Giant leap looms for mobile bugs

The widespread outbreak of mobile phone viruses will occur when a sufficient number of them share an operating system (OS), according to researchers.

BBC News reports that viruses spread by Bluetooth could reach all users of a given OS in days, whereas those spread by multimedia messages could spread in just hours.

But the virulence will only appear when a given OS has about 10% market share.

The link between Microsoft's fortune and the health of the PC market has rarely been clearer than in the software maker's fiscal third quarter, reports AP.

For the first time in Microsoft's 23-year history as a public company, revenue fell year-over-year as PC shipments tumbled. Earnings sank 32%.

The shortfall again illustrated the toll the recession has taken on the world's largest software maker, even though Microsoft remains one of the richest and most profitable companies.

It has become the new front in cyber crime: scams and identity-theft programs that attack e-mail accounts and users of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, says USA Today.

To carry out many of these automated attacks, cyber criminals first must overcome "captchas", the distorted letters and characters that users of an e-mail or social-networking account are required to type to complete certain online forms.

Now, security specialists say, a growing number of captcha-breaking groups are using real people to type in captcha responses for cyber gangs around the world. This allows the gangs to create fake e-mail and social network accounts by the tens of thousands - and use them as the starting point for a variety of cyber scams spread by e-mail and instant messages.

Oracle's senior management has expressed its love for Sun Microsystems' software and hardware, but warned tough decisions are coming on what people and products stay, according to an exclusive story published by The Register.

President Charles Phillips and chief corporate architect Edward Screven have committed to keeping Java open and to not killing MySQL. They also mocked the idea Oracle would simply shut down or close off certain technologies, and talked tough on Oracle's smarts as a hardware vendor.

Phillips noted there had been no decision on which members of Sun's current board will join Oracle if the proposed $5.6 billion acquisition goes through.