Paul Kallender

Trend Micro Inc. will compensate customers in Japan for the cost of repairing PCs after it delivered a faulty antivirus update to them over the weekend, the company said Thursday. The company will not offer reparation for any loss of business incurred and the fate of overseas customers remains unclear.

Following a rise in fraud and public pressure, many of Japan's financial institutions are turning to technology to make it harder to steal money from their customer's accounts.

Next month many companies throughout Japan, including foreign companies, will have to comply with legislation that sets out new rules for handling personal data.

NEC Corp. is developing a network security system that will automatically monitor and analyze the configuration of security tools deployed in a network and suggest changes to fix vulnerabilities and any redundancies that exist between them, the company announced Tuesday.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and Dell Inc. were the big winners in the Japanese PC market last year, while Sony Corp.'s shipments slumped, a Japanese market research company said Thursday.

The Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) expects to conclude its investigation of Intel Corp.'s Japanese subsidiary within the next few months, the commission said Tuesday.

The Tokyo District Court has suspended the production and sale of a word processing program that is the only serious competitor in Japan to Microsoft Corp.'s Word. The court also called for existing stocks of the program, called Ichitaro, to be destroyed. Justsystem Corp., which develops the software, said it plans to appeal.

NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's largest mobile phone carrier, is on target to achieve its revenue, profit and third-generation (3G) subscriber goals for the financial year ending March 31, but the company is pinning its hopes on new services to maintain its profitably over the long term, executives said at a news conference Friday.