News on Computer Hardware and Peripherals

Several PC makers were including controversial Internet-filtering software with computers shipped in China on Thursday despite a government decision to postpone its plan to make such a step mandatory. Beijing's decision this week to delay the requirement that the filtering software — known as Green Dam — be pre-installed or supplied on disk with all computers sold in China averted a possible trade clash with the United States and Europe. But the move by some makers to ...

Japanese chipmaker Elpida was thrown a 160-billion-yen (1.7 billion dollars) financial lifeline Tuesday, including public funds, to help it survive the economic downturn, officials said. Japan Airlines meanwhile has secured emergency loans of about one billion dollars from a group of banks, including two state-backed lenders, to help it through the economic crisis, reports said Tuesday. Elpida Memory Inc., Japan's only maker of dynamic random access memory chips, will sell securities worth 30 billion yen to the government-backed Development Bank of Japan, which will also extend it a ...

In a rare reversal, China's government gave in to domestic and international pressure and backed down Tuesday from a rule that would have required personal computers sold in the country to have Internet-filtering software. Just hours before the rule was to have taken effect, the government said it would postpone the requirement for the "Green Dam" software. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said it made the decision partly because some PC manufacturers were having difficulty meeting the deadline. It did not say whether the plan might be ...