When you hop on the Internet to check your online bank statement or pay some bills, do you ever wonder how secure your bank's computer network is? A new study claims most bank Web sites are vulnerable to identity theft.

A study done by Atul Prakash, a professor at the University of Michigan who teaches in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, found that more than 75 percent of 214 financial institutions checked in 2006 had at least one design flaw that could open up online bank users to potential identity theft.

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XM Radio and Sirius appear ready to accept concessions that would finally bring their 17-month merger effort to a close, according to a statement issued Thursday.

XM and Sirius confirmed they are in talks with the FCC enforcement bureau to accept specific conditions that would gain the merger approval from the body. It appears that the stipulations match those of Republican commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, who is the lone holdout.

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Since 2006, Finnish Cell phone producer Nokia and California chipmaker Qualcomm have been engaged in an intellectual property battle which began as a disagreement over patent licensing royalties. Just as the two companies were scheduled for a federal trial, they reached an amicable solution.

Yestderday, Nokia and Qualcomm announced that they had entered a 15-year agreement covering GSM, EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA, HSDPA, OFDM, WiMAX, LTE and "other technologies." This came at almost the same time as the announcement that a German court -- the third body, in addition to the UK High Court and The US International Trade Commission-- had ruled that Qualcomm's GSM patent suit against Nokia was invalid.

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With Microsoft's stock prices down 20 percent since February, CEO Steve Ballmer is reorganizing and rethinking the company, and the chief architect of Microsoft's abandoned attempt to acquire Yahoo, Kevin Johnson, is leaving to head up communications equipment maker Juniper Networks.

In a concerted effort to catch up to Google in the online space, Microsoft is now carving up its Platform and Systems Division (PSD), formerly headed by Johnson, into two divisions: "Windows/Windows Live" and "Online."

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At its annual F8 developer conference Wednesday, Facebook unveiled a system like OpenID where users can login to other sites with their Facebook account. It also rolled out new tools to help developers create better applications.

Available in the fall, Connect will allow users of Facebook to take their identities with them across partner sites. 24 websites and applications have already announced their support for the initiative, including Digg, Six Apart, and Citysearch.

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As the country prepares to open the 2008 Summer Olympics in three weeks, Chinese officials have arrested a writer and dissident who was already on probation after being charged a few years ago.

Du Daobin, 43, who was found guilty of charges of "incitement to subvert state power" in 2004, was scheduled to end his parole on August 4, just four days before the start of the summer games. He was initially arrested in 2003 after posting blog entries and articles talking about democracy and human rights changes the Chinese government should make in the future.

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Much to the delight of San Francisco computer network officials, Mayor Gavin Newsom was given the password so the city can again have access to its computer network after it was hijacked by a city employee.

Terry Childs, 43, of Pittsburg, California, manipulated the city's computer system and held it hostage for more than a week before handing over the passwords. Specifically, Childs locked city officials out of the FiberWAN network that controls the city's e-mails, law enforcement records, payroll, and other personal records.

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Amid complaints that Windows Vista is hurting the development of solid state drives, SanDisk now says it is working with Microsoft to optimize SSDs for "the Windows experience." But the company refused to provide details of Vista's problem, and Microsoft seemed unaware of the collaboration.

In a statement to BetaNews today, Richard Heyes, who heads up SanDisk's SSD Business Unit, didn't elaborate on the areas of optimization, although he did talk about SSD performance on "full-featured" operating systems such as Windows Vista vs. "simple" systems such as XP Starter Edition -- and he predicted that operating systems in general will become more "SSD aware" in the future.

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One Internet spammer was sentenced this week to nearly four years in prison, while another fled a correctional facility and is currently on the run.

Robert Soloway, who ran Newport Internet Marketing Corp and pled guilty to mail fraud, e-mail fraud, and tax evasion in May 2007 received his sentence yesterday: 3 years and 11 months in federal prison.

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Concerns over Steve Jobs' health continue to dog the company, and its attempts to quell such discussion seem to be falling mostly on deaf ears.

The issue cropped up once again during Apple's financial results call Monday when Lehman Brothers financial analyst Ben Reitzes said he was forced to ask for an official statement from the company on Jobs' health.

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With initial topics ranging from "How to Backpack" to "Toilet Clogs," Knol -- Google's answer, of sorts, to Wikipedia - has now left testing and is ready for perusal and contribution by one and all.

"Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article," said Udi Manber, Google's VP of engineering, in a blog posting back in December, when Knol was first unveiled.

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The record-breakingly long merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio now hangs upon the vote of one final FCC Commissioner.

After approval by shareholders in both companies, then a green light by the Department of Justice, the approval of five Federal Communications Commission commissioners is one of the major remaining hurdles the companies must endure before they can join.

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"Drizzle," a recently announced offshoot of MySQL, is taking the open source database in a wholly different direction than the bigger, feature-full database widely foreseen since Sun's MySQL buyout.

Running only on Linux, Sun Solaris Express, and Apple's OS X, the trimmed-down Drizzle database won't be getting Windows support any time soon, if at all. It essentially component-izes the software, making it so businesses can select which features they need and leave out those they don't, much like a Linux kernel.

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Hopefully it won't be another HD DVD/Blu-ray situation: Several consumer electronics companies have partnered to develop a technology that could deliver high-definition video wirelessly to television sets, but the technology will compete against another proposed standards.

Sony, Samsung, Motorola, Sharp, and Hitachi have formed a group that will focus on further developing technology known as Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI), the companies announced on Wednesday.

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Thirteen record labels have filed for a summary judgement to their two-year old case against peer-to-peer file swapping service LimeWire, seeking to bring a swift end to the drawn-out conflict.

In 2006, the Recording Industry Association of America sued LimeWire seeking $150,000 per occurrence of illicit music sharing, claiming the service participated in "inducement of copyright infringement, contributatory copyright infringement, and with respect to pre-1972 recordings, common law copyright infringement and state law unfair competition."

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