A new variant of the mass mailing Sober worm has surfaced in the wild, according to a threat advisory issued by McAfee Wednesday night. Like its predecessors, Sober.r arrives as a .zip file attached to e-mails written in English and German. McAfee rated the worm as a "Medium" risk for the time being.

According to the advisory, Sober.r "harvests addresses from local files and then uses the harvested addresses to send itself. This produces a message with a spoofed From address." In order to be infected, a user would need to manually extract the executable file from the .zip and run it.

Continue reading →

Taking a major step forward in embracing blogs as a new medium for content, America Online on Thursday announced it will acquire the popular Weblogs, Inc. blog network. Among the 85 blogs to become part of the AOL family are Engadget, Autoblog, Cinematical and TVSquad.

Weblogs boasts 30 million pageviews and another 25 million views of its RSS feeds each month. Links to the 85 blogs will be integrated across AOL.com, including the Personal Finance Channel, the Autos Channel, the Travel Channel, the Games Channel, the Television Channel, and at AOL News.

Continue reading →

Adding to its repertoire of RSS software, NewsGator this week purchased popular Macintosh feed reader NetNewsWire. The company had previously bought Windows-based RSS tool FeedDemon in May. The acquisition means NetNewsWire will add NewsGator syndication features for sharing and syncing RSS feeds.

"Many of our online customers who are Mac users have asked if we had plans to extend our product platform to the Mac desktop," NewsGator CTO Greg Reinacker said in a statement. "NetNewsWire is the dominant RSS application for the Mac OS, and was an obvious choice for us."

Continue reading →

Leading mobile phone manufacturer Nokia has chosen Symantec to protect its Series 60 based smartphones, the two companies announced Wednesday. Symantec Mobile Security will be preloaded onto the handsets and other Symbian OS based devices from Nokia to stem the emerging threat of mobile malware.

Symantec says it has worked with Nokia for two years on building technology to protect smartphones. Although mobile devices have yet to widely become victims of the same security threats plaguing PCs, new viruses such as Cabir and CommWarrior have specifically targeted Symbian and other phone platforms.

Continue reading →

While customers may have to wait until next year for the Client Protection tool, Microsoft on Thursday also announced the availability of Antigen, an antivirus program for messaging and collaboration servers that it acquired with the purchase of Sybari Software earlier this year.

Antigen will soon be bolstered by Microsoft's own antivirus scan engine, the company said, which all customers will receive as a free upgrade. In addition, a beta of Antigen specifically designed for Microsoft Exchange will ship early next year. According to Microsoft, the program "has been shown to achieve measurably improved levels of security."

Continue reading →

Microsoft introduced on Thursday a new program that will help to combat viruses, malware and spyware in the corporate environment, as well as provide stronger protection for current and emerging threats.

Called Microsoft Client Protection, the new service could be seen as new competition for McAfee and Symantec, who have otherwise worked closely with the company in recent years to combat the increasing tide of security threats.

Continue reading →

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected Microsoft's patent application for its File Allocation Table (FAT) file system technology on Tuesday, however the Redmond company has put on a brave face and told BetaNews that it expects to ultimately be victorious.

In June of last year, the USPTO agreed to review the patent after questions arose surrounding its validity. A group known as the Public Patent Foundation disputed Microsoft's claims to FAT in April 2004, saying it had become ubiquitous as a format and found in many devices.

Continue reading →

Since transitioning its popular Web browser to freeware status and dropping the built-in advertisements, Opera Software says downloads continue to surge. Over three million new users have downloaded Opera, the company claims, at a rate four times greater than previous releases.

Opera 8.5, which hit the 1 million download mark just 48 hours after its release, puts fresh pressure on Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominance. In fact, Opera has said the majority of downloaders were IE users looking for a safer alternative browser. The free Opera is available on a variety of operating systems in numerous languages.

Continue reading →

Nokia's Internet Tablet has been delayed due to software issues, the mobile phone maker told the Reuters on Wednesday. The Nokia 770 had originally been scheduled for a late summer launch. The tablet runs on the Linux operating system, and would allow users to check e-mail, browse the Web and view multimedia files.

According to Nokia, the finalization of the tablet's operating system took longer than anticipated, causing a delay in shipment. The device is expected to retail for $350 USD and will first be available in the United States and Europe. Initial versions will not have phone capabilities, but Nokia plans to add those features in future updates.

Continue reading →

America Online is taking extra measures in order to battle the growing problem of phishing attacks on its users, inking two new partnerships and expanding another. The nation's largest ISP says it currently blocks 8 million phishing attempts each day and will now actively seek out potential scams before they become a problem.

Working with MarkMonitor and Cyveillance, AOL will keep track of newly registered domains and see if they mimic legitimate sites. The company will also crawl the Web looking for phishing sites and work with Internet providers to take them offline.

Continue reading →

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday said that it was asking a U.S. District Court to shut down a spyware operation that was secretly installing malware on computers by luring them to download software that would allegedly make their P2P transfers anonymous. The programs then could not be uninstalled.

The software did not perform the advertised function at all, according to the FTC. It only acted as a vehicle to download and install dozens of spyware applications onto victims' computers.

Continue reading →

Industry watchers mostly agree that Tuesday's announcement of a multi-year partnership between Google and Sun was not what they thought it would be. Some even suggest Sun is fighting a battle to stay relevant as the tech world passes it by. Read on to see what people are saying about the deal.

"I've gotten comments ranging from "lame" to "underwhelmed," describing today's Sun-Google announcement. I wouldn't underestimate the significance here. I certainly never expected a Google/Sun deal on StarOffice. OK, so Google is going to ask people to download a huge chunk of Java software--well, huge compared to the toolbar. What's the big deal? Google just shot a huge canon across Microsoft's bow. A Google alliance with any competitor is probably going to cause ulcers over at Microsoft."
- Joe Wilcox, Microsoft Monitor

Continue reading →

SanDisk on Tuesday unveiled its m200 series of flash-based MP3 players, the first higher capacity players to break the $100 USD price barrier while ensuring PlaysForSure compatibility. The SanDisk players will range in capacity from 512MB to 4GB.

The company's aggressive price structure could force other Windows-based audio player manufacturers to again lower prices. Many are already hurting financially due to price pressure from market leader Apple.

Continue reading →

On Monday, news surfaced that Microsoft had invented a single-play DVD that would no longer function after being watched once in order to combat piracy. The story was quickly repeated, often without source, on a number of Windows enthusiast sites and blogs. There was only one problem: the news was not true.

The report was initially made by British Web site "The Business Online," claiming, "Showing a video of himself dressed in a sailor suit pretending to audition for the blockbuster Titanic, Gates pitched Hollywood with the proposition that only Microsoft could solve its piracy problem by making its DRM software a standard across every home entertainment playback and recording device."

Continue reading →

AOL tweaked its search engine on Wednesday in an effort to make results more relevant, as well as allow for the search of Web sites and multimedia from a single page. Users will also be able to save results in a search, which can be "clipped" to the top of the page for future searches on that term.

In addition, searches can now be made by asking natural-language questions, called "Quick Answers." AOL intends to have the new feature complement its "Snapshots" technology in which results are pre-programmed by editors for common search terms. Answers to these natural-language questions would be placed at the top of the result pages.

Continue reading →