Washington  - Kids love the Internet. Unfortunately, as every parent knows, there's a lot of trouble they can get into while wandering through cyberspace. The challenge is to allow youngsters to learn from and enjoy the Internet while keeping them safe from harmful influences. That's the focus of this week's questions.

Q: My kids have their own accounts on my computer. I would like to set up their Web browsers so that a kid-friendly search engine appears automatically. Can you recommend some?

IBM has launched a program which aims at sponsoring talented engineering students from various leading technical institutes of India. The program also aims at encouraging further researchers in the region. 

"The IBM Blue Scholar Program is aimed at growing that rare talent that blooms in a scientifically challenging atmosphere," said Dr. Manish Gupta, associate director, IBM India Research Laboratory.

To improve the performance and reliability of solid-state drives (SSD), SanDisk Corp. on Wednesday announced an advanced flash file management system called ExtremeFFS system.

Don Barnetson, senior director of marketing at the Milpitas, Calif.-based memory maker's SSD business unit, said ExtremeFFS should boost the speed of writing common types of data to SSDs by as much as 100 times, thereby dramatically improving two of the main weaknesses of SSDs.

San Francisco - Shares of ailing internet pioneer Yahoo plunged more than 10 per cent Friday after Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reiterated that his company was not interested in reviving its takeover bid.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang this week urged Microsoft to buy the company, just a day after Google said it was dropping plans for an advertising alliance with Yahoo, which would have boosted Yahoo's income by up to 400 million dollars per year.

San Francisco - Obama fever may have swept the world, following the Democratic presidential candidate's historic election victory Tuesday. Now millions of computer users are under threat from an Obama virus, network security companies said Friday.

Authors of the virus are hoping to benefit from the huge interest in US president-elect Barack Obama, with an avalanche of spam messages purporting to offer news of his victory.

Berlin - A tsunami early-warning system is scheduled to go into operation in the Indian Ocean on November 11, the German research team that developed it said Friday.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will attend the inauguration along with representatives of the German government, the Geo Forschungs Zentrum (GFZ) said.

The German government financed the 45-million-euro (58-million- dollar) project launched after the Asian Tsunami of December 2004, which claimed 230,000 lives.