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Symantec: Security holes, malware spike in 2008

If you worry that the Internet is a scary place full of digital pickpockets and online identity thieves, your fears will be bolstered by the latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report released Tuesday.

The report finds huge increases in the number of security holes in software and the number of Internet threats, particularly attacks in which browsers are hijacked and forced to download malicious programs as people surf the Web.

Even visiting trusted Web sites isn't always safe. Most Web-based attacks target visitors to legitimate Web sites that have been compromised and that either serve up malicious content to … Read more

NASA's next node will be named...

Chalk one up for Steven Colbert, kind of.

NASA announced Friday afternoon that astronaut Sunita Williams will appear Tuesday on "The Colbert Report" to unveil the name of the newest node for the International Space Station.

From everything NASA has indicated, the node probably won't be named for the comedian. It likely will be dubbed "Serenity," based on the official voting results on NASA's site.

NASA ran an online contest earlier this year to name the node. The agency's official suggestions: Earthrise, Serenity, Venture, and Legacy. But NASA also (naively, perhaps) stated that … Read more

Good, but not perfect

Personal Finances offers users a chance to get organized and answer the age-old question, "Where is all my money going?" With this fairly simple program, your financial past is dissected, however it may not live up to every user's expectations.

This free unlimited trial excels at breaking down a family's spending. After inputting members of the family and their incomes, users choose from a range of categories for their expenses. Everything from mortgage, insurance, gas, gifts and any other items are catalogued. Once listed, the easy-to-read display offers users a glimpse at what percentage of their … Read more

Freedom on the global Internet still a pipe dream

"The Internet represents freedom, but not everywhere."

So begins the annual "Internet Enemies" report by Reporters Without Borders--and that's probably the cheeriest line in the entire 39-page document. It goes down from there.

For the uninitiated, Reporters Without Borders is an anti-censorship watchdog organization. As blogs and news Web sites have grown in popularity, the group's focus has similarly migrated to the Internet. Unfortunately, the report again paints a grim picture of Internet freedoms in parts of the world where it says the authorities regularly chuck bloggers in jail for online posts that displease … Read more

Inside a solar-technology disruptor

What will it take to make solar electricity cheaper than grid power?

The 20 employees at 1366 Technologies, a solar start-up in Lexington, Mass., say they have the answer, and it's within sight. Rather than pursue one technology breakthrough, the company is hammering away at the cost of solar with a series of incremental improvements. The target is to cut the cost of making silicon cells in half to get below $1 per watt by 2012.

1366 Technologies, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spin-off, is the subject of a profile, "Making solar cheaper than coal." It's … Read more

A special report on green tech

Starting on Wednesday, CNET News is running a three-day special report on the green-tech industry in which we examine its progress to date and its prospects.

We focus particularly on the electricity grid and the growing role of IT in energy and environmental sustainability.

The central question at play is scale: will new technologies speed a huge industrial shift to a cleaner energy industry? Or will green tech remain a niche in the next decade?

The package is a culmination of many weeks of hard work by a handful of editors here. For me, personally, it's a bit of … Read more

TV on the Radio suffers from a bad mix

There was all sorts of buzz earlier this week about TV on the Radio's apparently abysmal performance on Saturday Night Live. If you like the band, as I happen to, you have to wonder what happened: their recordings are immaculate, and they have a solid live reputation.

Today, music blog Idolator performs an interesting experiment, embedding the band's performance of "Dancing Choose" on SNL directly above the same song performed on last night's edition of The Colbert Report. The difference is immediately noticeable.

So what the heck happened on SNL? Idolator jokes that they're … Read more

Handicapping cloud computing: The big picture

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Cloud computing isn't going to dominate the tech landscape but will raise a ruckus for software vendors. Google and Amazon will be cloud-computing winners, but the spoils will be relatively small. And there's a race to deliver a cloud developer stack for both consumers and enterprise customers.

Those are some of the key takeaways from a Bernstein Report dubbed The Long View: Netbooks, Wireless and Cloud Computing--Client Software's Imperfect Storm.

The report, which I mentioned in my Microsoft analysis Thursday, is notable because it maps out the … Read more