Microsoft announced today that it acquired startup Komoku, a company specializing in rootkit detection and protection solutions. The deal marks Microsoft's second purchase related to fighting rootkits.

Komoku is headed by sixteen-year information security veteran Dr. William Arbaugh, and former Silicon Graphics Inc. and Atheros Communications engineer Jeffrey Chung.

SlySoft, a software company located in Caribbean nations Antigua and Barbuda and maker of the AnyDVD ripping utility have announced a software upgrade that defeats the BD+ protection used on some Blu-ray discs.

BD+ is a DRM solution for Blu-ray that was initially developed by Cryptography Research Inc. In November, Macrovision struck a $45 million deal with CRI for the BD+ code and associated patents.

Google yesterday announced the availability of a plug-in for Windows Mobile devices, which provides a shortcut on the home screen to Google's search.

The plug-in was first made available to BlackBerry devices last December, and then to Symbian-based phones more recently. Making it available on Microsoft's popular mobile operating system was only a logical step for Google.

Media analysis firm comScore yesterday released its 50 top-ranked Web sites for the month of February, showing that Yahoo is still the biggest destination, but the advertising power lies with AOL.

Yahoo continued its lead as the server of the most visited sites on the Web, with 137 million unique visitors in February. Yahoo was followed by Google with nearly 136 million, and Microsoft sites with over 118 million.

Handset manufacturer Sony Ericsson will soon be publishing its quarterly earnings, and this week put out a pre-emptive warning that the struggling economy has had a negative impact on sales.

The company says the mid-range and high-end handset market especially suffered in the quarter due to the economic downturn, but anticipates its growth for the three-month period to be about equal with the same quarter last year.

Tuesday night Facebook rolled out enhanced privacy features that allow users to customize the permissions of individual aspects of a profile. Almost immediately, BetaNews received a report of "life-threatening" abuse of this feature.

Popular social networking site Facebook is a repository of personal information for many, but until Tuesday, it lacked the ability to grant differing levels of access to different users. Previously, the only way to block other users from viewing specific content was to deny that user access to the profile outright, or to limit the profile's viewability to everyone. Now, users can choose which content each individual is allowed to view.

Market research group NPD released video game console sales figures for the month of February, and the units with the fastest processors look to be selling the slowest.

Video game console sales in February 2008, according to research group NPD, showed a 19% increase in units sold year-over-year, with Microsoft's Xbox 360 selling the fewest among what is still, more than two years after its introduction, called the "next gen" console market.

Limewire, formerly a popular Gnutella-based P2P file-sharing service, has opened the beta of its DRM-free download store.

Though the store was announced in August of last year, Limewire's DRM-free download shop has only now opened in public beta, offering tracks on an a-la-carte or subscription basis.

TiVo has slowly been expanding the scope of its service to include the commonly available content the Internet has to offer. Last week, the company finally announced support for YouTube content, and today announced an update to its Desktop Plus software supporting most video codecs.

Windows software TiVo Desktop Plus 2.6 converts various formats to .tivo files, playable on Series 3 or TiVo HD DVRs, supporting resolutions up to 720p. The software also converts programs recorded on the user's DVR to files playable on PCs or portable media devices.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the World-Wide Web (the concept of hypertext documents being readable through a browser) recently spoke to the BBC voicing his opposition to ISPs tracking user habits.

Berners-Lee thinks each user's browser history is property of the user, and if a company wants to use that information in the creation of, for example, customized advertisements, that needs to be negotiated with the user directly. The user needs to understand how others can benefit from his information.

After receiving an unsolicited and "inferior" buyout proposal from data storage company EMC, Iomega promptly dismissed it. Now the company has upgraded its offer, and Iomega is reconsidering.

EMC's original offer amounted to roughly $178 million, which Iomega felt was an undervaluation of the company. Today's offer to buy out all outstanding shares in Iomega amounts to roughly $205.5 million.

Sources have confirmed to BetaNews that Facebook will be launching a multi-platform instant messaging service built into a user's profile page.

Based upon the open source Jabber platform, the IM service will be Web-based only, as Facebook doesn't currently have any software client developers, one source said. Blog TechCrunch, which first reported the news, says the IM service could be rolled out to the public next week, but our source wasn't given a specific date.

After the One Laptop Per Child project was sued by Nigerian keyboard manufacturer LANCOR in January for $20 million and an injunction on the OLPC XO was imposed in Nigeria, the case has taken root in US federal court.

The suit claims that OLPC used the Lagos Analysis Corp's (LANCOR) multilingual keyboard design in its low-cost XO laptop without permission. Through litigation in Nigerian court, the company has effectively crippled the OLPC project in that country.

A SQL injection hack this week has affected 20,000 Web sites, according to tracking reports by McAfee. Among those hit with the malicious code is international security firm Trend Micro.

Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun says the company's site was hacked at around 9:00 pm Sunday, local time and identified the malicious file as JS_DLOADER.TZE. It affected an approximated 32 Trend Micro pages, most of which were in the site's malware encyclopedia. Users who accessed any of the hacked pages would have been at risk of infection.

EA has gone over the resistant heads of Grand Theft Auto franchise leader Take-Two, making an appeal directly to the shareholders and offering approximately $2 billion in cash to buy out its common shares.

The move is a smart one from EA, as Take-Two has been at the mercy of the shareholders in the past. Almost one year ago, the company's CEO and entire board of directors were ousted in a shareholder uprising from investors ZelnickMedia, allegedly spurred by the company's worsening financial situation.