Don`t panic about cellphone Trojan

Local Sophos distributor Netxactics has advised customers not to panic following media reports of a Trojan that infects mobile phones.

The Troj/Skulls-A Trojan horse runs on the Symbian operating system used by mobile phones such as the Nokia Series 60 and can display pictures of human skulls on infected devices.

"Some media reports have described Skulls as a virus. It isn`t - it`s a Trojan, and that means that it cannot spread by itself," says Brett Myroff, CEO of Netxactics.

"In order to be infected you have to deliberately download the malicious file from the Internet and install it on your mobile phone.

"Users probably need to be more concerned about the number of malicious Windows worms spreading around via e-mail and the Internet at the moment."

US advocacy groups have criticised video games that have players shoot rival gang members, watch bare-breasted women and recreate the assassination of John F Kennedy, reports AP.

The National Institute on Media and the Family urged the industry to educate parents better about ratings and asked retailers not to sell such games to younger teenagers.

"This segment of games keeps getting more realistic, and they keep pushing the envelope," says David Walsh, president of the institute.

Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, said all the games on the institute`s objectionable list are rated M, which he said shows the industry is doing its job.

Linus Torvalds and two other European software luminaries have thrown their weight behind a campaign to block software patents from being legitimised in Europe, reports Ziff Davis.

The Competitiveness Council is expected to decide this week whether to formally back-draft legislation on "the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions".

This would amount to a step forward for the controversial proposal, which many argue would open the floodgates to software patents if approved in its current form.

Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux operating system kernel, Michael Widenius, one of the creators of the MySQL database, and Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of the PHP scripting language, urged the EU Council to prevent the proposal`s adoption.

"In the interest of Europe, such a deceptive, dangerous and democratically illegitimate proposal must not become the common position of the member states," they wrote.