The Sims sells 100m units

There are no scary monsters to slay, no enemies to shoot and no cars to hijack. But The Sims video and computer game has sold 100 million units since its launch in 2000, reports Associated Press.

Long the world's top-selling game for computers, The Sims is also available on Sony's PlayStation 2, the Nintendo Wii and other platforms ‑ but it remains most popular on PCs.

The 100 million mark, which publisher Electronic Arts announced yesterday, puts The Sims in the ranks of blockbuster franchises such as Nintendo's Mario and Pokemon games, which have sold more than 201 million and 175 million units, respectively, as well as Take-Two Interactive Software's Grand Theft Auto series, which has sold more than 65 million copies.

A concerted international effort could see the end of Web sites that profit by selling images of child sex abuse, it is claimed, says BBC News.

The UK's Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) conducted research to identify how many sites trade such images and concluded there are 2 755 such sites worldwide. Of these, 80% are judged to be fully commercial operations.

The IWF said this "manageable" number could be eliminated if Internet firms, governments and police worked together.

Apple has issued a security patch for its Safari Web browser, fixing the flaw that earned one security researcher $10 000 at the CanSecWest security conference, reports PC World.

Independent Security Evaluators researcher Charlie Miller exploited the flaw to gain access to a MacBook Air computer three weeks ago. It lies in the WebKit open source HTML rendering engine used by Safari and several other Mac OS X programs.

The bug lay in the way WebKit would process certain specially crafted JavaScript commands. In order to exploit the flaw, Miller had to first make the contest organisers visit a special Web site that contained his malicious JavaScript code.