The curse of the Pentium III serial number has struck again, this time the Chinese government has branded the Intel Corp chip a security risk. The ministry for industrial computer science is reported to have declared that Pentium III systems should not be connected directly to the internet. Presumably because of the possibility of a user’s movements on the web being monitored. However, Intel spokesperson Howard High said that as far as he was aware, Pentium III systems could be sold to the Chinese government as long as the embedded serial number function had been disabled.
