AMD to license technology

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) plans to license some of its processor technologies to enable third-party companies to produce chips with additional features.

Beta News says the move could aid AMD in its continuing battle for market share with Intel, which mainly makes its own accessory chips.

According to the report, the accessory chips will be able to plug into the same socket as AMD microprocessors. This means if a motherboard has space for two sockets, one can be used for the CPU, while the other can be used for the accessory chip to enhance graphics, for example.

The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is to begin delivering its $100 laptop to children in developing countries in the middle of 2007, but it will cost $135 initially, reports PC World.

OLPC head Nicholas Negroponte says he expects economies of scale to help bring the cost of the rugged Linux laptops to $100 by 2008, and $50 by 2010 as shipping increases from 10 million units in 2007 to 100 million a year after that.

Brazil, Thailand, Argentina and Nigeria have already committed to buying and distributing one million of the PCs next year, and China, India and Egypt are said to be close to an agreement.

Mozilla`s Firefox browser has been updated to fix 13 security vulnerabilities, five of which have been rated critical, according to an eWeek report.

Firefox 1.5.0.4 is a security and stability release to correct flaws that could cause security bypass, cross-site scripting, system access and HTTP response-smuggling attacks.

Security alerts company Secunia rates the update as "highly critical" because of the risk of remote code execution exploitation. According to Mozilla`s advisory, the most serious flaws occur because of errors in the browser engine that could be exploited to cause a memory corruption.