■ Entertainment
Sony warns of hacked files
Sony Corp warned users of its new PlayStation Portable game player not to down-load files taken by hackers from a company Web site and posted on the Internet because they are incom-plete and will cause the device to shut down. The "dummy" files, which promise to add functions such as Web browsing and e-mail to the console, were intended for use by the company's software developers, said Yoshiko Furusawa, a spokeswoman for Sony Computer Enter-tainment in Tokyo. Sony hasn't decided which functions it will add to the PSP and is looking at "various possibilities," she said. Computer hackers tracked down the files by breaking into a Web site Sony was still developing.
■ Publishing
Hollinger legal fees pile up
Conrad Black's alleged corporate misdeeds have cost newspaper publisher Hollinger International Inc more than US$57 million in legal fees and other costs, according to a company filing. Chicago-based Hollinger International, the parent company of the Chicago Sun-Times, said Tuesday that an investi-gation into alleged corpo-rate malfeasance and the litigation it has spawned cost the company US$10.1 million in 2003 and US$46.3 million in the first nine months of last year. The company reported a loss of US$74.3 million in 2003, according to a filing on Tuesday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It also con-tained restated financial results for the years 1999 to 2002. Black stepped down as CEO in November 2003.
■ Internet
Firefox gnaws at Explorer
The upstart free Web browser Firefox nibbled away more ground from Microsoft over the past month and now has a market share of nearly 5 percent, a research firm said on Tuesday. The group WebSideStory said usage of Firefox, created by the nonprofit Mozilla Foun-dation, has almost doubled in the past three months to 4.95 percent of all Internet users. Usage of Mozilla still trails Internet Explorer by a wide margin: the Microsoft browser built into the Windows operating system was used by 90.3 percent of Web users, the research firm said. But that is down nearly 3 percentage points since October, when Firefox was released.
■ Communications
Asia demands speed
Motorola Inc expects revenue to rise in Asia on demand for high-speed phone services, said Scott Durchslag, a vice president at Motorola PCS in Singa-pore. Motorola, which yesterday reported a 34 percent gain in fourth-quarter profit, doubled revenue and quadrupled margins in South Asia during the period, Durch-slag said in an interview. "Consumers in Asia are absolutely cutting edge in terms of what they're trying to do on handsets," he said.
■ Communications
Texas wins Samsung order
Texas Instruments Inc, the world's biggest maker of mobile-phone chips, won its first order from Samsung Electronics Co for a proces-sor to run digital cameras in handsets after a two-year effort to get the business. Samsung is using Texas Instruments' OMAP proces-sors to run software pro-grams in four mobile-phone models, Texas Instruments sales manager Fred Cohen said yesterday. He said he expects more Samsung phones with OMAP chips to be released later this year.
National Taiwan University (NTU) yesterday said it disqualified a person from an entrance examination for using AI smart glasses to cheat, along with two others for making untruthful statements in their curriculum vitae. The three applicants were given null scores, Taiwan’s highest-ranked university said, calling on prospective students to be honest in the admissions process. NTU registrar Lee Hung-sen (李宏森) said that the cheating applicant wore a hat and thick-rimmed glasses to the second written exam for medical school, claiming that they felt cold. Suspicions were aroused when the applicant stared oddly at the test for long stretches while steadily bringing the paper
A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck off the southern coast of Mindanao in the Philippines at 7:38am today, prompting the US Tsunami Warning System to issue an alert for neighboring countries, including Taiwan. The system issued a purple alert indicating a "tsunami threat." The potential threat zone includes Taiwan, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Yap and Palau. Philippine authorities were assessing the damage from the quake, with the office of civil defense seeking to verifying initial reports that 15 people had been killed and 129 injured in the region, mostly from falling debris. Arlene Hollero, disaster chief of Maasim town in the Philippines' Sarangani Province,
‘GRAY ZONE’ PRESSURE: Beijing’s activities are intended to create the deceitful impression that China has jurisdiction over the area around Taiwan, the CGA said Taiwan’s rights over its territorial waters and exclusive economic zone must not be violated by any country, the Mainland Affairs Council said yesterday, adding that it will not accept any unprovoked actions. The council issued the remarks in response to the China Coast Guard conducting maritime enforcement drills near eastern Taiwan and claiming to fully exercise China’s maritime administrative law enforcement authority. The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) has been closely monitoring the situation and is taking concrete steps to defend the nation’s sovereignty and secure its waters, the council said. China has no sovereign rights over the waters off eastern
Heavy rain is expected to affect parts of Taiwan this week, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday as a meteorologist said the active part of the annual plum rain season has started. A stationary plum rain front and southwesterly winds would bring unstable weather and abundant moisture to Taiwan from today for about a week, with the heaviest rainfall forecast for tomorrow and Wednesday, the CWA said. The agency said western and northeastern Taiwan, and mountainous areas in the east and southeast, could expect showers or thunderstorms on those two days, with localized heavy rain possible. Other parts of
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