(Article information from CNET.com)

China is softening efforts to establish its own Wi-Fi security standard and will adopt stringent new piracy prevention policies as part of a broad trade and technology agreement with the United States, the two countries announced Wednesday.

Chinese government officials had set June 1 as a deadline for gear makers to include its Wireless Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) standard into products sold in China. The specification would allow the government to decrypt any communications by its citizens over wireless networks.

WAPI is not compatible with current Wi-Fi security standards. Enforcing the inclusion of WAPI into gear would have limited the number of manufacturers that could sell products in the Asian country, setting the stage for a high-profile technology battle between China and the United States.

According to sources close to the negotiations, China agreed that it will not implement WAPI by its announced deadline and will indefinitely postpone enforcement of the WAPI directive. In the meantime, the country will work to revise and perfect the standard in collaboration with the international standards group IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).

China's WAPI decision is one of several agreements announced Wednesday, after a high-level meeting between U.S. trade officials and China's Vice Premier Wu Yi in Washington, D.C., convened as part of the U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade.

The commission also announced that China has agreed to adopt new copyright policies aimed at curtailing rampant piracy of music, movies and other works, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

As part of the copyright agreement, China will launch a campaign aimed at reducing piracy on CDs and other physical media; bolster efforts to bring criminal charges against accused pirates; and bring China's laws into line with international copyright treaties aimed at preventing pirated works from being copied over the Internet.

Wednesday's agreements could help ease growing trade tensions between the United States and China over technology. WAPI, for example, has been at the center of a simmering trade dispute between China and the United States.
China has maintained that many of its regulations are important to preserve national security. U.S. companies have said that the rules exist mostly to move jobs, and potential access to intellectual property, to China.

Among other disputes, U.S. chipmakers have loudly complained that the value-added tax (VAT) on semiconductors discriminates against companies that do not partly or wholly manufacture chips in China. Chips imported into China face a 17 percent VAT. Chips made in China can face a VAT as low as 3 percent, a difference that leads to lower prices. China also has begun to push its own standard for 3G, or third-generation, cellular networks.

Wi-Fi chip and gear makers had expressed confusion about the Chinese security standard and what its impact would be on product development. Intel chief Craig Barrett said the company would stop selling its Centrino chip packages for notebooks if a compatible solution could not be worked out--a position also adopted by Wi-Fi chipmaker Broadcom. Barrett traveled this month to Asia to carry his company's message directly to Chinese officials.

Still, the motive to cooperate has been high, and sources have said that talks have been progressing behind the scenes to get the WAPI spat resolved. Wednesday's agreement doesn't resolve all of the issues, such as piracy, but it will likely be seen as a good step forward.

U.S. industry groups applauded the agreement.

"With China being the fastest-growing technology market, the commitment of the Chinese government to work on this issue in the international standards community is an important one," Rhett Dawson, CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council, said in a statement. "From the U.S. industry's perspective, we look forward to working with the Chinese government to help make this a reality."

Several Chinese companies have gone public or are planning an initial public offering in the United States, and the trade dispute has hurt them. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co., a chip foundry that counts Texas Instruments as a customer, held a U.S. public offering the same day President Bush complained about the China trade. The stock declined on the first day of trading and has yet to rise significantly.

Semiconductor equipment manufacturers also have been pushing the U.S. government to relax regulations about selling equipment to Chinese customers. The United States recently relaxed some provisions that will allow these companies, with permission, to sell 130-nanometer equipment in China.

Additionally, trade is booming. China's trade with the United States came to $191.7 billion in 2003 ($28.4 billion in U.S. exports to China and $163.7 billion in Chinese exports to the United States), up 23.2 percent from the year before, according to statistics from the U.S. International Trade Commission. Electronics were the United States' largest export and the second-biggest Chinese export.

Last week, the U.S. Trade Representative opened a separate Office of China Affairs to handle issues with the growing China trade.

(Article information from CNN/Money)

Google, the world's No. 1 Internet search engine, finally filed for its initial public stock (IPO) offering Thursday and promised to maintain its long-term focus even though it will soon face the intense scrutiny of Wall Street.

The company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it expects to raise as much as $2.7 billion from the offering, which it will conduct in the unusual format of an online auction in a bid to make its shares more widely available. Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston were named as the lead underwriters for the deal.

The company's IPO filing has been rumored for the better part of a year and recent speculation has created a buzz about Internet stocks not seen since online auctioneer eBay went public in September 1998.

Wall Street has been eagerly anticipating a filing from Google so investors could finally get a glimpse into the company's finances.

In the filing, Google said that it generated revenues of $961.9 million in 2003 and reported a net profit of $106.5 million. Sales rose 177 percent from a year ago although earnings increased by just 6 percent. Google also revealed that has been profitable since 2001.

For the first quarter of 2004, Google reported sales of $389.6 million, an increase of 118 percent from a year ago. Net income was $64 million, up 148 percent from the first quarter of 2003.

Google's core business of selling search-based advertising, which allows companies to purchase ads tied to specific keyword searches, is one of the most lucrative and rapidly growing markets in the tech sector.

Google, founded in 1998 by former Stanford University students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, has quickly become one of the most successful Internet companies. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Novell and chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, joined Google as its chairman in March 2001 and was named CEO later that year.

Chinese authorities have reported test results confirming that the 53-year-old woman who died in Anhui Province on April 19 was infected with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The woman, a medical doctor, was the mother of a 26-year-old postgraduate student who had been conducting research at the National Institute of Virology in Beijing. The student remains hospitalized in Anhui.

Since the first case was reported on April 22, Chinese authorities have confirmed a diagnosis of SARS in five persons. Testing continues on another four patients who have SARS-like symptoms and a history of close contact with a known case.

Since April 22, the seven patients in Beijing are now being treated in isolation in a single facility, Ditan Hospital, as a risk reduction strategy.

Investigation of the source of the outbreak is presently focused on lapses in biosafety procedures at the National Institute of Virology. The institute was closed on April 23 and its staff were placed in isolation.

Researchers at the Peninsula Medical School, led by Professor Andrew Hattersley and funded by the Wellcome Trust and Diabetes UK, have found a new genetic cause of diabetes, which may mean that children who were dependent on insulin injections could now be treated by tablets.

The New England Journal of Medicine have published, the paper prepared by Peninsula Medical School scientists, which shows that mutations in the gene for a potassium channel call (called Kir6.2) in the insulin producing beta-cells is a common cause of diabetes in children diagnosed in the first 6 months of life. Although the diabetes has a genetic cause in 80% of the children they were the first person in their families with diabetes.

Before this discovery children with this type of diabetes would have to take insulin injections for the rest of their life. The Peninsula Medical School team, working with scientists throughout the world, has shown that the patients with this new genetic type of diabetes can respond to tablets that bind to the potassium channel. These tablets called sulphonylureas are normally used in elderly patients with diabetes and have never been considered in children who were not secreting any insulin.

In a statement, professor Andrew Hattersley said: "We have shown that over one third of patients diagnosed with diabetes before the age of 6 months will have diabetes because of a change in the potassium channel gene. It is very exciting that finding the cause of the diabetes in these children has resulted in the real possibility of stopping insulin injections."

The Peninsula Medical School is a joint School of the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth in the United Kingdom.

Cassini-Huygens, an international spacecraft launched in 1997 is just two months away from arriving at Saturn to begin a four-year expedition of the planet and its many moons.

Cassini, the orbiter component of the spacecraft, will spend four years circling the planet and sending back volumes of data on Saturn and its rings. The Huygens component of the spacecraft will take a more hands-on approach and descend onto the surface of one of Saturn's moons, named Titan, in January of 2005.

The spacecraft has been sending back images from a while, however. The latest image, taken from 29 million miles (48 million km) away, fills the entire field of view of Cassini's narrow angle camera.

The latest picture, acquired on March 27, is actually a composite of three exposures, in red, green and blue. Each pixel represents 178 miles (286km).

Two faint dark spots are visible in the southern hemisphere. These spots are close to the latitude where Cassini saw two storms merging in mid-March.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a joint project between the US and European space agencies (NASA and ESA) and the Italian Space Agency.