Maybe it’s time to stop grumbling about your cell phone company and just start your own.

That’s what Rod Farthing did, at 2:30 a.m. no less. Oh yeah, it took him just a few minutes to get Farthing Mobile up and running, replete with a selection of national calling plans and cell phone models.

Business is slow so far: Since the April launch, Farthing has signed up two subscribers, himself and his son. But he has two prospects in his wife and another son.

Well no, Farthing didn’t actually build a cellular network or develop a billing system and everything else that one needs to run a mobile phone business.

Instead, he created Farthing Mobile through Sonopia, a new “do-it-yourself” service that enables groups and individuals to design their own cell brands with a healthy dose of social networking gone mobile. Sonopia buys air time from Verizon Wireless to provide service, a fact hidden by each group’s brand on the phone’s screen.

The results of a recent nationwide survey released by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) show that illegal downloading of digital copyrighted works by youth (ages 8 to 18) has dropped by 24 percent in the last three years. The survey, first conducted in 2004, indicated that 60 percent of survey participants reported downloading software, music, movies, or games without paying for it; in 2006 the percentage of those who downloaded without paying dropped to 43 percent; and in 2007 the percentage decreased to 36 percent.
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Microsoft Corp. released a pair of tools on Monday that help protect computers from Office 2003 files containing malicious software code.

Both tools, which were announced earlier this month, are designed to help defend against Office “zero-day” attacks, which take advantage of vulnerabilities before a patch is released by Microsoft. These type of attacks have become more common in recent months as attackers look for holes in Office to penetrate corporate networks.

XM Satellite Radio experienced a second day of outages Tuesday after software problems resulted in the loss of one of the network’s four satellite signals, the company said.

Company officials initially expected to correct the problem Monday evening, but are now advising customers that they expect a fix by midday Tuesday.

“We quickly identified the problem and are working hard to return to our normal levels of service,” the company said on its Web site Tuesday. “The problem occurred during the loading of software to a critical component of our satellite broadcast system, which resulted in a loss of signal from one of our satellites.”

An XM spokesman said he had no information on how many of the company’s 8 million customers were affected. Internet message boards indicated the problem was widespread.

The service is still running on the company’s Web site, and XM advised subscribers to tune in online if possible.

Oh what a sweet, sweet day it must be for Microsoft. The first worm specifically targeting the open-source office package OpenOffice has emerged.

It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux computers, but anti-malware vendor Sophos admits it poses a low threat, especially as it’s only a proof-of-concept that hasn’t actually been discovered ‘in the wild’.

Bad bunny: some people have a one-track mind…Bad bunny: some people have a one-track mind…The OpenOffice worm uses the inbuilt StarBasic scripting language in the office suite to save scripts to disk in several other languages.

The worm attempts to download and display an indecent JPEG image of a man wearing a bunny suit performing a sexual act in woodland.

The SB/Badbunny-A worm first infects you when you open an OpenOffice Draw file called badbunny.odg. A macro included in the file performs different functions depending on whether you are running Windows, MacOS or Linux

Google Inc. is going to start sharing more insights about what’s on its users’ minds by showing a daily list of the 100 hottest topics on its Internet-leading search engine.

The new rankings will be unveiled late Monday in an upgrade of Google’s “trends” service. The breakdown will consist of the fastest-rising search requests on any given day.

The list won’t include all of the top queries because it will be edited to exclude pornography and other requests about the weather, popular Web sites like MySpace.com or prominent celebrities that consistently generate lots of searches.