Washington  - What's the biggest headache you face when working with your computer? The answer may very well be "the computer itself." System crashes, data loss, hard drive failure - there's a never ending parade of problems. There's a new movement afoot in the tech industry that promises to take some of those headaches away, and it's called "cloud computing." By now, many people have heard that term being bandied about, but questions are rife regarding what cloud computing is and what it means to the future. Read on for some answers.

Q: What is cloud computing?

Bochum, Germany  - Before downloading an advance version of Internet Explorer 8, computer users should make sure the offer really comes from Microsoft and not from a hacker.

Nuremberg, Germany  - A new service, called Family DSL, has been designed to make internet surfing safe for children.

Familien DSL, as the system is marketed in Germany, consists of a DSL connection, a WLAN router and an USB stick with integrated security software, said representatives of the three firms behind the idea - Carpo, D-Link and Cybits.

Family DSL is based on lists compiled and regularly reviewed by education experts. Those lists assign positive and negative values to websites, based on the user's age, and are regularly updated to the router, which then allows or disallows access based on the rating. As the information is stored in the router, the security software does not have to be installed on every device in a home.

Hamburg  - Addiction to online games should be treated as a distinct illness, experts recommended recently.

Round-the-clock gaming or chatting can have long-term negative impacts on a child or teenager's social, mental and emotional development, said psychologist Joerg Petry at an annual convention on gambling addiction in Hamburg.

"The pull of the PC as a medium is so strong that people turn completely inward," he said. In this way, some addicts come to play 50 consecutive hours or spend 100 hours a week at their computer.

But Petry says studies with students have shown that online addiction is not as widespread as assumed hitherto. It often proves just a a temporary problem during adolescence.

Dublin, Ireland  - The world's first biodegradable computer, the iameco, has been manufactured in Dublin from bio-degradable wood panels made from waste products in the lumber and pulp industry.

During a visit to the company by Ireland's Minister for Science and Innovation, Dr Jimmy Devins, the inventors of iameco, MicroPro Computers Ltd, said they could implant the seeds of native-tree species into the wood panels.

The minister's visit coincided with the announcement of details of a new Enterprise Ireland Green Technology Support for businesses.

Munich  - Officially named Core i7, Intel's latest quadcore processor, developed under the codename Nehalem, has arrived and already met with lots of praise.

This is Intel's first quadcore with four individual processor cores - the Core 2 Quads, which have been available since 2006, work with a pair of dual core chips and Computer Bild magazine has already tested the new chip.

The report hailed the top-of-the-line Core i7-965, with a speed of 3.2 gigahertz (GHz), "the fastest processor, by far" of all the processors it has ever tested.