LONDON — Organized gangs have adopted "KGB-style" tactics to hire high-flying computer students to commit Internet crime, a report said on Friday.

Criminals are targeting universities, computer clubs and online forums to find undergraduates, according to Internet security firm McAfee.

News of the U.S. Department of Commerce's approval Nov. 30 of the deal between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and VeriSign was met with both jubilation and disdain by those in the computer industry.

The deal will allow the agreement between ICANN, the non-profit company that oversees the Internet's technical infrastructure, and VeriSign to go forward, and gives VeriSign control over the dot-com top level domain until 2012.

Particularly for small businesses, 2006 brought forth an explosion of choice in the voice over IP market, as a flood of companies introduced IP PBX services and appliances, particularly from networking companies targeted toward the low end of the market and startups building and developing upon the recent advances in open source telephony software.

As with all things, eWEEK Labs expects to see a corresponding retraction in the market, likely towards the end of 2007.

Next year will be a big one for Linux, with new platforms and opportunities in the data center.

In the year to come, we expect to see Linux maintain its torrid development pace, with major new enterprise releases from Red Hat, which is set to ship Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in January, and Novell, which will also ship an update to its Open Enterprise Server early next year.

The Pantech Group, the second largest mobile phone company in South Korea, has agreed to use Nuance Communications' RealSpeak Mobile SF to power its PG-6200, PG-8000 and PG-3700 mobile phones in multiple languages, including Russian, English and Mandarin.

RealSpeak is a text-to-speech engine designed to accurately convert text into clear, synthesized speech, delivering high-quality readings of SMS and e-mail messages.

Heavy cell phone use may have a significant impact on the fertility of men, according to a study released in late October by the prestigious Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio.

The study, conducted by Dr. Ashok Agarwal reported on the results of 364 men who used cell phones for varying amounts of time each day.

Microsoft executives clarify its vision for an end-to-end portfolio of IT products that it claims will help developers build better solutions more quickly.

BOSTON—Microsoft is using its annual Tech Ed developer conference to stress the tight integration of its applications and how this will allow developers to build better solutions more quickly.

Microsoft's big push into the enterprise anti-virus market took another step forward June 6 with the release of a completely revamped Antigen e-mail security product suite.

The release comes just over a year after Microsoft's acquisition of Sybari Software and includes Antigen for Exchange, Antigen for SMTP Gateways, Antigen Spam Manager and Antigen Enterprise Manager.

Microsoft will use its annual Tech Ed conference to be held in Boston the week of June 12 to publish the new Windows Server System Common Engineering Criteria for infrastructure software produced in 2007.

Intel may sell off two communications processor product lines, exiting a major portion of its communications chip business, a published report says.

A San Jose Mercury News report says the chip maker has been shopping a package consisting of its xScale processor and IXP network processor lines to prospective buyers.

Networking gear maker Cisco Systems is taking the first steps of what could be a major initiative aimed at expanding its business into the growing market for products that integrate IT and physical security technologies.
 

A rogue Web browser that was removed from the Internet after security researchers found it was serving up child porn advertising has suddenly reappeared, with a peculiar twist.
 

A sneak peek suggests ultra portables from HP and Lenovo may challenge earlier thin notebook offerings.

New ultra portables in for review that are bound to appeal to users who value portability—but want it at a more affordable price.

A new wave of lightweight notebooks promises to be more livable for the road warrior, by offering more advanced features and built-in optical drives.

Among them are new entries from Lenovo and Toshiba, each of which announced on May 31 a new business-oriented notebook line built around a 12.1-inch wide screen and an internal optical drive. The new machines each weigh about 4 pounds.

Google and CodeWeavers have released the first Google program, the popular beginner-level photography program, Picasa, for Linux.

Although the Linux Picasa implementation includes most of the feature set of the Windows Picasa 2.x software. It is not, strictly speaking, a port of Picasa to Linux.