The acknowledgment coincided with an alert published by the Shadowserver Foundation, a nonprofit group that tracks the spread of malicious programs that criminals use to control infected systems remotely. Shadowserver member Steven Adair said the flaw is present in the most recent versions of Adobe Acrobat and Reader.
Q: I heard what sounds like an urban legend — that you shouldn’t hit the F1 key if a Web site tells you to. Is that true?
SAN FRANCISCO — FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III warned Thursday that the cyberterrorism threat is “real and . . . rapidly expanding.”
La Plata and Charles County Public Library officials are expected to sign an agreement soon to put on the fast track plans to make free wireless Internet service available in many locations.
Dulles-based Orbital Sciences said Thursday that it will pay $55 million in cash to buy a satellite subsidiary of Falls Church-based General Dynamics.
LONDON (Reuters) - Microsoft is still seeing a lot of interest in its Windows 7 computer software launched last year and a new budget cycle will help a gradual recovery in business spending, its chief operating officer said.
Spanish police have revealed that they have arrested three men responsible for one of the world’s biggest networks of virus-infected computers.
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke, Ap Technology Writer
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Tue Mar 2, 5:30 pm ET
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer intends to keep the regulatory heat on Google as his company strives to lessen its rival’s dominance of Internet search.
In an appearance Tuesday at a search engine conference, Ballmer said Microsoft believes Google Inc. has done things to gain an unfair advantage in the Internet’s lucrative search advertising market. He didn’t specify the alleged misconduct.
“We are expressing some of the issues and frustrations we see” with antitrust regulators, Ballmer said. “Sometimes (it’s) unsolicited, sometimes because we have been asked.”
Google declined to comment Tuesday. But it has said its actions are aimed at providing better experiences for Web surfers and advertisers.
Yahoo Inc., which is about to team up with Microsoft in search, seems less inclined to get regulators involved as the two companies gang up on Google.
“I am actually not interested in government intervention in anything,” Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz told reporters during a Tuesday lunch to celebrate the company’s 15th anniversary. “I think for the most part markets work. I don’t wish antitrust on anyone.”
Microsoft already has helped convince U.S. regulators that Google would break antitrust laws in two proposed deals: a search advertising partnership with Yahoo that was scrapped in 2008 and a digital books settlement that still needs federal court approval. Yahoo also lobbied regulators to oppose the agreement that would give Google the electronic rights to millions of hard-to-find books.
Ciao, an online shopping comparison service owned by Microsoft, has filed an antitrust complaint against Google in Europe. Regulators there say they are looking into those allegations and similar ones made by two other sites, Foundem and ejustice.fr.
Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, has had its own troubles with regulators. Its bundling of personal computer software triggered a court dispute with the U.S. Justice Department that forced the company to change the way it packages software with its Windows operating system. Microsoft later tussled with EU regulators, too.
Since Microsoft’s own antitrust showdown started in the late 1990s, more people have been relying on their computers chiefly as a conduit to the Internet. The evolution has turned Google’s Internet gateway and other online services into a major threat to Microsoft, which has tried to respond by investing billions of dollars in search technology.
Microsoft has made little headway. Even with some progress since unveiling an upgraded search engine called Bing nine months ago, Microsoft remains a distant third in the U.S. search market.
Ballmer is counting on Microsoft’s 10-year search partnership with No. 2 Yahoo to help close the gap. Regulators cited Google’s 65 percent share of the U.S. search market as one of the reasons for allowing Microsoft and Yahoo to work together.
When the alliance kicks in late this year, Microsoft will start processing search requests on Yahoo’s Web site and pay most of the ad revenue to its new partner. As Microsoft fields more search requests, Ballmer expects the company to collect more data that it could analyze and use to help improve search results. That, in turn, could help the company lure away Google users.
“There is an advantage to having the power of two, as opposed to the power of one,” Ballmer told the crowd at the Search Marketing Expo.
When asked whether he thought Microsoft would overtake Google in Internet search, Ballmer indicated it probably will be a long time before there’s a changing of the guard.
“I don’t know how old I will be when that will happen,” said Ballmer, 53.
As part of its efforts to challenge Google, Microsoft has sought help from Twitter and Facebook — two popular services for sharing information and photographs.
Microsoft, like Google and Yahoo, pays an undisclosed sum for better access to Twitter’s index of short messages. In a bigger partnership, Microsoft spent $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook and processes search requests on that site.
Responding to questions, Ballmer played down the possibility of Microsoft buying Twitter or Facebook, which are both privately held.
Shares of Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., fell 56 cents, or 1.9 percent, to close Tuesday at $28.46. Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., gained $8.37, or 1.6 percent, to $541.06, while Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo lost 6 cents to $15.73.
Surprising no one, AMD announced today the official name of its upcoming next-generation CPU: the Phenom II X6.
As the name implies, the processor (formerly code-named “Thuban”) will be a six-core behemoth, and will undoubtedly be intended to compete directly with Intel’s own forthcoming six-core Gulftown processor.
One suspects the timing of AMD’s announcement today is hardly coincidental. The 890GX chipset, which the company also released today, looks to be a powerful foundation for building a Phenom II X6 system, with high-speed technologies like SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 well situated for the power hungry.
AMD hasn’t released many additional details yet about the Phenom II X6, but we expect it to make its appearance later this spring.
The Internet has surpassed newspapers as a primary way for Americans to get news, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. That makes the Internet the third most popular news platform overall, with many connected users taking advantage of nontraditional consumption methods such as social media postings, personalized news feeds, and getting their news on-the-go.
National and local TV stations still dominate the news cycle for most Americans, but the Internet now stands third in the list, ahead of national and local newspapers. Additionally, the majority of news consumers say they use two to five websites per day to get their fix—a number we think sounds about right—but a surprisingly high number (21 percent) rely on that one favorite site to get everything they need.
Pew points out that consumers who don’t just rely on newspapers and TV are much more interactive with their news, too. A full third of those with cell phones said that they get their news while mobile, and 37 percent of those with Internet access reported having contributed to the creation of news themselves, commenting on it, or disseminating it via Facebook or Twitter.
And even though not everyone participates in commenting or sending it out, these methods are still quite effective in getting the general population involved. Three-quarters of people who consume news online said they do so thanks to e-mails or posts on social media sites. Those “e-mail a friend” or “post to Facebook” links apparently work well.
Still, Pew’s data shows that 59 percent of those surveyed get their news both online and offline. CNN and CBS were quite popular among the sample, as well as various local stations, and these two categories remain highly popular among Americans (73 percent and 78 percent, respectively).
Only 17 percent said they read the print version of a national newspaper, however, and 50 percent said they read local papers. According to Pew, newspapers were most likely to be read by people who were over 50 or those who don’t own cell phones—yikes. The data clearly reflects print media’s continued decline, though Pew pointed out that the online versions of newspapers (such as the New York Times or USA Today) were just as much a part of an online news consumer’s day as any other website. Now if only the papers could figure out how to stop bleeding money.
