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India is developing a laptop to be sold at US$10, that will target higher education applications, a minister of the federal government said Tuesday in Delhi. Research on the new low-cost laptop is being carried out at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, said D. Purandeswari, Minister of State for Higher Education, at a conference in Delhi. This measure will help raise the quality of higher education in India, she added.
The Minister did not however give the specifications of the $10 laptop, nor is it clear if the rock-bottom price will be achieved with the help of a government subsidy. The Indian government is planning to use information and communications technology (ICT) to strengthen its current programs for distance learning by making them accessible online, Purandeswari said.

View: The full story @ PCWorld

Apple has come under fire for failing to patch the critical Domain Name System (DNS) flaw which prompted a (rest of) industry wide response earlier this month.
For anyone just back from a trip up the Amazon, the discovery of a domain spoofing vulnerability by security researcher Dan Kaminsky sparked a massive patching effort that began on 8 July. Dozens of vendors - including Microsoft, Cisco, Ubuntu and the Internet Systems Consortium, which maintains BIND - released updates that mitigated against the risk of cache poisoning attacks, which stem from security shortcomings in the protocol itself rather than coding errors.

View: The full story @ The Reg

Watch out Apple, because Dell is poised to unveil an MP3 player and music downloads service, according to company insiders. The Wall Street Journal has it on good authority from a mole within Dell that the PC manufacturer has already designed and tested its own MP3 player. The gadget’s thought to feature a small iPod Nano-esque display and allow users to navigate through tracks with a scroll wheel that’s integrated into the player and positioned just below the display.
The mole’s also said that Dell intends to launch an “online download service” that sources tracks and video content from several unnamed sources. This could be done directly through the Dell MP3 player, because it’s also thought to feature Wi-Fi connectivity.

View: The full story @ The Reg

Yahoo Music is offering refunds to anyone who bought songs from the service. Is it time for MSN Music follow Yahoo’s lead?
Yahoo announced last week that it would no longer issue authorization keys for the digital rights management, or DRM, software on its songs. This meant that anyone who bought songs from the service would still be able to hear their songs through its service but would be unable to move them to other devices or computers.
This did not play well with Web users. Now Yahoo Music plans to issue refunds and is trying to go one step further. If a customer would prefer music over a refund, Yahoo is looking for a way to give the customer copies of the purchased songs in the DRM-free MP3 format, according to a Yahoo representative.