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Despite the rapid growth of networking in the home, recent studies have informed Microsoft that a vast multitude of single-office businesses -- on the "far left" side of the SMB scale -- still work with either single PCs for their principal applications, or peer-to-peer networked clients. The company's research has drawn the conclusion that this market may be best served by an "all-in-one solution" -- one where business users simply buy the server and have it plugged in for them, and they don't even install the operating system.

For this reason, there's no fancy plastic box for the newest SKU for Microsoft's server OS announced this morning, called Windows Server 2008 Foundation. Instead, this very-basic rendition will come pre-installed on OEM and partner systems, the first of which are likely to premiere this month. Look for likely brand names such as HP, Dell, IBM, and Acer to top the list of manufacturers offering new, simple half-tower units at lower prices.

In a way, you might say that this is where the real trouble with Conficker starts: As of 4am EDT -- or 10:30pm in the Marquesas Islands, where the day begins -- the malware appears to be doing exactly as predicted, switching to its powerful newer algorithm. As experts also predicted, no serious amount of amok has been run and the Net has not experienced a massive meltdown.

Today, anyway. As we wade through the much-anticipated April 1 update, it's almost certain that the real damage comes later. Smooth sailing today beats mayhem, of course, but whatever Conficker's botnet is designed to do, it's apt to do it in the days and weeks to come -- well after flightier members of the public (and their media outlets) will have concluded that Conficker's danger passed on April 1. They'll assume that they're safe... and they're apt to regard malware and its ilk as a less serious, pervasive, and insidious problem than computer professionals understand it to be.

Google's Postini service regrets to inform us that after just over four months, the spam drop we saw in the wake of November's McColo takedown has been erased by a new, smarter breed of spam technology. The company released an overview of the relevant numbers in a blog post Tuesday morning.

Postini, which handles spam-blocking services for over 15 million business users across 50,000 companies, has been watching traffic climb back from the McColo drop since it happened, at one point estimating that spam traffic would return to normal in February. And the first one-day traffic spikes did indeed start to equal previous numbers right around then. But last week was the first time the service has seen those levels sustained over seven full days. In addition, the rate of increase is remarkable, with spam traffic growing by 1.2% each day during the first quarter of the year.

In a speech on the eve of an important Consumers' Summit to take place in Brussels, European Commissioner for Consumer Affairs Meglena Kuneva told a roundtable convened to discuss data security policy that personally identifiable data (PID) -- the stuff advocacy groups fear could end up in the wrong hands -- may not be the biggest privacy problem Internet users face. As long as Web services maintain profiles of their users, even without associating those profiles with names or addresses, the misuse or misappropriation of that data, Comm. Kuneva said, may still endanger Internet users.

"No one in the digital space really cares about our actual names or exact physical addresses. What traders want is a description of who we are and a way to reach us," Kuneva told the roundtable (PDF of speech transcript available here). "They want to know that the person behind the number 1234 is young, sporty, drives fast cars and travels frequently and that as a trader you can show up on his screen at your convenience. This is fine. But what about the person behind number 456, unemployed, in debt and about to lose his home? He is a target for predatory loans and fraudulent financial and yes, personal, advice."

Even though the interface is practically indistinguishable from that of the Android Market, details revealed today by Microsoft about the Windows Mobile Marketplace adds promise to Windows Mobile 6.5, an OS version that many have already written off as a placeholder until WM7.

When Windows Mobile Marketplace goes live, it will be populated with software from companies such as EA, Netflix, Pandora, Facebook, Sling Media, Gameloft, AccuWeather.com, and at least half a dozen others. Many of the apps will be ports of apps already proven popular on the iPhone, and Microsoft said it expects many more developers of the nearly 20,000 Windows Mobile developers to list apps.

Mark Zuckerberg, take note: Twitter on Monday quietly introduced a high-visibility change in design and functionality, and no one's crying or threatening to leave the service. "Today's update better reflects how folks are using Twitter now," writes founder Biz Stone in his blog.

The change turns "Replies" on the service into "Mentions," and groups them under a tab on the left labeled with the familiar @username syntax -- for instance, for the Betanews Twitter account, Mentions displays as @BetaNews. And where previously the Replies tab showed only those tweets that began with the flag, Mentions shows every instance in any message. (In other words, it now sees "La la la @BetaNews" as well as "@BetaNews la la la.") The adjustment will help Twitter users to keep track of any conversation in which they're flagged. And as with the original @username reply flag, the new usage was developed and perpetrated by the users, rather than dictated by a design team.

As announced back in November and discussed during their most recent earnings call, Sun's effort to reduce their workforce by 15-18% continues this week with layoffs for 1500 employees. It is believed that most of the positions are sales jobs and other "customer-facing" staff.

The layoffs, which overall are expected to affect 5,000-6,000 staffers, will cost the company $375-$450 million, after which they're expected to save Sun between $700 million and $800 million annually. The company's next earnings call will take place on April 28; their Q3 '09 ends today.

The contributions counter on the front page ticks slowly, slowly along, but it would be faster to watch the minutes count down for Wikia Search, Jimmy Wales' "people powered" would-be Google competitor, which announced Tuesday that it was shutting down at day's end.

The Wikipedia founder wrote in his blog that the project "has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped." Wikia Search, known early in its career as Wikiasari, was launched in January 2008, and rolled out its Wikia Intelligent Search Engine for developers in October.

In a move which may have forestalled a deal that may have accelerated arch-rival Hulu's "evil plot" to assimilate consumers' brains, YouTube has made an extended deal with Disney Media Networks -- parent company of the American ABC and ESPN channels -- that not only gives ABC its own branded YouTube channel, but enables Disney to manage its own in-stream advertising.

This afternoon, a hastily-produced preview video was posted to ABC's new channel in a format that could not be embedded elsewhere, contrary to the usual YouTube methodology. And a two-and-a-half minute clip from a recent SportsCenter serves as a placeholder for future content on ESPN's new YouTube channel. ESPN already has a full-featured sports news and video highlight service on Disney's own Go Network, its homebase since 2004 after Disney and Microsoft's MSN terminated their deal.

Wireless streaming of high-definition video must still be very far off.

While it does exist in various forms today, one of the premier members of the Wireless HD Consortium, Broadcom, is proposing a new streaming video interface standard which focuses on HD over Ethernet.

As tensions rise in the Far East, satellite-image purveyor GeoEye has snapped a pair of finely detailed images of activity at North Korea's Musudan-Ri missile facility, the most recent gathered at 11:49am local time on Sunday, March 29. The image, taken from 423 miles up and at a slightly oblique angle, shows the launch pad, the vehicle assembly building, and (according to analysts at GlobalSecurity.org, who have reviewed the image) a great many vehicles near the facility's launch control complex.

GeoEye, with the help of an analyst at IHS Jane's, has annotated the March 11 image for your viewing pleasure. The annotations spotlight the missile launchpad with its umbilical cord, the large Launch Control Complex to its north, the Missile Assembly and Checkout Facility just to its west, and an Engine Test Stand in a defile to the southeast.

In the wake of yesterday's discovery that the Conficker worm can give hints to its presence on a system in a Windows-based network by changing the network signature of that system, the US Dept. of Homeland Security released what the chief of its US-CERT division says is "the most comprehensive [tool] available for enterprises like federal and state government and private sector networks to determine the extent to which their systems are infected by this worm."

But its use, says a DHS statement published yesterday, is limited to computers -- including network infrastructure systems -- operated by the federal government and its private sector partners. For that reason, DHS says, it's distributing this detection tool only through its secured channels. Specifically, government sources may acquire the tool through the Government Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (GFIRST) portal; and private sector partners may contact their designated Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC).

At this point, the Adobe Flash platform is ubiquitous. For many users, like the growing number of those browsing on their iPhones its absence can be point of perpetual irritation.

Likewise, Facebook has reached near ubiquity, counting everyone from octogenarian grandparents, to captive elephant seals as users. A marriage of the two is a perfect fit.

The whole point of drawing the mass of interconnected processors and storage units as a "cloud" in the first place was to give customers the impression that they didn't have to bother themselves with the configuration or the administration or anything whatsoever about the texture of where their services were being housed. But when those customers have customers of their own, the notion that a business' processes, logic, and vital data are being housed in some distant and texture-less nebula tends not to inspire confidence.

So businesses that want to deploy cloud services of their own are faced with two competing pressures: the need to cut costs and reduce overhead, and the need to ensure security and privacy. While the whole cloud metaphor does seem comfortable on the surface, the disconnect between a company and the resources it entrusts to the cloud may be the source of some stress.

This morning, Sony has officially reduced the price of the PlayStation 2 to $99.99, confirming rumors that the nine-year old console would finally hit the "sweet spot" in price on April 1.

In Sony's announcement today, the company noted that the PlayStation 2's library of titles will grow to almost 1,900, an impressive total by any metric. The fact that it is still able to grow is especially remarkable when considering the console's proximity to retirement.