Hamburg  - DVD writers boasting high speeds sound good, but their error rates are high, also too.

A total of 48 different recordable DVD blanks were recently put to the test by Computer Bild magazine. The Hamburg-based magazine determined that burn speed has a major impact on quality. Quality is excellent when burning at four to eight times the standard burn speed. At a 16x tempo, however, the error rate climbs quickly.

Hamburg  - Search engines specializing in flight prices seem to be the way to go to when looking for affordable flights, according to Germany's Computer Bild magazine.

The search engines yielded the best deals in online travel agencies, the report added. The magazine tested several ticket search engines and online travel agents on 30 different routes.

First place went to search engine Swoodoo, which found the best price in 13 instances. Second place went to checkflix. de, followed by kelkoo.

Gelsenkirchen, Germany  - Computer users and homeowners have plenty in common as they themselves usually want to decide who is allowed into their domain. Some house owners keep a watch dog for this purpose.

In terms of computers, that function is handled by anti-virus software which keeps a watchful eye on the system and looks out for ill-intentioned intruders. A more effective approach is to keep unwelcome guests from getting onto your property or hard drive in the first place. That's where firewalls come into play.

London, Mar 21: Google has removed several images from its new UK Street View application.

The firm was forced to pull some of the images from the street-mapping facility following complaints.

It is thought that the pictures removed contained revealing images of homes, a man entering a London sex shop, people being arrested and a man being sick.

"We''ve got millions of images, so the percentage removed was very small," Google''s Laura Scott told the BBC.

Samsung has rolled out a new portable touchscreen multimedia player, named ‘P3’ in the Indian market.

The newly launched player ‘P3’ was first announced at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) earlier this year.

Samsung P3 Digital Media Player, which is just 0.39 inches thin, has a 16:9 aspect ratio.

With a 3-inch touch screen WQVGA TFT-LCD powered by Samsung's EmoTure touch interface, P3 also features a Music Hot Touch Key, which is placed just below the touch screen.

London, Mar 20 : Google needs to keep a strict check on the its advertisements and suggested links to avoid providing users with web pages that contain dubious medical claims, warn doctors.

While writing in British Medical Journal, Dr Marco Masoni from the University of Florence in Italy revealed that as the internet is not well policed and regulated, it is up to members of the medical community to be vigilant and to suggest improvements.

Google AdWords is a service that matches key search terms to related advertising.