Isabel Aguilera, Google’s chief executive in Spain and Portugal, has admitted that the searchmeisters have some mobile goodness in the works but appeared to play down the project, noting that the phone is just one of 18 R&D initiatives the company currently has underway. Furthermore, she mentioned that Google’s mobile skunkworks were designed to make their way into developing countries

Forget what Microsoft says about Vista being the most secure version of Windows yet. More to the point, what do the hackers think of it?

In a nutshell, they think it’s an improvement, but at the end of the day, it’s just like everything else they dissect—that is, breakable.

“Not all bugs are being detected by Vista,” pointed out famed hacker H.D. Moore. “Look at how a hacker gets access to the driver: Right now I’m working on Microsoft’s automated process to get Metasploit-certified. It [only] costs $500.”

Moore is the founder of the Metasploit Project and a core developer of the Metasploit Framework—the leading open-source exploit development platform—and is also director of security research at BreakingPoint Systems. The irony of his statement lies in the idea that Vista trusts Microsoft-certified programs—programs that can include a hacker exploit platform that walks through the front door for a mere $500 and a conveyor-belt approval process.

Blogger.com, home of the weblog publishing system owned by Google, has been infiltrated by a number of phishing sites, security watchers report.

In some cases, the Stration mass mailer is being used to drive traffic to these fraudulent sites. One such scam is a “storefront” for Pharmacy Express, which redirects from a Blogspot.com (now Blogger.com) link. The site is designed to harvest the personal information of prospective marks.

Beyond the problem of spam and phishing sites, a number of Blogger.com sites have been compromised with malicious code. For example, a blog site seemingly created by a Honda CR450 enthusiast is hosting the Wonka Trojan.

The Blu-ray disc association said on Thursday it aimed to replace the DVD storage format within three years.

“Within three years it will just be Blu-ray,” Frank Simonis, the Blu-ray Disc Association’s European chairman, said at the CeBIT technology trade show.

Blu-ray, which offers five times more storage capacity than DVDs for storing high definition films and other content, will first have to beat the rival HD-DVD format which offers somewhat lower storage capacity but claims cheaper production of players, burners and discs.

Measured in the number of players, Blu-ray is already well ahead of HD DVD because Sony’s (6758.T: Quote, NEWS , Research) PlayStation 3 (PS3) video games console comes with a built-in Blu-ray player.

Sony Computer Entertainment said it had sold 1.84 million PS3s by the end of December in Japan and North America and that one million PS3s are ready for launch next week in Europe.

The HD DVD camp conceded it is being outsold by Blu-ray because of PS3 by at least five to one, but it claims that sales of movie titles are still level. Film studio 20th Century Fox, which supports Blu-ray, said weekly Blu-ray film sales are actually three times higher than HD DVD.

Red Hat Inc. has unveiled the latest version of its Linux operating system as the open-source software company continues to combat Microsoft’s market-dominating Windows platform.

Developers for the Raleigh-based company touted Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as more flexible and more manageable than its prior versions, and said they worked for two years on the product.

“Our customers are an integral part of the development process,” said Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president for engineering, echoing the open-source tenet that users be allowed to view and edit the software’s code.

Resoundingly, Cormier said, customers wanted less complexity.

The new operating system supports “virtualization,” which Red Hat said will help companies consolidate their technology workload onto one server - saving energy, space and money.

a German patent court has ruled Microsoft’s patent on FAT invalid in that country, finding that it is “not based on inventive activity.” Just one of 6,000-odd patents Microsoft has amassed since a 1991 memo from Bill Gates turned around the company’s attitude to patents.

Commodore’s eagerly anticipated Cxx gaming PC will sport an Intel Core 2 Extreme four-core processor, a pair of 768MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card and a Creative X-Fi soundcard, the company revealed today.

What it didn’t say up front was how much all this gaming hardware - fitted inside a casing covered with one of a half-dozen or so painted ’skins’ applied to the interchangeable front and side panels - will cost.

The machine’s specification also inlcudes an Asus P5N32-E motherboard based on Nvidia’s nForce 680i SLI chipset. Each system has 4GB of Corsair Dominator DDR 2 memory clocked at 1066MHz. There’s a choice of hard drives: two 150GB 10,000rpm boys in RAID configuration, or a single 500GB 7200rpm job.

Apple has issued a security update for Mac OS X that fixes 45 security bugs.

The security update released Tuesday patches several zero-day vulnerabilities, along with other bugs in Apple’s software and bugs in third-party software, including Adobe Flash Player and MySQL Server. Apple has issued several patch releases in the past few months.

The latest update, which is 8 Mbytes, is aimed at systems running Mac OS X 10.3.9. Patches are available for client and server systems.

Seven of the bugs being patched were published during the Month of Apple Bugs in January, and five were released during the Month of Kernel Bugs last November.

Companies planning to move to Longhorn Server may want to wait and not upgrade, but for those staying with Windows Server 2003, Microsoft on Tuesday released Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, encompassing hundreds of patches and fixes to the server operating system.

The 32-bit version is a 372-Mbyte download, making Service Pack 2 no featherweight. Still, that hasn’t stopped companies from downloading. Thousands have downloaded the release candidates of the software, which, according to Microsoft, is twice the number that downloaded the release candidates of Service Pack 1 before its full release in March 2005.

In addition to previously released updates, hotfixes, and security patches, the service pack, which applies to all versions of Windows Server 2003, also includes some significant upgrades that could be valuable to IT shops. Arguably the most important is Windows Deployment Services, the operating system deployment method that will be built into Longhorn. Since it’s file-based rather than disk- or sector-based, it can replace only certain files. That’s a big upgrade for companies used to wiping users’ personal files with every new install.