NEW YORK - Is "malfile.exe" a virus? What does "hmtcd.dll" do? PC users sometimes come upon... Bits, bytes...

PC users sometimes come upon unfamiliar files on their hard drives, and identifying them is often a challenge. Many were fooled by a hoax e-mail that circulated a few years ago, instructing them to delete the alleged virus file "jdbgmgr.exe." The file was perfectly innocuous, but it wasn't easy to know that.

Internet security company Bit9 Inc. this week launched http://fileadvisor.bit9.com, a Web site that attempts to bridge that knowledge gap. Visitors can search data on 25 million Windows PC files, collected from Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp., the National Institute of Standards and Technology and other sources.

Users can download a small, free application from FileAdvisor. When the user right-clicks a file, the application gives the option of computing a unique number that identifies the file. That number is then compared to the FileAdvisor database, giving a better chance of identification.

NEW YORK - Music sales helped propel U.S. spending on online content to a record $2 billion last year, a 15 percent increase from 2004, the Online Publishers Association reports.

NEW YORK - The Internet's key oversight agency has outlined a plan for testing domain names entirely in non-English characters, bringing closer to reality a change sought by Asian and Arabic Internet users.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced a tentative timetable Tuesday that calls for tests to begin in the second half of the year. The tests would help ensure that introducing non-English suffixes wouldn't wreck a global addressing system that millions of Internet users rely upon every day.

The Internet's main traffic directories know only 37 characters: the 26 letters of the Latin script used in English, the 10 numerals and a hyphen.

Constraining non-English speakers to those characters is akin to forcing all English-speakers to type domains in Chinese. As a result, ICANN has faced pressures to adopt technical tricks that let the directories understand other languages.

TOKYO - Hitachi is working on an R2D2-like security robot on wheels that can map out its surroundings using infrared sensors and a camera to detect missing items, suspicious packages and intruders.

Hitachi has no commercial product plans so far but believes the roving robot, which can figure out the best route to a spot on its own, is better than the stationary cameras now common for security.

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