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IBM

Submission + - IBM Challenges Microsoft with Free Office Suite

BBCWatcher writes: The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and several other news outlets report that IBM will announce a free, downloadable office suite today in a direct challenge to Microsoft. The news comes only a week after IBM announced it is joining OpenOffice.org and dedicating 35 developers to the project.

IBM is resurrecting an old name for this brand new software: Lotus Symphony. The new Symphony, based on Open Office, is yet another product to support Open Document Format (ODF), the ISO standard for universal document interchange. There are about 135 million Lotus Notes users, and they will also receive Symphony free. IBM support will be available for a fee. There are no details yet about platform support, but IBM is supporting Lotus Notes 8 on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, so at least those three are likely.
Wii

Wii Uses Elliptic Curve Cryptography For Saves 183

An anonymous reader writes "A user at the Nintendo-Scene forums just posted a lengthy post about his discovery that the Wii savegame files are signed and encrypted with NIST B 233 bit elliptic curve cryptography. Could this be the first step for a Wii softmod the homebrew community have waited for? From the post: 'It appears a Wii savegame file ends with a certificate chain. The certificates contains a public keypair (the one that is being "certified") and a signature (another number pair) from the signing entity. The number pairs are stored as a compound 60 bit data (first 30 bytes for the first number, and the next 30 bytes for the second). Hence, the first and middle byte is always 00 or 01 for keys, and 00 for signatures. One can check that the keys are indeed NIST B 233 keys using openssls EC_KEY_check_key function (code forthcoming).'"
The Almighty Buck

Cleaning up the Most Toxic Pollution in the World 212

Hugh Pickens writes "Blacksmith Institute has published their list of the most polluted sites in the world compiled by comparing the toxicity of the contamination, the likelihood of it getting into humans and the number of people affected. For example, ninety-nine percent of the children living in and around the poly-metallic smelter at La Oroya in Peru, owned by the Missouri-based Doe Run Corporation, have blood lead levels that exceed acceptable limits. Scientific American says that despite the massive pollution, it would be relatively cheap and easy to clean up the most dangerous hazards. For $15,000, the radioactive contaminated soil from the Mayak plutonium facility on the shore of the Techa River in the Russian town of Muslyomova could be dug up, saving an estimated 350 lives. 'For about $200, the cost of a refrigerator, we are able to save someone's life,' says Richard Fuller, founder of Blacksmith."

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