If you manage a website that has anything more than basic personal details, then it's vital to make sure it's secure. There are plenty of free tools around that promise that they can help, but which really delivers?

Netsparker's Community Edition is one popular solution, as it offers a strong core set of features with minimal restrictions (you can use it on as many sites as you like, for instance).

I've got a puzzle for the oft-vocal Apple Fanclub of bloggers and reporters. In June, many of them claimed that Verizon iPhone had stalled Android's US growth and that the days of massive gains were over for Google's mobile platform. How does that reconcile with ComScore's newest smartphone data, released today?

At TechCrunch, MG Siegler led the charge in ridiculous late-June post: "The Verizon iPhone Halted Android's Surge. The iPhone 5 Could Reverse It". Other Fanclubbers followed his lead. I rebutted the lot with "Android is unstoppable". The available data didn't support Siegler's assertion then, and even less so today.

Website analytics company KISSMetrics licensed out a technology to dozens of companies, including streaming media companies Hulu and Spotify, that let them implant a tracking tag in a user's browser history that could "respawn" if deleted. Now, the company and its licensees are being sued.

UC Berkley School of Law posted a study at the end of July that revealed the use of these persistent cookies.

In the matter of a few short hours on Wednesday night, Google's seemingly well-intentioned and cogent argument against its competitors vis a vis Android blew up in its face. In the fallout, the search giant now appears to be speaking out of both sides of its mouth and may have strengthened its competitors' claims against it.

See, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond argued that there's a "a hostile, organized campaign against Android" using patents he calls "bogus." This came just days after it lost its bid for a host of Nortel patents to a consortium of companies that included Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research in Motion, and Sony.

T-Mobile USA has been listed as a "discontinued operation" by its parent company Deutsche Telekom all year, and regulatory approval of the wireless provider's merger with AT&T is still pending, yet the number 4 wireless carrier in the US has managed to prevent mass customer flight.

On Thursday, T-Mobile USA posted its earnings report for the second quarter of 2011, revealing that it had $5.1 billion in net revenue, down from $5.2 billion in the first quarter. This figure represents all service contracts, equipment sales, and all other sources of income for the company, so T-Mobile continued to lose customers and sold fewer handsets in the quarter.

Amazon can't keep running away from states that require sales tax collection. Even they are now supporting a Democratic proposal to create an interstate agreement for standardized and simplified collection of taxes. Everyone's a winner except for those of you who have not been paying the use tax you're supposed to pay. It's a good and fair idea and it has no chance whatsoever of passage.

The remote buyer sales tax problem is an old one going back to the days of mail order and catalogs. The Internet has made it worse for states because the volume is so much greater, but the nature of the problem hasn't really changed. In that sense, the established court precedents might seem to close the books on the case.

Optimizing your PC's performance can be a tricky and complex business, but the best place to start is by benchmarking its current speed, ideally with real-life tests such as the time it takes to launch some of your larger applications.

Once that's done then it's easy to measure how your system changes over time. Whether you've installed a new security suite which seems to have slowed you down, or a new defrag tool looks like it's ramped up your speeds, then you won't have to guess what's happening; just run your tests again and you'll see precisely what's going on.

Sony admitted Thursday that its upcoming PlayStation Vita handheld console would miss the holidays in both the US and European markets, although it still would be on track to release by the end of the year in Japan. The company had said just last month that the PlayStation Portable's successor would arrive for that all important retail season.

The Vita ships in both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi+3G models through a deal with AT&T. It sports the familiar Sony controller interface with an OLED touchscreen, and adds a rear-mounted touchpad and six-axis motion sensors. A quad-core ARM processor and GX 543MP4+ graphics processor support the gaming experience.

Ever wondered what your PC is getting up to while you're away from it? Or maybe you have a more practical reason -- you're an IT manager -- for needing to know what various PCs are being used for when you're not around.

Either way, one of the most comprehensive and complete tools for monitoring and managing your PCs remotely lies in PC Monitor, a pair of tools that let you monitor and control Windows and Linux PCs over the network or Internet from any web browser or -- if you prefer -- iPhone, Android or Windows Mobile device.

"Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it", David Drummond, Google chief legal officer, writes in a blog post late yesterday afternoon. He's absolutely right.

For weeks I've been thinking about writing a commentary about how Apple has become a patent bully -- that its behavior answers an ongoing question of discussion going on for years. Drummond's blog post tipped me to doing it.

Clearwire, the United States' only nationwide WiMAX network announced on Wednesday that it intends to add TDD-LTE to its catalog of services based on its existing 4G infrastructure. The announcement comes just one week after Sprint announced a similar plan with burgeoning LTE/Satellite network LightSquared.

Clearwire says it will initially implement LTE technology in urban areas on the infrastructure it built up for its 2.5GHz WiMAX 4G network, and eventually upgrade to LTE Advanced (currently known as 3GPP Release 10) when the technology is ready, and when funding is obtained.

IDC jumps into the debate about Android and mobile developer priorities. Apple's iOS leads the pack, but Android is primed for gains -- even more, if only Google could sort out the messy tablet problem.

Assuming apps really matter -- and IDC's findings suggest perhaps not as much as technorati believe -- then which platforms developers prioritize are important, too. IDC surveyed more than 2,000 developers in late July, finding that 91 percent are "very interested" in iOS iPhone, followed by iPad (88 percent). Android for phone is 87 percent, while 74 percent for Honeycomb. Android interest increased on both phones and tablets -- by 2 and 3 percentage points, respectively, from three months earlier. By comparison, developer interest in iOS was flat for phones and up 2 points for tablets.

The disclosure of potentially serious malware affecting Android smartphones seemed to be tempered on Wednesday, with two security firms at odds over its threat to users. What's saving everyone from a Trojan that can record phone calls and apparently send them to a remote server? Hardware fragmentation.

CA had warned on Tuesday of the potential threat from this phone call recording app. That firm's findings caused Symantec researcher Irfan Asrar to take a second look.

Aiming to make its copyright laws more responsive to the realities of the digital age, the UK Government on Wednesday began efforts to update its more than 300-year-old system to better reflect how its citizens are using copyrighted works.

The plans include changing the laws so the 'ripping' of CDs and DVDs owned by UK citizens would now be legal, something that up until now would have been considered against the law. Government officials also said they had scrapped earlier announced plans to block copyright-infringing sites.

Best Buy's deal of the day, August 3, is the Samsung-manufactured, Google-branded Nexus S for free with two-year activation. The handset normally sells for $99, with models for AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile to choose from.

I normally don't write about deals like this one, but Nexus S is unique for offering a so-called "pure Google" experience. Google pushes the new versions of Android 2.x as they become available. There's no waiting on carriers, and there's no crapware or special skins (e.g., user interfaces) slapped on top. If you want Android at its best, Nexus S is the only way to get it right now.