Opinion

Prices of some virtual items in online games, including World of Warcraft, have leapt more than 30 percent in China as the government prepares to restrict the amount of time gamers are allowed to play.

An internet connection owned by SCO, the firm at the center of a legal battle over the open source operating system Linux, was used to delete information from SCO's Wikipedia entry last month.

Contributors to online discussion groups have now suggested that the same individual later went on to remove substantial amounts of unfavorable information from the Wikipedia entry, but the evidence they have so far offered to support this view is not strong, and appears to be circumstantial, at best.

Trojan horse software is being used to artificially boost websites' positions on Alexa.com, the leading internet traffic measurement chart, security researchers suspect. The covertly-installed software first installs Alexa's traffic monitoring toolbar on the victim's PC, and then forces the victim's web browser to visit several websites, thereby increasing their ranking in Alexa's statistics, according to FaceTime Security Labs.

While revolutionary new inkjet printing technology from Silverbrook Research has set the printer industry abuzz, few outsiders have been permitted to closely examine the print quality of the prototypes.

Can $200 inkjet printers working at more than twice the speed of anything else on the market actually print clearly, without smudging the ink? And even if this breakthrough technology really works, how can a tiny company like Silverbrook survive in an industry dominated by giants like HP, Canon and Epson?

New printing technology, described as “radically inventive” by some analysts, could replace RFID tags, according to its creators. The new technology codes objects with invisible infrared markings, which can be read by a handheld scanner or even a mobile phone.