Security researchers at Sophos Labs last week discovered a new, "still in beta" backdoor Trojan targeting Mac OS.

The Trojan, identified as BlackHoleRAT, is a variant of the free "remote administration tool" darkComet RAT for Windows, and gives the administrator the ability to place text files on the desktop, send restart, shutdown or sleep commands, to run shell commands, to place a full-screen window with a message that forces a reboot, to force URLs to a client, and to pop up a fake "Administrator Password" phishing window.

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Microsoft's Craig Mundie and Don Mattrick recently announced that the company would be releasing a non-commercial SDK for its Kinect 3D motion controller sometime this spring. Today, just seven days later, Belgian 3D interface company SoftKinetic has launched its free SDK for all depth-sensing cameras, including Microsoft's Kinect.

"We want to expand the community of developers able to access to our professional tools and technology," said Eric Krzeslo, Chief Strategy Officer of SoftKinetic. "We believe that opening up our cross-platform, multi-camera software to a broader community will enhance productivity and creativity, and we cannot wait to see the incredible innovations that emerge as a result."

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There has been lots of recent speculation about whether Apple can go on without its CEO should he not return from medical leave. Steve Jobs may be visionary and iconic, but Jony Ive's value simply can't be overstated. Apple's vice president of industrial design has influenced most of the major hardware product designs since joining the company in 1996. I have long felt that Apple could more easily go on without Jobs than Ive, but never really had cause to state so until today, following a report from the Sunday Times of London that is spreading like wildfire across the InterWebs.

Ive is the creative genius behind designs for iPad, iPhone and iPod, which, combined, accounted for two thirds of Apple revenues during calendar fourth quarter. He takes credit for Macs, too -- aluminum PowerBook, iMac, Titanium PowerBook and unibody MacBook Pro. Ive is an indispensable employee -- like Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter is to Pixar -- someone Apple shouldn't want to lose. If the Times report is even marginally accurate, Ive and Apple are in a tuff over whether he works in Silicon Valley or his native United Kingdom. The outcome raises questions about his departure from Apple.

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Initial sales didn't meet expectations, and the company is stalling until its next earnings report -- perhaps hoping sales will surge meanwhile. Moreover, if Verizon Wireless sold 60 percent of initial iPhone sales online, as the CEO claims, the other 40 percent leads to a surprisingly small number.

On February 14, I asked: "Say, whatever happened to that 1 million Verizon iPhones sold announcement?" If first weekend demand was good, then surely somebody, either Apple or Verizon, would have released sales figures. After all, Apple could have scored a big, distracting PR coup just as Mobile World Congress was beginning. Instead, there was silence, which Verizon Wireless CEO Daniel Mead broke as the weekend started. He told the Wall Street Journal and Reuters that the iPhone 4 launch broke sales records. Funny thing, neither news organization actually quotes Mead about Verizon iPhone sales. They summarize instead. Now why is that? Regardless, Mead gives no actual sales numbers, which removes real credibility from his summarized claims. He defers revealing sales until Verizon's next quarterly earnings report.

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Perhaps Apple chose the wrong time to get out of the server market. The company stopped selling Xserve at the end of January. Now the 2010 server numbers are in, and they're looking pretty good. Server shipments grew 16.8 percent during 2010 and revenue by 13.2 percent, year over year, according to Gartner. It was a remarkable turnaround compared to 2009, when shipments and revenue fell 16.6 percent and 18.3 percent, respectively. Manufacturers shipped 8.8 million servers for the year, generating $48.8 billion in revenue.

Gartner largely credited the rebound to x86 server upgrades delayed by the economic crisis set in motion by the September 2008 stock market crash. "2010 was a year that saw pent-up x86-based server demand produce some significant growth on a worldwide level," Jeffrey Hewitt, Gartner research vice president, said in a statement. "The introduction of new processors from Intel and AMD toward the end of 2009 helped fuel a pretty significant replacement cycle of servers that had been maintained in place during the economic downturn in 2009."

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Leading Czech antivirus vendor Avast! has updated its free antivirus tool to version 6. Avast! Free AntiVirus 6 claims to deliver even better protection against malware thanks to two new features previously only found in paid-for antivirus programs.

The first feature is AutoSandbox, which automatically identifies suspicious applications and prompts the user to run them in an isolated environment, preventing them from interacting with, and potentially infecting, the computer. Second, WebRep provides reputation-based ratings for websites and search engine results, although this functionality is already available for free in standalone browser add-ons like MyWOT, it's the first time it's been made available as part of a free antivirus product.

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The Web as a whole tends to favor those individuals with their vision intact.

There are a couple of areas of the Web that have benefitted the visually impaired: Web radio and podcasting services, for example, are generally free sources of lots of information, and many of the most popular news sites do daily or weekly audio recaps of their featured written content. Voice over IP communications, likewise has brought the convenience of free instant messaging to those without sight. But for the most part, the Web has been a silent place that we look at, instead of listen to.

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As if the press frenzy surrounding the antenna problems with the AT&T iPhone 4 last year was not enough, Consumer Reports has just added some more fuel to the fire. The publication claims that in its own internal tests of the Verizon model, the same exact attenuation issues are occurring.

Bloggers and journalists labeled it a whole bunch of amusing and comical names: from the "grip of death" to "Antennagate." It became a whole lot more serious for Apple, who eventually was forced by the publicity to admit some issues and provide free bumpers to all iPhone 4 owners.

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Once you've installed Service Pack 1 for Windows 7, did you know there's around 1GB of setup files cluttering up your hard disk? You'll need these files should you ever want to uninstall SP1, but we'd only recommend doing so if you needed to correct a problem. After a month or so, you should have a pretty good idea if these files will be needed going forward or not, at which point if your system is trouble-free, why not delete them to reclaim a decent amount of space?

Microsoft has thoughtfully integrated the cleaning tool into the Disk Cleanup utility, meaning you no longer need to open a command prompt window and type in a specific command. Once you've ascertained that you'd like to free up the drive space, read on to discover how it's done.

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German software developer ashampoo GmbH & Co. KG has released Ashampoo Photo Commander 9.0 for Windows PCs. Version 9 boasts a large number of new features to give Photo Commander a foothold in the increasingly crowded photo organization and editing market. This is reflected in the download size of the package, which is a third bigger than version 8 at a whopping 135MB.

Standout new features include support for tagging photos, new filters and editing options and improved wizards, plus an extended user interface, which includes a brand new dual-pane view for comparing the effects of editing on the currently selected photo.

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Betanews welcomes reader contributions. Here, Eric Neumann responds to two February 21st posts by Joe Wilcox -- "iPad is not a PC" and "5 reasons Macs will never outsell PCs." If you would like to submit a post, please email joewilcox at gmail dot com.

Being a business IT professional, I have been watching with great interest and excitement the emergence of the iOS model of computing and cloud movements hitting the personal and now commercial computing worlds. However, I must add that initially I have also viewed these big changes with fear; as recently as 2006, my career was purely based on the SME IT status quo of on-premise Microsoft and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stacks.

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Google took a big step Thursday night towards dealing with the issue of content farms clogging results, changing its algorithms to weed out low-quality sites. The company said the changes would "noticeably impact" 11.8 percent of all queries, and could affect the rankings for a large number of websites, the company warned.

"We can't make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down," the company posted to its blog. "It is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that's exactly what this change does."

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In the first month of 2011, Myspace CEO Mike Jones confirmed that News Corp was looking to spin off or sell his social media and entertainment site. According to reports on Friday, more than 20 parties have already expressed interest in MySpace.

Silicon Alley Insider on Thursday posted a chart concisely titled "The Utter Collapse of MySpace," which showed how the social-network-turned-entertainment-site dropped from 70 million unique views to 45 million uniques between 2010 and 2011. It's a sharp decline, but MySpace has been bleeding users for more than five years, illustrated by Quantcast's estimates below.

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You know I'm an iPad freak. I was first in line to buy one and I've used it so much my screen is cracked. It is the device that's changed my life more than any other in the past year, which, in a year that Microsoft Kinect shipped, is totally impressive. For the past few days I've had a Motorola XOOM. I accepted a loaner because I wanted to prove that it would suck next to an iPad.

One problem: I'm falling in love with it. With a couple of caveats. First, the caveats:

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Yesterday, during an exclusive press briefing that was also available by invitation-only webcast, Sony Electronics president Phil Molyneux detailed how the company would embrace the connected anytime, anywhere and on-anything era. He also addressed, and not necessarily answered, questions about Sony's Internet TV and tablet strategies. If one word defines his plan for the consumer electronics company: Differentiation. I attended the event at Sony Electronics' corporate headquarters in northern San Diego, which is about a 30-minute drive from my apartment. Sony Electronics is the largest of Sony's six US organizations.

Molyneux, a 24-year Sony executive, assumed his current responsibilities just six months ago. During his first two months Molyneux traveled to 15 states, visiting 250 retail stores. He wanted to understand Sony's retail situation in the United States. "You can go pretty much into any retailer in the US and you'll be faced with this wall of LCD TVs. I call that the 'sea of sameness.' From a consumer's perspective, you look at that wall and this line of LCD products...how can you decide which product to purchase?"

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