The makers of combat video games have unwittingly become part of a global propaganda campaign by Islamic militants to exhort Muslim youths to take up arms against the United States, officials said on Thursday.

Tech-savvy militants from al Qaeda and other groups have modified video war games so that U.S. troops play the role of bad guys in running gunfights against heavily armed Islamic radical heroes, Defense Department official and contractors told Congress.

The games appear on militant Web sites, where youths as young as 7 can play at being troop-killing urban guerillas after registering with the site’s sponsors.

Source: Reuters

Scientists in the United Kingdom and Asia have deployed a computing grid to find a potential cure for Avian flu.

As part of the international collaboration, known simply as the “Grid,” about 2,000 computers from various research labs were used throughout April to run a drug discovery application and analyze 30,000 different compounds for a potential virus inhibitor. Scientists are now reviewing results from the computer screening to predict which compounds and chemical fragments would be most effective at blocking the virus if it mutated, according to The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC).

Source: News.com

A federal court has ordered a man who was at the center of the nation’s first “spyware” case to give up $4 million in ill-gotten gains.

Sanford Wallace was accused by the Federal Trade Commission of running an operation that infected computers with software that caused flurries of pop-up ads. It then tried to sell consumers cures called “Spy Wiper” and “Spy Deleter” for $30.

The order issued Wednesday by U.S. District Court in New Hampshire bars Wallace and his company, SmartBot.net Inc., from spreading spyware.

Source: AP

Israel-based Mirage Innovations has developed a lightweight, compact and affordable personal video display device for use with portable media players, game consoles, cellular phones and PDAs.

Mirage claims its NanoPrism technology will alter the rice/performance of personal displays while solving the problems plaguing traditional personal displays, which include unacceptably large weight and form factor.

Source: InformationWeek

Unless made the default Web browser, Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 reportedly breaks Web links in messages received through at least two versions of the Outlook email client.

The problem affects at least Outlook 2000 and 2003, and similar problems also were reported in Outlook Express.

Source: InformationWeek

McAfee, Inc. (NYSE: MFE) announced anti-virus support for Intel-based Apple computers. McAfee VirusScan for Mactel 8.0 runs under Apple’s Rosetta emulator to help protect Apple computer users from Macintosh and Windows-based viruses, Trojans and other malicious threats.

According to McAfee Avert Labs, Macintosh platform vulnerabilities have increased more than 228 percent since 2003 due to the rising popularity of Apple’s consumer products, notably the iPod media devices and iTunes media services. While the Mac OS X operating system still remains safer than Windows-based platforms, the rapid growth in critical vulnerabilities has forged the need for a more proactive approach to keep systems secure, especially in heterogeneous work environments. McAfee VirusScan for Mactel is designed to detect, block and clean infected emails and attachments, keeping systems free from these threats.

Seventy percent of malicious software being circulated is linked to various types of cybercrime, a study by security firms Panda Software showed.

The report, based on a survey in the first quarter of 2006, suggested that “financial profit has become a priority” for creators of “malware,” which includes viruses, worms, trojans and spyware, the company said.

The survey confirms a shift from several years ago, when malicious software was often aimed at garnering attention or exposing security flaws.

“Malware has become a took for generating financial returns,” the report said.

Source: AFP

A Pentagon research team monitors more than 5,000 jihadist Web sites, focusing daily on the 25 to 100 most hostile and active, defense officials say.

The team includes 25 linguists, who cover multiple dialects of the Arabic language and provide reports on events sparking anger on extremist Web sites, Dan Devlin, a Pentagon public diplomacy specialist, said Thursday. The researchers, for instance, focused in November on the backlash caused by the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Source: AP

Some system administrators are finding that Microsoft’s new anti-piracy software is incorrectly labeling PCs for users logged is with restricted accounts, as a counterfeit copy of Windows.

The problem with the WGA installation is that it works perfectly fine as long as you are using an account with administrative rights on the system. As soon as one of the students, or other non-administrative level account, logs on to the system it screams that it is not a valid copy of windows and it is counterfeit.”

A Microsoft staffer monitoring the newsgroup intervened, eventually diagnosed the problem, and offered a fix: give everyone, including the student systems running under rights-restrictive accounts, write access to a file called “data.dat.”

Source: InformationWeek

OpenDocument Foundation is offering Massachusetts a plugin that could “allow Microsoft Office to easily open, render, and save to ODF files, and also allow translation of documents between Microsoft’s binary (.doc, .xls, .ppt) or XML formats and ODF.”

The Foundation says it has such a plugin, it has finished testing it, and it is good to go.

Source: groklaw

Microsoft plans to launch its online advertising sales platform for search engine advertising in the U.S. at an event in Seattle today, the company said. The move opens the way for Microsoft to challenge Google’s business model for search advertising revenue.

AdCenter will now be the sole platform serving up advertisements on MSN, Windows Live, and other Microsoft Web sites, Microsoft said. Microsoft has previously relied on partners like Yahoo to sell advertising on its behalf, said Nate Elliott, an analyst with Jupiter Research.

Source: PCWorld

Microsoft confirmed Wednesday that it will offer free replacement copies of its Office application suite for people whose versions were tagged as counterfeit — if they can prove they bought the bundle with the best intentions.

Source: InformationWeek