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Google’s Blogger service is responsible for around 2 percent of the world's malware, according to a new report from security firm Sophos, with malicious users setting up pages on the free blogging service to host infected files, or simply posting links to potentially dangerous websites in other bloggers’ comments.

This should really come as little surprise considering that just about anyone can set up a blog without having to provide positive identification. What should be of concern, though, is that a large number of so-called reputable and trustworthy sites are supposedly being turned into malware delivery platforms through scripting and SQL database attacks. For its part, Google is doing its best to parse search results for malicious Web sites and keep them from being linked to – but it isn’t an easy task.

The report also ranks the US at the top of the malware-hosting countries and mentions the astronomical rise of spam on mobile devices in places such as China, where it grew to almost 354 billion messages in 2007.

Intel today took another step forward in its quest to conquer the embedded market, with the company announcing new x86-based "system-on-a-chip" (SoC) processors designed to power a range of devices from television set-top boxes to mobile Internet devices to telecommunications infrastructure.

The first batch of products is under the Intel EP80579 Integrated Processor line which consists of eight variants with speeds between 600MHz and 1.2 GHZ and power consumption between 11.5 and 21 watts. The chips combine a CPU core, memory controller, input/output controller, and acceleration technology.

While the first products will be built around the Pentium M core, Intel says it has 15 further SoC projects in the pipeline, many of which will center on the low-power Atom core. Meanwhile, in somewhat related news, Intel's long-rumored dual-core Atom processor for “Netbooks” now has a fixed launch date and price – if a recent leak is to be believed. The Atom 330 is now supposedly due to arrive on September 21 running at 1.6GHz and consuming a mere 8W of power, for $43.

Blogspot.com cited as the No. 1 host for malware @ News.com
Unreal Engine 4 Due Next Console Generation @ ShackNews
AT&T Earnings Give Hope to Telcos @ BusinessWeek
Net firms in music pirates deal @ BBC News
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Five years ago in TechSpot:
Microsoft reveals DirectX 'critical' flaw

Nearly two years after acquiring gaming PC maker Voodoo for an undisclosed amount of money, HP has decided it will stop operating the division as a standalone business unit and instead sell Voodoo-branded products alongside its consumer Compaq Presario and Pavilion PC lines.

The move will likely evoke the fears of Voodoo fans who would hate to see the brand just slapped onto anything HP wants to market for more money to the gaming crowd. Voodoo is pitching the merge as a good thing, though, stating that Voodoo systems easier to get at retail locations, they will feature local service, and they will have the full power of HP’s marketing and sales channel behind them. It is unclear if the move would cause potential layoffs resulting from the integration.

Rumors have been abound in recent months that AMD is planning to spin off its chip manufacturing business, after the company’s former CEO Hector Ruiz briefly mentioned AMD’s future “asset-smart” strategy earlier this year. It now seems that those rumors have been confirmed (sort of), with AMD’s newly-appointed CEO Dirk Mayer stating that the company is ready to sell off its manufacturing infrastructure as part of a cost-cutting drive.

He made the revelation in an interview with the Austin American-Statesman, though AMD was quick to deny such a move by saying Meyer was actually misquoted. Supposedly, his original quote mentioned radically transforming the way wafers are manufactured but nothing about spinning off fabs.

AMD already outsources much of its chip production through partnerships with IBM and TSMC, so the notion of a spin-off isn’t at all that far-fetched. Whether Meyer meant something else or not, we will hopefully find out soon enough when the company further details their “asset-smart” strategy.

Rumors of a Digg acquisition by Google have been on and off for some time now. But according to TechCrunch, the two have signed a letter of intent and are finally nearing a deal whereby the search giant would pay a sum in the range of $200 million to bring the popular news aggregation site under the Google News property.

Interestingly, a large piece of Digg’s cash flow comes from a three year ad deal with Microsoft – a deal which would presumably end or be threatened if Google acquired the company. The real question is what would Google do with Digg? The search giant has been known to be experimenting with user-voted search results, but some suggest Google might just leave Digg as a standalone property – like YouTube – and strengthen its already solid search-advertising lead through the site.

Eight out of ten times Microsoft gets a decent amount of press it doesn't seem to be for the right reasons, especially around online circles. Perhaps the most recurrent topic in the last year has been the hit-or-miss release of Windows Vista, and most recently the consecutive failure on acquiring #2 search company, Yahoo. However, that's not to say the software giant is suffering much, if at all from these.

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, sent a memo to all his employees yesterday in which he quotes a thriving financial year with revenues increasing in the order of $9.3 billion for a total of $60+ billion, and an operating profit of $22.5 billion. But most interesting is the part in which he refers to his competitors. Apple, he said, has prospered thanks to "an experience that is narrow but complete," whereas Windows has had to make compromises in this regard. He said they are actively working on this end-to-end experience with hardware vendors along their side. He also mentioned a big promotional campaign coming up for Vista.

About Google and Yahoo, Ballmer said they've already got all the right pieces to make search work and compete hand in hand with leader Google. Nevertheless, the failed Yahoo acquisition could be considered a setback since they were looking to speed up the process of growing an audience and leveraging its web properties reach.

Among other things, Ballmer announced that Microsoft's former Platforms and Services Division is being split into two: Windows/Windows Live and Online Services, and that long time employee (and president of the splitting division) Kevin Johnson will be leaving the company.

A study released this week by a group of researchers from the University of Michigan shows an alarming picture after examining over 200 financial institutions websites and finding that over 75% of these had at least one design flaw.

It is important to note, however, the research did not focus on security holes per se, but design practices that could potentially put customers at risk. For example, about half of the bank websites showed a login box on insecure pages, while about a third redirected customers to external websites without any notification. In the other hand, making much of this information somewhat irrelevant is that research data was pulled from websites dating back from 2006, meaning banks should have resolved many of these issues by now, or so we hope.

A separate study also released this week looked into Corporate PCs and networks, showing bleak security practices with about 10 percent of a pool of 100,000 computers analyzed allowing the use of external storage or USB drives, 12 percent had missing anti-virus programs, and about 9 percent had peer to peer applications installed without authorization.

Following eight months of testing, Google's Wikipedia competitor, Knol, was finally opened to the public today. The concept is quite similar to that used by Wikipedia, whereby users can share knowledge in a wiki format, but with a twist that emphasizes authorship and control over an article’s content.

Each article – otherwise known as knol – is created by an author or team of authors who receive attribution and are allowed to insert AdSense ads on their pages to receive a share of the revenue. Any reader may suggest changes to a knol, but edits will pass through a moderation process before being applied. Readers can also rate, write reviews of, and submit comments to any given knol.

Any topic can have several articles written on it, but only the ‘best’ ones will in theory rise to the top while the rest fade away. By offering a monetary incentive Google hopes to lure experts on any given subject into creating good (and hopefully credible) content for the site, and a quick glance at some of the topics featured on the site already show many articles written by doctors that have to do with medical conditions. Seeing that articles will contain advertising, though, one has to wonder what is to keep Knol from becoming just another spam repository.

We've been hearing about wireless streaming of HD content for some time now but so far – besides a few Wi-Fi based solutions that require some sort of compression – few products that can actually handle it have trickled out to the market. Now, a group of consumer electronics and wireless technology developers have partnered to jointly develop yet another industry standard for wireless high-definition video.

Wireless Home Digital Interface, or WHDI, is based on technology from an Israel-based company called Amimon which makes the wireless chipset driving the technology. Theoretically, it can support data rates of up to three gigabits per second, which is enough to send uncompressed high-definition video signals over the unlicensed 5-Gigahertz band.

WHDI will being going up against other technologies designed to stream high-definition signals such as WirelessHD. A major difference between the two, however, is that the former can go through walls and keeps bandwidth usage low. According to Amimon, WHDI-enabled TVs should be available next year costing around $100 more than a set without the technology. And in three to five years (or when shipping volumes reach 10 million) it should only cost $10 extra to have the technology inside a variety of devices.

Texas Memory Systems has introduced what it claims is the world’s fastest, most capacious solid state drive: the RamSan-440. It is not intended for the consumer market, though, but rather for enterprises willing to pay its hefty price tag in exchange for top performance, fast speed and high storage capacity.

Starting at around $140,000, the RamSan-440 can sustain a record setting 600,000 IOPS (input/outputs per second) and is available in capacities of 256GB and 512GB – four times that of its predecessor and now entry-level RamSan-400. It uses DDR2 RAM to deliver 4Gbps random read and write speeds with a latency of less than 15ms and NAND flash modules in a RAID configuration for data backup.

While such a costly and complex system might seem like overkill for a market still wary of SSD deployment in enterprise systems, TMS says it has already deployed similar products among customers in financial, telecom, e-commerce and other fields in which downtime or processing lags are not tolerated.

Solid state drives may be the inevitable future of computer storage, but there’s still plenty of demand for traditional hard disk drives. In fact there has been no indication of a market slowdown, which has affected the NAND flash industry, but rather a healthy 21% gain in shipments over the same period last year.

According to market research firm iSuppli, 137 million hard drives were shipped during the first quarter of this year, with units primarily being snapped inside notebook PCs, consumer electronics, desktops, and external drives. Vendors saw some healthy operating margins, too. Seagate reported $363 million in profits, or 11.7% of revenue, Western Digital announced $298 million, or a 14% return and Hitachi GST stated it had earned $65 million, or 4.6% of revenue.

It remains to be seen how flash-based storage will affect the HDD industry overtime, but as long as demand for low-cost storage capacity continues to rise, hard drive makers will find ways to stay competitive for some time. iSuppli says vendors are on track to ship 573 million drives by the end of this year, which represents 11 percent growth over last year's final tally.

Japanese browser maker takes on IE, Firefox @ ComputerWorld
Yahoo CEO remains upbeat despite lackluster quarter @ Miami Herald
Crowd-sourcing the e-car @ Reuters
MotionPlus totally ambushes third-party developers @ WiiFanboy
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Five years ago in TechSpot:
Nowhere to hide for Illegal BitTorrent Downloads?

Another spammer has been convicted to jail time. Robert Alan Soloway, also known as the Spam King, has been sentenced to nearly 4 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of e-mail fraud, mail fraud, and tax evasion back in March – a rather lenient verdict considering he was facing a maximum sentence of 26 years behind bars.

The prosecution argued that Soloway should get more prison time, asking for a sentence of 7 - 9 years to echo the severity of past sentences in similar spam cases. The defense countered that Soloway didn't damage anyone’s computer, he didn’t send out malicious code, and he never directed people to pornography, as some spammers have done.

Robert Soloway is the second person in the US to be convicted under the Can-Spam Act for flooding people’s inboxes with fraudulent email messages. But while the Soloway case is seen as a step forward in the fight against the spam nuisance, another convicted offender with the same criminal moniker escaped from a federal minimum-security prison camp in Colorado over the weekend.

Late last month OCZ Technology revealed a partnership with Fatal1ty to develop a new range of high-performance memory and power supplies tailored for the needs of gaming enthusiasts. Well, their efforts are now starting to come into fruition with OCZ unveiling its first Fatal1ty-branded DDR2 and DDR3 memory modules.

OCZ claims it “worked closely with Fatal1ty and his team to design new memory kits that pair perfectly with the top selling motherboards.” Marketing talk aside, the family of OCZ Fatal1ty memory modules include 4GB PC2-6400 (800MHz) kits with CL5 4-4-18 timings, 2GB and 4GB PC3-10666 (1333MHz) kits with CL9 9-9-26 timings as well as a 2GB PC2-8500 (1066MHz) EPP-ready kit with CL5 5-5-15 latency settings for “plug and play” overclocking on DDR2 Nvidia platforms.

Pricing and availability has not been announced. You can read more about these modules on OCZ’s product pages for DDR2 and DDR3 Fatal1ty memory kits.