The business of writing, buying, and selling malware has become increasingly commercial over the past few years, but a new report from online security firm Finjan sheds light on just how mainstream the crimeware business has gone. Earlier this month, the company discovered a small, standalone application gathering data on over 8,700 servers, including web sites from 2,500 North American companies and a handful of sites in Alexa's top 100 ranking. Potential buyers were able to log into the malicious server hosting the data-gathering service and evaluate any given web site's size and Google Page Rank to decide whether or not the site's FTP information was worth purchasing or not.

The concept of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is nothing new, but this is the first time anyone has organized the purchase of FTP login credentials, with additional tools available to help a buyer confirm he's making a smart purchase.

Court Questions Patent Damages Against Microsoft For Guatemalan Patent ...

Microsoft has been fighting for years against a Guatemalan patent holder, Carlos Amado, who claims to hold a patent on the concept of linking a database to a spreadsheet. The patent itself has been thoroughly debunked. Even the patent itself admits that it's merely taken a bunch of concepts that were widely used before and combining them -- which is exactly the type of thing that the Supreme Court has said should not be patentable. Microsoft has appealed the ruling, but the Supreme Court turned it down. However, it then appealed the amount of damages, and the appeals court has now thrown out the lower court's damages based on the fact that it appeared to pick the damages number out of thin air. It seems likely that Microsoft will still have to pay damages for infringement (though, the court also admits that new Supreme Court rulings may impact the amount as well), but the lower court is going to at least have to justify how much Microsoft needs to pay Amado for basically putting such an obvious idea on paper and filing a patent.

Online bullying, suicide raise concerns for parents

At 13, my girlfriends and I passed notes to each other every single day, folded into small triangles with the recipient's name scrawled on the outside panel. Some of them could get pretty ''emo'' to use today's vernacular, but the truth is, we wrote to each other about boys most of the time. We wrote about boys we liked and boys we didn't like. We even wrote about boys we barely knew, just in case one of us heard something about them that just might be worth passing along (perhaps that one of them ''liked'' one of us, for example.)

Once in a while, we even wrote notes to boys. Without revealing too much, let me just say that over the past five years, I've emptied enough boys' pockets on laundry days to know that girls still write notes to boys, still folded into little triangles.

World Markets See-Saw As Dollar Hits Record Low And Oil Prices Soar

News on Thursday showed that foreclosures, or repossessions, had hit a record high in the fourth quarter of last year while house prices look to be in freefall.

Analysts said the latest numbers were as good as confirmation that the U.S. economy was already in recession as a result of the housing market collapse and sub-prime mortgage crisis, which has already claimed victims across the globe, including Northern Rock.

'The debate should no longer be about whether there is or is not a recession, only about how deep it will be. Private employment has now fallen for three months in a row,' said Nigel Gault, economist at Global Insight. 'The Fed has to be more aggressive,' said Richard DeKaser, chief economist for National City Corporation in Cleveland, Ohio.

U.S.

Archive for: February, 2008

IT Project Failures

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The project is understood to have run into trouble early last year after the human resources element was completed.

Singles of the Week - Holly | Graham

I've always wanted to travel to everywhere so I could see everything.

Steve Almond To Oprah: "I Don't Give A Shit How Many Books You Sell"

You're the world's leading retailer of inspiration. You're the Wal-Mart of Hope.

I can already hear your fans howling for my head. But from where I'm sitting, you're just another zillionaire narcissist for whom fame (the illusion of unconditional love) has become the true goal and your public acts of good merely the means.

NextIO snags $18.8M of venture capital

Rather than IPO, Precision Therapeutics goes merger route [Pittsburgh] Taxpayer says a simple thank-you would help [Boston] Luminescent gets $9M new funding [San Jose] TC Angels does 6th deal, plans 2nd fund [Mpls./St. Paul] Arasor buys Novalux for $7M [San Jose] .

S.F. park to host massive music festival

The inaugural Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival will launch with all the subtlety of a rocket ship. With a lineup that includes headliners Radiohead, Tom Petty and Jack Johnson, this three-day festival has the potential to be one of the biggest concerts in Bay Area history.

The event is set for Aug. 22-24 at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Radiohead will headline the first night, with Petty and Johnson batting cleanup on, respectively, Aug. 23 and 24. Those are the only three names that have yet been announced. The festival is being put together, in part, by the same folks that present the mammoth Bonnaroo Festival each summer in Tennessee.

The event, perhaps the most ambitious in the park's rich history of hosting concerts, will feature five performance stages and the programming will represent a wide range of styles, from rock and blues to hip-hop and reggae to soul and jazz.

Do-It-Yourself Help for Filing

If you do your taxes for a second year in a row with the same company's program, it will remember your info from the previous year, saving you a great deal of typing as you fill out your W-2s, 1099s and Schedule As. So unless you've grown seriously disenchanted with a tax application, stick with it for this year.

Intuit's TurboTax can save you time in two ways: It can automatically extract tax-relevant information from Intuit's Quicken personal-finance program, and it can download some of your tax forms if employers and financial institutions have made them available through the right data networks.