in the East China Sea and will offer easy access to much of the Asian marketplace.

The Intel investment will help transform what had been an industrial part of the country’s economy into a more modern technology center, stated Zhang Xiaoqiang, vice chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission. The partnership is expected to yield multiple benefits for the region, including workforce training and improved infrastructure and health care delivery to rural areas of the country, he added.

Intel’s investment could help break down some of the final barriers to greater investment by western companies in China, including concerns about theft of intellectual property. While those concerns remain, Intel may be signaling that it’s comfortable the Chinese government will offer its technology some level of protection as the chips are sold to nearby PC factories.
Tracking Growth Trends

Intel is now eager to be able to sell chips to China-based manufacturers, in large part because it is one of the major growth markets in the PC business today and in the future, Gartner (NYSE: IT) Latest News about Gartner analyst Charles Smulders told the E-Commerce Times.

China is also poised to become an increasingly important manufacturing center for other devices that use silicon chips, he noted. Non-PC uses of silicon chips are what has been driving the recent run of double-digit annual growth rates for the semiconductor industry, according to a recent statement by the Semiconductor Industry Association.

“Intel and the other chipmakers are seeing where the growth trends are headed and recognizing they have to act now to be ready to take advantage of what will happen over the next decade,” Smulders concluded.

Symbian has announced an updated version of its operating system for mobile devices, which promises better memory usage and integrated push e-mail support.

The company also claims that Symbian OS 9.5 will now be more affordable, meaning manufacturers can use it in lower-cost phones and not just the high-end smart phones for which the system is best known.

The new version was announced Monday at the CTIA Wireless 2007 event in Orlando, Fla. Speaking to ZDNet UK, Symbian product manager Ian Hutton explained that the use of demand paging–loading a part of the disk’s library into physical memory only when it is needed, rather than preloading it–would make handsets based on version 9.5 quicker to start and more responsive.

Demand paging also means “less RAM being used on the device, so our manufacturers have the option of putting less memory into the phones if they wish to,” said Hutton, adding that “build costs will (therefore) be coming down to the point where Symbian OS will be available for not only high-end but also mid-range phones.”

RAM defragmentation–similar to the way users would defragment a PC’s hard disk–is also built in to free up further memory. Hutton said that Symbian expected to see a “20 to 30 percent reduction in average memory usage during device use,” with a potential for reduced battery usage.

The other big advance in the new version, Symbian says, is the integration of ActiveSync for over-the-air connectivity with Microsoft Exchange servers. ActiveSync has previously been included only in Symbian-based handsets as a manufacturer’s add-on. Hutton indicated that improvements have also been made to the operating system’s calendar application and contacts database. In a possible reference to the recently announced version 6 of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS, he added that Symbian was “making sure that we stay very competitive in the enterprise space for corporate users syncing data back and forth.”

On the networking side, Symbian OS 9.5 also has an improved SIP stack and supports the ability to have the handset switch between Wi-Fi and 3G connections.

The new version also offers increased support for location-based technologies such as GPS navigation. According to Hutton, the new mapping application APIs (application programming interfaces) will dramatically reduce the cost to a manufacturer of enabling its handsets for location-based services.

Handsets loaded with Symbian OS 9.5 will start to become available in the middle of 2008.

A problem in the way Windows PCs obtain network settings could let attackers hijack traffic, security researchers said Saturday.

The problem occurs because of a design bug in the system used by Windows PCs to obtain proxy settings, researchers with security firm IOActive said at the ShmooCon hacker conference here. As a result, an attacker with access to a network at a corporation, for example, could insert a malicious proxy and see all the traffic, the researchers said.

“The upshot of it is that I can become your proxy server without you knowing about it,” Chris Paget, director of research and development at IOActive, said in an interview after his presentation on the problem. “I can put up the equivalent of a detour sign on your network and redirect all the traffic.”

Chris Paget, director of research and
development at IOActive, during his
ShmooCon presentation. An attacker can set up that “detour sign” because Internet Explorer on Windows PCs by default searches for a proxy server using the Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol, or WPAD, Paget said. It turns out that an attacker can easily register a proxy server on a network using the Windows Internet Naming Service, or WINS, and other network services including the Domain Name System, or DNS, he said.

“When IE starts up, it will ask the network where its proxy server is,” Paget said. “It is really easy to put up your hand and say: ‘Here I am.’”

Microsoft acknowledged the problem in a support article published Saturday on its TechNet Web site. “If an entity can surreptitiously register a WPAD entry in DNS or in WINS clients may be able to route their Internet traffic through a malicious proxy server,” Microsoft said in its support article.

If an attack is successful, all traffic on a network will flow through the attacker’s proxy. This means the attacker can access all the data, redirect and manipulate it and carry out all kinds of other nefarious acts, Paget said.

Still, the proxy problem isn’t a critical security issue, Paget and fellow IOActive security expert Dan Kaminsky said. An attack is possible only with access to the target network, not from the Internet, they noted. “The biggest risk inside a corporation would come from a malicious insider,” Paget said. “This is not worthy of mass panic or critical advisories.”

That doesn’t remove the need to fix the problem. Insider threats are real. Also, the proxy problem may be appealing to attackers who find it increasingly hard to exploit other vulnerabilities, Kaminsky said

“Buffer overflows and other bugs have gotten a lot harder to do, so design issues like this have gotten a lot more interesting for attackers,” he said.

Problems with WPAD aren’t new. Seven years ago Microsoft patched IE 5 because the browser would search for a proxy server on the Internet if it failed to find one on its local network. That let a malicious hacker give settings to the browser that would facilitate a broader attack.

Such a problem was exploited by somebody who registered the domain name “wpad.org.uk” and served a “wpad.dat” file with proxy information to Windows PCs looking for it. As a result the people using those PCs ended up on an online auction Web site regardless of the address they typed into their browser.

In its support article, Microsoft lists steps for network administrators to address the WPAD problem. The steps reserve static WPAD DNS host names and to reserve WPAD WINS name records. As a result, an attacker’s malicious WPAD name will no longer work, which will foil the malicious proxy trick, Paget said.

KINGSTON, Jamaica

(CNN)

A pathology report indicated that Pakistani cricket coach Bob Woolmer died of “manual strangulation,� according to a statement from Jamaican police commissioner Lucius Thomas.

“In these circumstances, the matter of Mr. Woolmer’s death is now being treated by the Jamaican police as a case of murder,� the statement said Thursday night.

Police announced Tuesday that Woolmer’s death was suspicious, two days after he was found unconscious in his room at the Pegasus Hotel. Woolmer, 58, was declared dead at a hospital soon after he was found. (Watch what has emerged as a possible motive in Woolmer’s murder )

Initial media reports indicated he died of a heart attack.

Woolmer’s death came less than 24 hours after former world champion Pakistan was beaten and eliminated by the relatively unknown Irish team on St. Patrick’s Day, one of the biggest shocks in World Cup cricket history. The loss on Saturday prompted outrage among the team’s hardcore fans, with protesters burning effigies of Woolmer and the team captain in Karachi.

Asked about suspects, Deputy Police Commissioner Mark Shields would only say, “We have a few definite lines of inquiry,� acknowledging later that betting on cricket matches was among them.

Shields urged people with any information about the case to come forward.

“It’s a very busy hotel,� he said. “I’m absolutely certain that someone saw something that could help us in this investigation.�

Blood, vomit and diarrhea were splattered over the walls and floor of Woolmer’s hotel bathroom, said Pakistan’s team spokesman Pervez Mir Wednesday afternoon. (Watch Mir describe what he saw )

Police refused to comment on that report.

Earlier on Thursday, police fingerprinted all members of the Pakistani cricket team at the hotel, and they were to submit statements to police as part of the ongoing investigation, Mir said.

“It is standard procedure,� Mir added. “Each of them will come along and give a written statement.�

The players’ hotel rooms were on the same floor as Woolmer’s.

The team has been cleared to leave Kingston, and there was no reason to detain anyone, a Jamaican official said Thursday.

The team left the hotel secretly and was believed to be flying to Montego Bay, Jamaica, for two days’ rest before returning to Pakistan.

Woolmer, who was English, played Test cricket for England in the mid-1970s. He later turned to coaching and coached the South African national team before taking over as Pakistan’s coach in 2004.

Following revelations that a high-ranking member of Wikipedia’s bureaucracy used his cloak of anonymity to lie about being a professor of religion, the free Internet encyclopedia plans to ask contributors who claim such credentials to identify themselves. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in interviews by phone and instant message Wednesday from Japan that contributors still would be able to remain anonymous. But he said they should only be allowed to cite some professional expertise in a subject if those credentials have been verified.

“We always prefer to give a positive incentive rather than absolute prohibition, so that people can contribute without a lot of hassle,” Wales wrote.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/1700AP_Wikipedia_Credentials.html

The head of Google in Spain and Portugal has confirmed that Google is working on a mobile phone. “Some of the time the engineers are dedicated to developing a mobile phone,” Isabel Aguilera is quoted as saying on the Spanish-news Web site Noticias.com.

A Google spokeswoman in the United States released this statement when asked for comment: “Mobile is an important area for Google and we remain focused on creating applications and establishing and growing partnerships with industry leaders to develop innovative services for users worldwide. However, we have nothing further to announce.”

Google stateside has repeatedly declined to comment on rumors of a Google Phone, but the smoke has been rising lately. Earlier this month, Simeon Simeonov of Polaris Venture Partners wrote in his blog that an inside source told him the Google Phone will be a BlackBerry-like device running C++ at the core with an operating system bootstrap, or loading program, and optimized Java, and that it would offer voice over Internet Protocol.

Rumors also circulated that Google and Samsung were building a phone, code-named “Switch,” Simeonov said, and his posting includes what he claims is a leaked photo of the device. That wouldn’t be so far-fetched, since Google and Samsung announced a partnership in January to bundle mobile versions of Google Search, Google Maps and Gmail on certain Samsung phones. Late last year, the rumor was that France Telecom Group’s mobile-telephony division Orange was in discussions with Google.

Plus, Google has on its payroll Andy Rubin, the founder of handheld device maker Danger who later started Android, a mobile-software maker that Google bought in 2005. Google also acquired mobile-applications company Reqwireless and secretly acquired a company called Skia, whose first product is a portable graphics engine that renders 2D graphics on handhelds.

Vans drove out periodically through the gates, carrying away the bodies of the dead.

Emergency Ministry officials arranged for grieving relatives to wait at a nearby hotel, where psychologists were providing assistance. Local authorities declared three days of mourning, cancelling entertainment events and flying flags at half mast.

Amongst the dead was a visiting Briton, who was carrying out a coal reserves audit underground when a methane gas explosion ripped through the mine, Itar-Tass news agency reported.

British mining consultancy IMC confirmed that one of its employees, Ian Robertson, was in the mine at the time of the blast but could not comment on what had happened to him.

Accidents in Russia’s mines are frequent but the Ulyanovskaya complex was only opened in 2002 and inaugurated on the 50th birthday of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Authorities believed a failure to follow safety rules was the most likely cause of the disaster.

“The main theory being considered by the prosecutor’s office is violations of mining work rules,” Kemerovo region prosecutor Alexei Bugayets told Interfax news agency.

Putin dispatched Emergency Minister Sergei Shoigu to oversee the rescue operation at the mine and rescuers were drafted in from neighbouring areas to help

Yahoo! has expanded the reach of the popular new Yahoo! oneSearch service to the Mobile Web in the United States. Yahoo! oneSearch reinvents search to give consumers exactly what they want on their mobile device - instant answers. The innovative search service that initially launched in Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 is now accessible on more than 85 percent of mobile phones through the mobile Web and is also available through the gamma version of Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0. The service leverages Yahoo!’s deep experience, investment and expertise in search on the desktop as well as relationships with leading content providers to deliver an un-matched search experience to consumers.

“Yahoo! oneSearch has already started to change the mobile search game by fundamentally improving the way consumers’ access and use the Internet on their mobile phones,” said Marco Boerries, senior vice president of connected life, Yahoo!. “Consumers that have tried oneSearch love it, telling us it’s easier and more helpful than any other mobile search services they’ve used. We are delivering the results consumers want with just one search, not a list of Web links.”

Yahoo! oneSearch is designed to make searching for and finding information as quick as possible for consumers by providing relevant results right on the page such as news headlines, images, business listings and more as well as easy navigation to other websites. For example, if a consumer wants to go to a movie this weekend, they just need to type the name of the movie into the search box. The search results would first list the movie, including a user rating, local theaters the movie is playing at, news headlines related to the movie and more. To dig more deeply into the results, a consumer would simply need to click on any item or category. For example, to see all the movies playing at a specific listed theater, just click on the theater name.

Yahoo! oneSearch on Yahoo!’s Mobile Web site has sponsored search results and display advertisements built into the experience, further extending the reach of Yahoo!’s advertising services to the mobile environment and enabling advertisers to reach consumers on their mobile devices across major mobile operators. Consumers can click on an ad to go to the advertisers’ mobile web site or a landing page to get more information about the advertisers’ offerings, including the ability to call the advertiser.