Google exploited to push malware

Cyveillance has uncovered a search engine optimisation poisoning campaign that has impacted more than 260 000 sites, states eWeek.

The scheme targets Google search by getting victims to click on links that are routed to sites that attempt to download malware onto their machines.

According to Cyveillance, the common string albums/bsblog/category is found in the URLs for numerous blogs. Inputting that into Google will generate a series of results leading to malicious sites, the company observed.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM has described a milestone in cognitive computing: the group's massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5% the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain capacity than a cat, reports ARS Technica.

The authors quantify brain capacity in terms of numbers of neurons and synapses.

The simulator, which runs on the Dawn Blue Gene /P supercomputer with 147 456 CPUs and 144TB of main memory, simulates the activity of 1.617 billion neurons connected in a network of 8.87 trillion synapses.

Salesforce.com has unveiled a social networking service called Salesforce Chatter for its customers' in-house operations, giving a corporate flavour to a technology that's largely been for personal use, says CNET.

Salesforce Chatter lets employees set up profiles to connect with co-workers, issue status updates to say what they're up to, and subscribe to feeds from people, and from applications.

Also for collaboration, it lets people join groups to share updates and content. The service also integrates with Twitter and Facebook.

Scientists at IBM's research labs in Zurich have developed a cheap lab-on-a-chip based on silicon that has the potential to diagnose dozens of diseases, reports the BBC.

A tiny drop of blood is drawn through the chip, where disease markers are caught and show up under light.

The device relies on an array of antibody molecules that are designed to latch on to the protein-based molecular markers of disease in blood.