Tim Conneally

Early in August, security firms noticed a worm spreading on Facebook through wall posts, claiming to contain a video requiring a new codec to be installed. Variants of this worm are now being spotted on a weekly basis.

The virus appears to be a slightly modified version of what Kaspersky Labs called Koobface; a worm elaborate in its design, but crude in execution.

A technology for mobile digital television in Europe may have had a better chance for a full rollout before the EC mandated it as Europe's official standard. Now, a leading analyst reports that hope may be fading for DVB-H.

In March, the European Commission agreed that DVB-H would be the standard for terrestrial mobile television broadcasting, thanks to the directing hand of Commissioner Viviane Reding. Only five months later, German service provider T-Systems, an arm of Deutsche Telekom, rolled out a DVB-T service to its customers despite the EC mandate that providers stick to DVB-H.

Verizon and Google may be close to establishing a revenue sharing mobile search deal, according to a report which have yet to be confirmed though have certainly not yet been denied.

Both Google and Verizon refuse to comment upon rumors, but a report from The Wall Street Journal this morning said the two companies could close a deal within the next few weeks. Such a deal would establish Google as the default mobile search engine for all of Verizon's handsets in exchange for a share of advertising revenue.

Research In Motion launched its newest BlackBerry, the Bold, in Canada yesterday. Reviewers who have hastily compared it to Apple's iPhone have been asked by RIM to remove a side-by-side review comparing browsing speed between the two devices.

The Bold, or BlackBerry 9000, runs on an Intel XScale 624 MHz processor, has an HVGA 480x320 display and offers UMTS (2100, 900, 850MHz), GSM (1900,1800,900,850MHz), GPRS, EDGE and HDSPA , as well as Wi-Fi connectivity and GPS. There is also 1 GB of on-board memory for storage of files, and 128 MB of flash memory for applications.

It might not have even been a story meriting any extent of coverage -- Microsoft's hiring yesterday of comedian Jerry Seinfeld as its new commercial spokesperson -- had it not been for the fact that Microsoft has an image problem. That problem is due in large part to Windows Vista, and the public perception of it as somewhat less than the savior of modern computing that it was originally promoted to be in the early months of 2007.

As was widely reported yesterday, Microsoft is reportedly investing $300 million in a new advertising campaign starring comedian Jerry Seinfeld, and designed by the firm responsible for Burger King's popular, yet disturbing "King" ads. You may recall, the ones where ordinary people find themselves conversing with a plastic, motionless, mute Burger King statue that they find in their midst for no apparent reason.

A Maryland company has sued Nintendo, alleging that the Wii's controller infringes upon four of the company's patents.

Earlier this year a small Texas company called Anascape sued Nintendo for the designs of its Wii classic and GameCube controllers, two peripherals especially popular at that time because of the game Super Smash Brothers: Brawl. That company walked away with $21 million after Nintendo lost the patent appeal.

The Canadian software producer published a statement this morning confirming that it is discussing a sale to undisclosed third parties.

Earlier this week, Corel announced that its majority investor Vector Capital had withdrawn its March buyout offer that valued the company at nearly $280 million, in the interest of Corel's pursuit of other "potential strategic third-party alternatives," which would best suit shareholders.

AT&T today launched ConnecTech, an in-home support team that deals with setup and repair of home media services, and not exclusively to AT&T customers.

For fees beginning at $69, AT&T will send a technician to your home to perform installation or support-related tasks. Services include: wireless network setup, setup and connection of PCs, digital media, printers, music or photo setup, PC upgrading, home theater and TV installation, as well as in-home or telephone support.

The Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon's block-level persistent storage service for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has come out of beta, offering more security for databases in the event of instance failures.

For companies relying on cloud-based services, the threat of outages looms large. In July, when Amazon's Simple Storage Service went down for eight hours, dozens of popular sites such as Twitter and SmugMug were disrupted.

In its latest Stop||Watch commercial rankings, TiVo found that, while viewers fast-forward through most paid advertisements, movie trailers are among the least skipped.

Stop||Watch has been measuring this trend for months. In May, the top three most-watched commercials were promoting movies. Now, the results for June show the top four commercials in total viewing were for movies.

To remain competitive as user activity levels off, eBay has announced that Buy it Now sales will incur a reduced flat fee for an extended listing period.

Online auction service eBay charges its sellers twice for each transaction: once for listing the item (called the insertion fee) and once after the item has been sold (or the final value fee). Effective September 16, sellers will be able to insert 30-day Buy it Now auctions for 35¢, a 70% reduction in listing cost, according to eBay.

Download AIM Express 7.0 from FileForum now.

Two new AIM updates geared toward keeping the mobile user connected, were launched by AOL this morning: AIM Express (IE6 & 7, Firefox 2 & 3, and Safari 2 & 3) and AIM for Windows Mobile (5 & 6).

According to an apology Microsoft has issued to Japanese consumers, the demand for Xbox 360 consoles has far outstripped supplies in Japan, and inventories will remain totally sold out until new shipments arrive in September.

Reports began surfacing early this month of major consumer electronics retailers such as Yodobashi Camera and Bic Camera running out of Xbox 360s at metropolitan locations.

Music "mixtape" sharing site Muxtape has been pulled offline, with a notice saying it has to "sort out a problem with the RIAA." Its blog today contains the glib but equally nebulous statement, "No artists or labels have complained."

The message on Muxtape's main page predicts Muxtape will only be down "for a brief period." But the message contained in the site's Tumblr blog is slightly more foreboding, saying, "The site is not closed indefinitely."

Since March 2007, when the Copyright Royalty Board exacted a per-performance, per listener fee on streaming online services, pundits have declared a deathwatch on Internet radio. Recently, Pandora's founder expressed the same dire outlook.

This weekend, Pandora founder Tim Westergren told the Washington Post that his service is nearing the point where shutting down is the only feasible option. Despite the fact that Pandora is among the top 200 most popular United States Web sites (and climbing), and that the Pandora iPhone application is among the App Store's 10 most downloaded, Westergren said his company is still losing money.