Facebook in Google smear campaign

It has been revealed that Facebook embarked on a smear campaign against rival Google, says the BBC.

The social network admitted it hired a PR firm to plant anti-Google stories related to user privacy.

The details came to light when one blogger approached by PR firm Burson-Marsteller published the e-mail exchange. Burson had been touting stories on behalf of an unnamed client about the Google service Social Circle.

Malware targeting the popular Android mobile platform has increased by 400% since summer 2010, according to a report from network infrastructure firm Juniper Networks, reports Computing.co.uk.

The research found that both enterprise and consumer mobile devices are being exposed to a record number of security threats.

“Hackers are now setting their sights on mobile devices,” said Jeff Wilson, principal analyst, security at Infonetics Research. “Operating system consolidation and the massive and growing installed base of powerful mobile devices are tempting profit-motivated hackers to target these devices.”

Having facilitated the mass piracy of billions of songs over a 10-year period, LimeWire founder Mark Gorton and his file-sharing company have agreed to compensate the four largest record labels by paying them $105 million, reveals Cnet.

Gorton's lawyers closed in on a settlement agreement yesterday to hammer out a deal. “We are pleased to have reached a large monetary settlement following the court's finding that both LimeWire and its founder Mark Gorton are personally liable for copyright infringement,” said Mitch Bainwol, chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America.

“As the court heard during the last two weeks, LimeWire wreaked enormous damage on the music community, helping contribute to thousands of lost jobs and fewer opportunities for aspiring artists.”

Despite having no Internet access in his hideout, Osama Bin Laden was a prolific e-mail writer, who built a painstaking system that kept him one step ahead of the US government's best eavesdroppers, writes the Associated Press.

Holed up in his walled compound in northeast Pakistan with no phone or Internet capabilities, Bin Laden would type a message on his computer without an Internet connection, then save it using a thumb-sized flash drive. He then passed the flash drive to a trusted courier, who would head for a distant Internet caf'e.

At that location, the courier would plug the memory drive into a computer, copy Bin Laden's message into an e-mail and send it. Reversing the process, the courier would copy any incoming e-mail to the flash drive and return to the compound, where Bin Laden would read his messages offline.