I am in Switzerland this week, on a government press junket for reporters to educate us on the wonders of the international sector. On Monday I and 12 other reporters visited HP's European headquarters in Geneva and while much of the talk centred on the recent merger with Compac, I took the chance of visiting the company's "Invent Centre" to get an advance look at what products are about to be introduced to the market.

Now I really like my HP printer, but I threw the spanner in the works when I asked Jean-Max Arbez, the general manager, why the company was gouging us consumers for ink cartridges. Yes, I actually used the word "gouge", as I feel that the company is diminishing its brand by encouraging resentment from consumers.

As individuals and companies well know, one spends a huge amount of money on replacement ink cartridges, which may cost $30 and even more depending on the type of printer you use. It is very difficult to find companies manufacturing cheaper versions, as there seems to be a conspiracy among retailers not to offer consumers alternatives. HP makes most of its money from printers from the continuing sale of those ink cartridges by imposing a huge mark-up. Mr. Arbez shrugged his shoulders at my question and smiled in a good natured way. He was used to such questions.

"Soon we might be giving the printers away for free," he said as a joke. What more could he say? Was it a joke?

HP is a great company and I was impressed with the innovative printing equipment it plans to introduce over the coming months. Keen digital photographers can expect what HP calls a 4800-optimised dots-per-inch inkjet printer to appear soon, which the company claims will enable the printing of "life-like photo-quality images that rival the quality of current analogue prints".

Mr. Arbez also told me the company is working on removing that layered look prints have because of the way ink is deposited on photo quality printing papers. Just view a photograph printed via a printer from a sharp angle and you will see what I mean.

Let's just say that I await with keen anticipation to see if the new printers will match up to the hype, but I'm still resentful about the gouging.

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After over four years of effort, a team of computer programmers and enthusiasts have won RSA Security's 64 bit encryption challenge, winning a US$10,000 prize. The team, a loose coalition of 331,252 volunteers working under the name Distributed.net, tested 15,769,938,165,961,326,592 keys in order to break the encryption in four years. They did it by using the idle time of their computers to search through the list of all possible 64-bit keys for RSA Security's RC5 encryption algorithm to find the one secret key selected at random by RSA Laboratories that decrypted the message correctly.

For the record the message was: "The unknown message is: some things are better left unread."

The contest is one of a series of increasingly difficult cryptographic challenges posed by RSA Laboratories to determine the difficulty of finding an encryption key by trial-and-error.

Stephen Davidson, the vice-president of marketing and business development at Bermuda-based QuoVadis Ltd. noted the challenge helped show the difficulties of breaking the much more complicated encryption algorithms used by security and digital certificate companies.

`This contest was using the RC5 algorithm,' he said. `The QuoVadis CA certificates are created using the RSA algorithm, which works much differently, at the much larger 2048 bit size. The largest RSA key to be factored so far is 512 bits. The 576-bit value is likely to be factored (solved) in the next year or so, while RSA-2048 is expected to stand for decades."

You can read about the challenge at http://www.rsasecurity.com.

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Microsoft issued four security bulletins last week. One "critical" alert notified users that two problems with the Windows help file could let a hacker seize control of computers using Windows 98, 98 Second Edition, Millennium Edition, XP, NT 4, NT 4 Terminal Server Edition and 2000. The problems warranted issuing a "critical" alert. Two "moderate" alerts were also issued, one identifying two security problems involving compressed files, and the other identifying three problems with Microsoft's services for Unix 3. A fourth "critical" alert advised of a cumulative patch for protecting SQL Server software 7 and 2000 from hackers. The latest warnings bring to 57 the number of security alerts issued by Microsoft so far this year.

Road warriors should look out for a new laptop battery cell by PolyFuel, which says the battery can let notebook computers run three to ten times longer than current batteries. PolyFuel said the new battery, which contain methanol, has been approved by the US authorities for use on airplanes.