A SQL injection hack this week has affected 20,000 Web sites, according to tracking reports by McAfee. Among those hit with the malicious code is international security firm Trend Micro.

Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun says the company's site was hacked at around 9:00 pm Sunday, local time and identified the malicious file as JS_DLOADER.TZE. It affected an approximated 32 Trend Micro pages, most of which were in the site's malware encyclopedia. Users who accessed any of the hacked pages would have been at risk of infection.

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A new Facebook application created by bSocial Networks could make Facebook members into surrogate salespeople, giving them a 10 percent commission each time one of their friends purchases a product or service they recommend.

The Market Lodge so far has a catalog of more than 1,200 products available from 50 different merchants, from companies including Aurora Nova Skin Care, Inner Waves Organics, Oona Sara Designs, White Swan and Holistic Pet. At least 100 people are now testing the service that quietly launched last week.

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EA has gone over the resistant heads of Grand Theft Auto franchise leader Take-Two, making an appeal directly to the shareholders and offering approximately $2 billion in cash to buy out its common shares.

The move is a smart one from EA, as Take-Two has been at the mercy of the shareholders in the past. Almost one year ago, the company's CEO and entire board of directors were ousted in a shareholder uprising from investors ZelnickMedia, allegedly spurred by the company's worsening financial situation.

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Reports yesterday and today stating Microsoft confirmed its Windows 7 release date for 2010 appear to be very premature, as the statement those reports were based on is the same boilerplate language the company has produced for months.

An oft-repeated statement from Microsoft's spokespersons on the release timeframe for the next version of the Windows client, currently code-named "Windows 7," continues to make the case that the product remains slated for a development phase extending some three years after Windows Vista's general availability (GA) release, which was in January 2007.

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Tanya Andersen refiled her lawsuit against the record industry body on Friday, which could open up RIAA's investigation techniques for all to see.

She filed the original lawsuit in August 2007, although a judge dismissed the case at a hearing on February 13 on a motion by the RIAA. Andersen was given 30 days to refile.

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Apple is using its pre-existing partnerships to expand the reach of the phone to other markets.

T-Mobile will be the device's carrier in Austria, where the German telecommunications company also has a network and provides service. Phones will be sold for 399 euros for the 8 GB model, and 499 euros for the 16 GB.

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The US House of Representatives passed its new version, largely sponsored by majority Democrats, of the FISA Amendments bill. For more on this afternoon's passage, click here.

11:42 am EDT March 14, 2008 - In an extremely rare closed-door session last night, the US House of Representatives debated whether to go ahead and approve a foreign intelligence bill that would grant prosecutorial immunity to telecom companies, or to advance another version without it.

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The newest member of the Open Group today is Sun Microsystems today, in its latest effort to become recognized as the pinnacle of the open source community.

The Open Group is an organization aimed at the "creation of Boundaryless Information Flow," which is the stated ideal of being able to serve information throughout an enterprise in the context that each user specifically requires, without running into incompatibilities or interoperability problems.

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It was an ambitious idea: the possible invocation of a clause in the law that might have given the FCC the authority to make cable TV providers offer individual channels to their customers. Now, the US House is wondering whether it was too ambitious.

Last November, US Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin surprised most everyone by making preparations to invoke a legal clause that would give the Commission authority it hadn't exercised before. Under a clause of telecom law, the FCC could direct cable TV operators to carry certain classes of programming, ostensibly as a way of ensuring diversity.

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Asustek has said that nearly 66% of upcoming Eee PCs will be shipped with Windows XP, summarily putting the Linux-based Xandros operating system the sub-notebooks used to exclusively feature into the minority.

The company officially launched the Windows XP-based Eee at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany only a week ago. There, it also showed off the next generation Eee with a 9-inch screen and larger touchpad.

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Harvard, the Ivy-league bastion of higher learning released a statement on Monday that its database of applicants to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from last year was compromised.

As many as 10,000 applicants could have had their information exposed, with at least 6,600 comprehensive profiles that include names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, mailing and e-mail addresses, phone numbers, test scores, and school records.

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Microsoft has addressed critical issues in Office and Office Web Components, as well as specific issues within Excel and Outlook.

All the issues deal with some type of remote code execution risk, according to Microsoft.

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The DotAsia Organization has received more than a half million .asia domain applications during a three-week "landrush" period that started in late February.

Buy.asia was the domain that received the most applications in landrush with more than 400 applicants, while Sex.asia received the most applications in the "sunrise" period of filing. Hot.asia, Gold.asia, Fun.asia and Girl.asia round out the top five sought after domains during the Landrush period. DotAsia reported 45,697 domains had more than one landrush application and will end up in auction.

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Atlanta-based ZapMedia says Apple is infringing on technology to distribute music over the Internet covered in two of its patents.

Specifically, ZapMedia holds patents on sending music from a server to multiple players. The company applied for the patents in 2000, however the first one wasn't granted until March 2006, and the other on Tuesday.

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Guitar company Gibson has filed suit against Activision with regard to its Guitar Hero music simulator game, claiming it patented the idea first.

Activision, which makes the popular Guitar Hero music simulator series, had been working in close conjunction with guitar maker Gibson, making graphic representations of the company's classic axes available to your game's characters, and even modeling controllers after the SG, Les Paul, Flying V, and Explorer models.

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