February, 2010 Issue

The U.K. government will not exempt universities, libraries, and small businesses providing open Wi-Fi services from its Digital Economy Bill copyright crackdown, according to official advice released earlier this week.

Microsoft left little doubt Friday that it was one of the companies leading the charge against Google worldwide. In a blog post entitled "Competition Authorities and Search," Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner said part of the motivation for Microsoft and Yahoo's search deal was "we are concerned about Google business practices that tend to lock in publishers and advertisers and make it harder for Microsoft to gain search volume." The post comes at the end of a week in which European authorities asked Google to explain its search algorithms after complaints from competitors--one of which is owned by Microsoft. "Microsoft would obviously be among the first to say that leading firms should not be punished for their success," Heiner wrote in one of Microsoft's strongest public statements regarding Google to date. "Our concerns relate only to Google practices that tend to lock in business partners and content (like Google Books) and exclude competitors, thereby undermining competition more broadly."

And so it begins: the European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation of Google.

In what may be a precursor to the hippie/robot showdown we've always hoped for, musician Patrick Flanagan has founded Jazari, a three-piece robotic drum circle with some impressive grooves. If that's not fun enough, it's all controlled by two Wiimotes.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has authorized Google Energy to buy and sell electricity in bulk like any other utility. The FERC, the agency with oversight of the U.S. power grid, signed an order (PDF) on Thursday that grants Google Energy market-based rate authorization. This paves the way for the search giant to not only better manage its own energy costs, but to possibly add electricity marketer to its repertoire of services. The order specifically grants Google Energy--a subsidiary of Google--the rights "for the sale of energy, capacity, and ancillary services at market-based rates" while acknowledging that neither Google Energy nor its affiliates "own or control any generation or transmission" facilities.

When Christian Taylor stopped by the Sprint store in Daly City, Calif., last November, he was planning to buy around 30 BlackBerry handhelds.

More than 74,000 PCs at nearly 2,500 organizations around the globe were compromised over the past year and a half in a botnet infestation designed to steal login credentials to bank sites, social networks, and e-mail systems, a security firm said Wednesday. The systems were infected with the Zeus Trojan and the botnet was dubbed "Kneber" after a username that linked the infected PCs on corporate and government systems, according to NetWitness. The Wall Street Journal reported that Merck, Cardinal Health, Paramount Pictures, and Juniper Networks were among the targets in the attack. NetWitness speculated that criminals in Eastern Europe using a command-and-control server in Germany sent attachments containing the malware in e-mails or links to the malware on Web sites that employees within the companies clicked on. NetWitness said it discovered more than 75 gigabytes worth of stolen data during routine analytic tasks as part of an evaluation of a client network on January 26. The cache of stolen data included 68,000 corporate login credentials, access to e-mail systems, online banking sites, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail, 2,000 SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate files and data on individuals, NetWitness said in a statement and in a whitepaper available for download from its Web site. In addition to stealing specific data, Zeus can be used to search for and steal any file on the computer, download and execute programs and allow someone to remotely control the computer. More than half of the compromised machines were also infected with peer-to-peer bot malware called Waledac, the company said. Nearly 200 countries were affected, with most of the infections found in Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States. The news comes after Google announced an attack targeting it and what is believed to be more than 30 other companies and which was linked back to China. McAfee dubbed that attack "Operation Aurora." "While Operation Aurora shed light on advanced threats from sponsored adversaries, the number of compromised companies and organizations pales in comparison to this single botnet," said Amit Yoran, chief executive of NetWitness and former Director of the National Cyber Security Division. "These large-scale compromises of enterprise networks have reached epidemic levels."

Those iPhones really are awful.

Intel and Nokia are combining their respective Linux operating environments to power future smartphones and tablets, another step in a technology tie-up launched last year.

Weather service Weather Underground has a new trick up its sleeve: it can now show you the weather on a full-screen Google Map. The company is aptly calling it Fullscreenweather.com.

I feel sure you will find the appropriate way to express your love on Valentine's Day.

Good old Wi-Fi could be the fix to an impending explosion of data on wireless networks. Nearly three years after Apple introduced the game-changing iPhone, wireless operators around the globe are feeling the effects of the wireless data tsunami that is well under way. Even networks that don't support the iPhone are feeling the pinch as a generation of new wireless devices offering bandwidth-hungry Web applications are hitting networks.

Google announced some changes to Google Buzz late Thursday that show it has belatedly recognized the backlash over privacy concerns with the new service. Early users of Google Buzz have found the settings very complicated, especially the ones that pertain to privacy. In a blog post Thursday, Google said it built privacy controls into Google Buzz from Day 1 but acknowledged the most strident criticism--that Google made if difficult to make one's list of followers private--in tweaking the set-up process for the new social-networking service. "... we heard from people that the checkbox for choosing not to display this information was too hard to find, and based on this feedback, we've changed the notice to make it very clear," the company said on its Gmail blog.

An optional update to Windows closes a number of hacks that counterfeiters have used to bypass the product activation technologies built into Windows 7. With the update, Windows will try to restore Windows to its proper state, as well as marking tampered versions as non-genuine copies of the operating system.

Adobe Systems on Thursday warned of new critical holes in Reader and Flash Player, released a security update for the Flash hole, and said a patch for Reader would come next week.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--The Rodney Dangerfield of search engines is starting to get a little annoyed about its plight. Yahoo hosted a search event at its headquarters Wednesday that seemed designed mainly to remind the Silicon Valley press that it is still working on Internet search. A few new projects were shown off, such as an interesting mobile search feature that lets you draw a circle around an area of a map to narrow search results called Sketch-a-search.

Google, never satisfied with the pace of change, plans a test that will provide 50,000 to 500,000 people with fiber-optic broadband Internet access with a network speed of a gigabit per second starting as soon as this year.

To entice security researchers to look for holes in the Chrome browser, Google has announced it will pay $500 for bugs found in the code. But several experts say that's not enough money to motivate skilled vulnerability researchers. "I think it's ridiculous," Charlie Miller, a senior security researcher at Independent Security Evaluators, said when asked Monday for his opinion of Google's new bug bounty program. "It's insulting. It's so low." Under Google's new "experimental" incentive program announced last week people will get paid $500 for select interesting and original security vulnerabilities discovered in Chrome, or $1,337 for particularly severe or clever bugs. That figure refers to the geek term for elite, or "leet," which can be spelled out using the numbers.

It was Google's first-ever Super Bowl ad--and one of their few TV spots at all, to boot. On Sunday, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XLIV, the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant aired an ad called "Parisian Love," featuring a Valentine's-worthy romance spelled out in Google search queries.

Mozilla on Friday pulled two programs from its Firefox browser add-on site for containing malware. Sothink Web Video Downloader 4.0 and all versions of Master Filer were found to contain Trojan horse code aimed at Windows users.

Microsoft said on Wednesday that it is investigating another flaw in Internet Explorer, this time a vulnerability that could result in an unauthorized disclosure of information for users running its browser on older operating systems.

A difference of opinion among developers has become a high-profile debate over the future of the Web: should programmers continue using Adobe Systems' Flash or embrace newer Web technology instead?

Fed up with its progress, Google has decided that its social-networking strategy could use a few more followers.

Anyone with an e-mail account likely knows that police can peek inside it if they have a paper search warrant.

President Barack Obama's budget proposal will call for tripling government loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors, an administration official said on Friday, a move sure to win over some Republican lawmakers who want more nuclear power to be part of climate change legislation.