FBI warns of new Storm worm variant

On Wednesday, the FBI and its partner, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), warned against a new email campaign being used by the creators of the Storm worm botnet.

The email uses the phrase 'FBI vs. Facebook' in its subject line and contains a link to view an article about the FBI and Facebook, the popular social-networking website. Clicking on the link downloads malicious software onto the victim's computer.

"The spammers spreading this virus are preying on internet users and making their computers an unwitting part of criminal botnet activity," said the FBI in a press release. "We urge citizens to help prevent the spread of botnets by becoming web-savvy."

Dell tests music player to renew iPod battle: report

BANGALORE--In recent months, personal computer maker Dell, has been testing a digital music player that could go on sale as early as September, the Wall Street Journal newspaper said, citing several Dell officials.

KDE 4.1 released

The community behind KDE, the widely used Linux and Unix desktop environment, this week released the final version of KDE 4.1, a significant upgrade and the second edition of KDE to use the Qt 4 application development framework.

Along with Gnome, KDE is one of the two most widely used desktop environments for Linux and Unix systems. With the KDE 4 series, developers shifted the system from the Qt 3 application-development framework to Qt 4, while rebuilding the desktop environment from scratch.

'Star Trek' communicators free up doctors' time

Belfast Health and Social Care Trust has saved the equivalent of 4,000 emergency department staff hours per year with an internal Star Trek-style wireless voice communicator.

The network, which is supplied by Vocera and is accessed by a pendant-like device, has been installed at the Royal Victoria Hospital Emergency Department in December 2007.

The curse of the BlackBerry

Although he's supposed to be on holiday, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown admits his BlackBerry will remain on as he wanders pensively along the North Sea shore at Southwold.

Perhaps it's forgivable for a prime minister to feel the need to remain in constant touch with the office. But how many people do you know who have they holidays spoiled by work emails and calls? Or more mundanely how many people do you know who check their BlackBerrys and email out of office hours?

Apple CEO Jobs' life not in danger: report

LOS ANGELES--Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who has been dogged by investor concerns about his health, does not have recurrent cancer or a life-threatening health issue,

Scrabble-Scrabulous standoff spells L-A-W-S-U-I-T

It was only a matter of time before the Scrabble-Scrabulous feud came to a head, and that breaking point has now been reached. Hasbro said today that it has filed suit in the Southern District of New York against Rajat Agarwalla, Jayant Agarwalla, and RJ Softwares, better known as the creators of the popular Facebook application Scrabulous. As part of the suit, Hasbro said that it has served Facebook with yet another take-down notice for the application due to copyright infringement.

Google opens Knol website, a wiki with bylines

SAN FRANCISCO--Google opened its website Knol to the public on Wednesday, allowing people to write about their areas of expertise under their bylines in a twist on encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows anonymity.

Qualcomm patent ruled invalid in German Nokia case

HELSINKI--The German Federal Patent Court ruled on Wednesday that a Qualcomm GSM patent asserted in a case against the world's top cell phone maker Nokia was invalid.

Qualcomm, Nokia deal ends long legal battle

NEW YORK--Qualcomm and Nokia late on Wednesday settled a 3-year, three-continent legal battle over patent licenses and royalties for the next 15 years.

Microsoft turns to users for new wave of Xbox games

SEATTLE--Microsoft will turn to users of its Xbox 360 to create new video games and broaden the types of games available on its console, taking a page out of the strategy books of Facebook and YouTube.

NY gov signs game bill into law

A bill that will have made it illegal to sell or rent some violent games to minors was signed into law Tuesday by New York Governor David Paterson.

Governor Paterson's office said the bill was aimed directly at protecting children.

The passed version of Senate Bill 6401 abandons the restriction on minors' access to violent games in a bill that was considered last year, but retains some of the original legislation's satellite measures. Chief among those is a requirement that after September 1, 2010, all new gaming consoles sold in the state will need to have parental lockout features. PCs are exempt from the law, as are handheld systems. (The Nintendo DS is the only current-generation system on the market without a parental lockout feature.)

Microsoft gives a new Xbox 360 experience

Despite ostensibly having what is regarded as one of the best user interfaces of all the major consoles, Microsoft is reinventing the Xbox 360's look. The underlying Xbox Live foundation will remain the same, but Microsoft wants to make life even better for users by making existing features easier to find and use, removing clutter from the marketplace, and vastly improving the social experience of Live.

10 hard drive disasters

Deaths at the hands of bananas, smelly socks and WD-40 are some of the unusual fates to have befallen innocent hard drives, according to a data recovery company that has released a list of the most remarkable cases of data loss witnessed this year.

One customer left a banana on top of his hard drive, which then rotted and seeped through into the device. The circuits were ruined and the drive failed to work.

The banana was also ruined.

The evolution of search over traditional BI

Commentary--A recent Gartner report predicts that ITs involvement in business intelligence (BI) will diminish in time as business users adopt new technologies to quench their thirst for information. There are two reasons for this shift: depth of insight and ease of use. The next generation of information access solutions will reach out to the entire enterprise, bring together all of the information and make it universally accessible. As this transition begins, legacy solutions can retain value by pursuing an integration strategy: bringing their mature reporting, visualization and dashboard capabilities to bear on unstructured and semi-structured content.

AMD on road to recovery, says research firm

While AMD's processor business is showing strength, the company is still in a worse position than Intel to face a dip in demand for the rest of the year, research firm Technology Business Research has cautioned.

In a statement on Friday, John Spooner, senior analyst at Technology Business Research (TBR), said AMD enjoyed stronger-than-expected processor unit shipments in the first half of 2008, as a result of a healthy global PC market--driven by strong sales in emerging markets--and the US server space.

Yahoo may revisit News Corp if AOL dims: source

NEW YORK--Yahoo is unlikely to get into a bidding war over AOL with Microsoft because if Microsoft gets in the way, Yahoo could instead renew talks over News Corp's Web properties, a person with knowledge of the plans said on Thursday.

EU files new charges against Intel

BRUSSELS--European Union antitrust regulators made new accusations against chipmaker Intel on Thursday, saying it paid retailers to not sell PCs using chips made by rival Advanced Micro Devices.

Torvalds attacks IT industry 'security circus'

Linux creator Linus Thorvalds has labeled makers of the OpenBSD operating system a "bunch of masturbating monkeys", as part of a wider critique of what he said was self-centered behavior in the IT security industry.

In an email to the Linux kernel developer mailing list, Torvalds said a section of the security industry was dedicated to finding bugs in software only to publicize their findings and gain notoriety.

The row erupted in the Gmane mailing list after a developer for the PaX Team, which patches the Linux kernel, accused Torvalds and other top Linux kernel developers of "covering up [the] security impact of bugs" by not clearly labeling them as security flaws.

New hybrid delivery security architecture

In the past, CIOs deployed their own self-contained application architectures on their own servers and storage systems. This old model is giving way to a hybrid application architecture that combines hosted functionality with in-house applications running on consolidated and virtualized commodity servers. We believe that this transformation will drive efficiencies across the full stack, from business processes to physical infrastructure, while increasing IT's ability to meet new demands in a rapidly changing business environment.

AOL talks with Microsoft, Yahoo heat up: source

NEW YORK--Time Warner's discussions to merge or sell its AOL Internet division with Microsoft or Yahoo have taken on new urgency ahead of Yahoo's Aug 1 shareholders meeting, a source familiar with the discussions told Reuters on Tuesday.

Intel faces new antitrust charges in Europe: report

European regulators are preparing to file new antitrust charges against Intel, expanding a probe into the chipmaker's marketing and sales practices, The Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

10 things we'd change on the iPhone 3G

The 3G iPhone has finally arrived--a year and a half after CEO Steve Jobs first confirmed rumors Apple would indeed be making one of those fancy mobile phone things.

Since then many iPhone clones have been born--many with fleeting lives--and the mobile industry has done a whole lot of waking up and smelling of coffee.

But we're not about to sit here going gaga over the gadget, sleek though it may be. There are plenty of functions and features where we feel Apple could up its game--so here are 10 things we'd like to change about the 3G iPhone...

Crackers claim iPhone 3G hack

A group of developers has claimed to have cracked the iPhone 3G.

Apple's latest version of the iPhone was released to market on Friday last week. Within hours, the iPhone Dev Team, which cracked the original iPhone, claimed to have hacked the operating system behind the iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0.

The iPhone Dev Team also claimed to have developed a tool, 'PwnageTool 2.0', that will enable users to 'jailbreak', or run unofficial, third-party apps, on their iPhone 3G. In a blog post, the iPhone Dev Team posted a link to a video which they claim shows PwnageTool 2.0 in action.

Yahoo to offer free games with in-game ads

NEW YORK--Yahoo said on Thursday it would offer its users hundreds of popular casual online games as free downloads backed by revenue from advertising integrated into the games.

iPhone 3G poses barriers to business adoption

For years, Apple has paid little attention to products for enterprise users. Now it's pitching its new iPhone 3G as: "The best phone for business. Ever". But has it got the package right?

The update lets companies push email to the smartphone and supports communication with Microsoft Exchange mail servers using ActiveSync. There's in-built Cisco VPN, location services using GPS (but no driving directions) and, of course, the fast 3G networking. It will also allow businesses to deliver enterprise applications to the handset without any intermediary. Here at ZDNet.co.uk, we wondered what ordinary business users would make of these new features. We asked readers: "Is it enough? Could you see yourself using the iPhone in your workplace?" Here's what they said.

Murdoch says News Corp, Yahoo tie-up very unlikely

SUN VALLEY, IDAHO--News Corp's Rupert Murdoch said it was "very unlikely" his company would be involved in any Yahoo transaction and said Yahoo and Microsoft would not end up with any deal.

Microsoft to cut Xbox 360 price tag

After weeks of rumors and leaked retailer adverts, it now appears as if official confirmation has arrived for a $50 price cut to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Pro.

Citing "people familiar with the matter," The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft will lower the price of its 20GB Pro unit from $349 to $299 as early as Sunday, July 13. It could also be announced as part of Microsoft's presentation at the E3 Media & Business Summit on the morning of Monday, July 14.

A time and need for service innovation, education

Commentary--Services make the world go around. In modern day society, we are all connected to each other by either giving or receiving a service.

At first glance, our daily service interactions almost seem invisible.

From the moment we turn a light switch on in the morning (electric utility service), to beginning a morning commute (transportation service), to interacting with colleagues at work (communication service often by email and telephone), to buying a quart of milk on the way home (retail service), to meeting with retirement planning advisor in the evening (financial services), or going out to a restaurant with a spouse (entertainment service), we are all actively engaging in service interactions--at a count of forty times a day. Often, we only become aware of these individual interactions when there is a disruption.

A new look at technology visualization

Commentary--Now more than ever, businesses and government agencies are dependent on clear, actionable infrastructure information to make intelligent business decisions on a daily basis. As individuals on almost every organizational level rely on the technical infrastructure to support mission-critical objectives and applications, data center management solutions must be capable of providing high levels of visibility into complex, continually changing environments.

Stolen: Google employees' personal data

Google has confirmed that personal data of U.S. employees hired prior to 2006 have been stolen in a recent burglary.

Records kept at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, an external company Google and other companies use to handle human resources functions, were stolen in a burglary on May 26. An undisclosed number of employees' details and those of dependents such as names, addresses, and Social Security numbers were on the stolen computers. It is understood that Colt did not employ encryption to protect the information.

Offshoring: India still No. 1

Bangalore has retained its position as the ideal global delivery location for businesses, according to a new report from IDC.

The research analyst's Global Delivery Index (GDI) released this week indicated that India is still the offshoring country of choice. In its second edition, IDC's GDI ranks 35 cities in the region based on criteria such as labor and rent costs, language skills and political risk.

Two other Indian cities also made it to the top 10 list--New Delhi edged out Manila for the number two spot, while Mumbai dropped three places from last year's list to seventh.

Introduction to dynamic documents

Dynamic documents can transform how organizations create, share and deliver information. Jake Sorofman, senior VP of marketing and business development for JustSystems, talks about the emergence of dynamic documents. Jake discusses how dynamic documents come to life, more like business applications than what we think of as documents; information is live, the user experience is interactive and backend systems are accessed bi-directionally--from within the document itself.

California to drivers: Drop the cell phone, dude

LOS ANGELES--Next week California will try to wrest cell phones from the hands of drivers, telling everyone from movie starlets and dot-com millionaires to surfers and soccer moms that conversations behind the wheel must be on a headset.

Bill Gates bids farewell to Microsoft

Bill Gates' farewell speech to Microsoft reminded employees that the company knows how to come from behind as well as to lead.

"In some cases, those are the ones that bond you the most," Gates said, recalling some of the tougher times. "You know when IBM decides to attack you or when some legal ruling isn't quite right, and you have to do a press conference afterward."

Nokia to buy Symbian

HELSINKI--Nokia will pay $410 million for the remaining shares in UK-based Symbian and make its software royalty-free to boost phone sales and respond to new rivals such as Google.

Symbian's software is used in two-thirds of smartphones--handsets with computer-like capabilities--and 6 percent of all mobile phones, but new platforms such as Google's Android and Apple's iPhone could challenge its dominance.