August 30, 2003

Virus Aside, Gates Says Reliability Is Greater New York Times -MICROSOFT, the world's biggest software maker, is the biggest target for computer viruses like the SoBig.F worm that wreaked havoc two weeks ago. Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, talked last week about what it is doing to keep hackers at bay. Following are excerpts from the conversation.    Q. You wrote a memo last year calling on Microsoft to focus on reliable software. Now we've had this series of computer-security-related events that make it appear to outsiders that you aren't making progress. Have you in fact made progress? A. Well, we've certainly made a lot of progress in terms of creating more reliable software, building tools so that people can stay up to date so that they don't run into these problems, creating the procedures that make sure that the recovery actions get widely communicated. We'd be the first to say that we're doing more and more on this. It was very important that we got the company focused on it, made it part of the reviews of all the different employees. 10:51:40 PM

Music industry claims MP3s are traceable New Scientist -Recording industry lawyers have claimed that detailed analysis of the data in MP3 music files can prove the files were downloaded illegally from an online file-sharing network. 10:50:13 PM