Are our computers too smart for our own good? That's the question I'm asking myself after reading Charlie Miller's "Battery Firmware Hacking" paper. Miller showed how you can write programs to render an expensive notebook battery worthless. You might even be able to blow one up.

How could this be? What design error in the system made it possible? None. Miller wrote programs based on published documentation for chips conforming to a popular standard. But there is one key mistake by Apple that makes the whole thing a lot worse.

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BitDefender today released its 2012 family of security suites, which have been enhanced with a range of new and interesting features.

A new monitoring tool tracks process behavior, for instance, helping to detect new and unknown viruses. Integrated cloud services deliver a faster response to new outbreaks. And the new Scan Dispatcher runs scans only when it's idle, so improving security without impacting on your overall system performance.

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Skype has announced the release of Skype for Windows 5.5. Its headline feature is deeper integration with Facebook. Once installed, you'll be able to see which Facebook friends are online and chat directly from Skype itself, plus update your Skype Mood and Facebook status together. You can also view, comment and "like" Facebook status messages too.

Skype 5.5 also promises improved video call reliability, new and updated emoticons and a raft of other minor improvements, interface tweaks and bug fixes.

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There's something wrong with your country when one of the most financially stable companies has more cash on hand than you do. But that is exactly what happened at the end of business Wednesday, according to the latest available daily financial statement from the US Treasury.

With a cash-on-hand balance of about $73.8 billion, the US Government now has less money on hand than Apple, who reported it had $76.2 billion in cash and securities at the end of last quarter.

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As patent lawsuits become ever more frequent, companies are building up their portfolios in an effect to protect themselves from litigation. Google is no stranger to this practice, as it confirmed on Friday it had purchased 1,030 patents from IBM. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

No doubt Google is still smarting from its loss to Apple in the race to acquire the intellectual property of Nortel Networks. The company was the odd man out in bidding for Nortel's technologies. It appears that the IBM patent purchase occurred some time in the middle of this month, indicating Google quickly moved on.

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Was it you? Your neighbor? Or me?

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Feeling the heat from both Android and iOS in the global smartphone market share battle, Research in Motion on Thursday announced the availability of BlackBerry Messenger 6 (BBM 6) the latest version of the smartphone maker's trademark instant messaging application which integrates BBM functionality into other BlackBerry apps for a boost in social usability.

With the debut of the BBM Social Platform SDK earlier this year, BlackBerry app developers got the ability to embed BBM functionality into their apps. The platform is extremely promising, as it could put real time communication into any application. Users could, for example, see that one of their contacts is available to play games, and an invitation could be sent. Then, once the game has begun, users could have a live in-game BBM chat session.

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Just two weeks after it launched here in the US, music service Spotify finds itself the target of a patent fight. San Diego-based PacketVideo sued the company in both the US and Netherlands on Thursday, claiming it could not come to an agreement over licensing of its technologies.

"PacketVideo has a strong intellectual property portfolio, and will take any necessary action needed to protect its intellectual property and prevent the misuse of its patents," the company's general counsel Joel Espelien said in a statement.

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Editor's note: This article was commissioned by Dell. To learn more about Dell's solutions for improving responsiveness while reducing costs with virtualization, please visit Dell's site by clicking here.

As hardware power increased over the years IT pros used to wonder about what we'd do with all that capacity, but no longer. Virtualization has enabled everyone, from SMBs to enterprise IT, to get better utilization out of their hardware and make management easier too.

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At Computex 2011 in Taipei last month, there was a significant amount of movement stirring in the MeeGo camp. The fully open source mobile operating system from Intel was being shown off on An Acer Iconia tablet, as well as on notebooks from PC makers Lenovo, Samsung, and Asus.

Earlier in July, an FCC filing from Taiwanese PC maker and netbook pioneer Asus showed that its MeeGo-powered X101 could possibly be coming to the United States

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If you've administrated Windows for any length of time, surely Sysinternals is in your toolkit. If not, it should be. I remember first using the software to recover a locked-up Windows NT 4 PC in 1996 (was it called Winternals back then). Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell founded Winternals that year, and Microsoft acquired the company 10 years later.

"Russinovich, Technical Fellow working on the managed cloud OS kernel -- you know this as the Windows Azure Fabric Controller -- is the primary author of these powerful tools", Charles Torre explains in the blog post introducing the video above. "Aaron Margosis, meanwhile, is a Microsoft Consultant and Sysinternals user with expert-level knowledge and experience using Sysinternals tools. They are an important part of his job. Aaron yearned for a book that encapsulates detailed information about all of the Sysinternals tools. Mark agreed and asked Aaron to coauthor it with him--be careful what you ask for!"

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Media files like photos, video and music can quickly swallow up gigabytes of drive space. Then there's the issue of viewing or listening to those files on more than one Mac or device. Do you diligently copy the files you need across to your second computer, or create a network shared folder that everyone can access?

A third option -- which has the added benefit of providing you with a fuss-free, attractive user interface for browsing and accessing your media collection -- lies with a tool such as Plex Media Server; it has been updated to version 0.9.3.4.

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Sprint & LightSquared on Thursday announced a 15-year agreement to share the responsibility and profits of the LightSquared wholesale 4G LTE network.

Number 3 US wireless network carrier Sprint has repeatedly spoken out against the possible merger of AT&T and T-Mobile USA, saying it would cause the wireless industry to "regress inexorably toward a 1980's-style duopoly."

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Skype has revolutionized the way we communicate, and armed with a headset you can slash your phone costs either by calling fellow Skype users for free or taking advantage of its cheaper call rates to communicate with both landline and mobile phones.

If you've ever needed to record a voice call, you'll have no doubt browsed the Skype Extras shop and discovered a number of paid-for solutions are available. If you can't justify the cost, and your needs are relatively basic, then you can record any Skype voice conversation for free with the aptly titled MP3 Skype Recorder.

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It's barely a week since NirSoft owner Nir Sofer released his last creation, CustomExplorer. But the prolific developer is already back with ProcessThreadsView, a powerful low-level system monitoring tool that displays in-depth information on the threads of whatever process you specify.

And we do mean "in-depth". Choose a process and you'll get to see each of its threads, along with their creation time, thread ID, status, number of context switches, base and dynamic priority, window title (if appropriate), class and a whole lot more.

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