Opening the window to Bill Gates' mansion

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Published: 12:00am, 1 Oct 1995

THERE are several places on the Internet's World Wide Web where you can find houses for sale, but you'd be hard pushed to find anything with the price tag attached to Bill Gates's HK$360 million mansion.

The extraordinary, semi-subterranean retreat is still under construction on the beautiful shores of Lake Washington, but pictures of the work in progress are now available on the web, thanks to a local PR firm. 'So you're wondering where that US$89 you spent for Windows 95 went?' asks Morse McFadden. 'Since you're paying for it, we thought it cordial to allow you to visit every week or two.' Mr Gates is not amused by this intrusion into his privacy, the London Times reported this week. However, if you are curious, go to the page (http://www. morsepr. com/MMdocs/Bill.html) and see if you can work out which bit of your Windows 95 purchase helped to pay for.

SO far you have needed a computer to use the Internet. Now a Swedish firm has developed a system which, it is claimed, could open up the Internet to anybody who has a television and a touch-tone telephone.

The system, from the Infral company, enables World Wide Web pages to be broadcast over teletext systems. It can also handle e-mail without the senders or recipients needing to have a computer.

LAST week, we reported on fears of the Internet being used, or abused, by white-collar criminals. Now newspapers report that a security flaw in Netscape's Internet software may prove a serious blow to business transactions on the international computer network.

The flaw was found by two students at the University of California in Berkeley. It means that financially sensitive data sent on Internet using Netscape software could be vulnerable to hacking.