Online videos aren’t just for bloopers and rants — some might also be conduits for malicious code that can infect your computer.

As anti-spam technology improves, hackers are finding new vehicles to deliver their malicious code. And some could be embedded in online video players, according to a report on Internet threats released Tuesday by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center as it holds its annual summit.

The summit is gathering more than 300 scholars and security experts to discuss emerging threats for 2008 — and their countermeasures.

P2P video service Joost quietly slipped its 1.0 beta for Mac and Windows out the door late last week, and we were curious as to why there was no fanfare for the (almost) 1.0 release.

It turns out that the team was holding off on the celebrations for today, as it has announced via the Joost blog that Joost is now open to the public. No longer will curious testers be forced to beg their friends for Joost invites as anyone who wants to watch the streaming video channels can now do so at their leisure.

Microsoft plans to announce the second generation of Zune digital music players on Tuesday, according to a source close to the company.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is supposed to take part in the formal announcement of the new music player, the Web site BetaNews reported on Monday. A source with knowledge of the announcement confirmed the report when contacted by CNET News.com.

Labelless, but hardly penniless, Radiohead are letting their fans set the price for digital downloads of the band’s new CD.

Fans will be able to pay as little as 1p - plus a mandatory 45p credit card fee - for the In Rainbows album. The new release will also be available in physical form - £40 for a box-set - easily affordable to the well-heeled bourgeois bedwetters who make up the band’s core following.

Then again, this is such a guilt-ridden corpus of record-buyers they may well feel obliged to make more than the minimum donation.

Radiohead has the freedom to make such decisions: the group declined to renew a contract with EMI/Capitol after their last album in 2003.

The trend is being hailed as a iconic gesture that heralds the end of the big, vertically integrated record label. But it really follows the recent trend of rich popstars giving away their recorded material - while keeping more of the bounty for themselves.

Miscreants pushing Viagra and malware are making new progress infiltrating Google indexes, a feat that’s considered the Holy Grail among spammers.

Google, which by some estimates carries out 60 per cent of the world’s searches, goes to great lengths to filter naughty sites from its results. The proliferation of rogue sites that have made an end run around the controls is giving rise to conspiracy theories that Google has been hacked.

“If a smart spammer has really found a way to game the Google search results with spoofed or cloaked sites, and Google still doesn’t have a fix, this could be a major issue with the underlying infrastructure of the entire Google operation,” according to this post on The Google Watchdog blog. “This is the first time that I’ve ever been worried that Google’s own index has been hacked.”

The site notes that specific search terms return large number of domain names ending in .cn. When clicked, they redirect the user to a different address that attempts to install malware. The rogue sites catch the attention of Google search bots by appropriating keywords and other content from legitimate sites. Amazingly enough, the rogue sites manage to secure a higher ranking than the legitimate ones, according to Google Watchdog.

According to Roger Thompson, a Exploit Prevention Labs researcher who specializes in finding innocuous search terms that return toxic results, the perpetrators are mainly succeeding through sheer brute force. Spammers register thousands of domain names and create thousands of landing pages for each one and then embed thousands of legitimate sounding keywords in each one. Then they lie in wait. Once a page is entered into the Google index, the miscreants enter code into the page that causes it to redirect to a site that installs malware.

“We’ve seen a real surge of this thing over the last couple of months,” Thompson says. “By putting out just the landing pages, they get up near the top of the search results and potentially get a lot more victims before they get shut down.”

Domain names ending in .cn seem to be especially popular these days because they sell for as little as 13 cents apiece, Thompson said.

A group of record companies says Jammie Thomas illegally shared everything from Enya to Swedish death metal online. Tuesday, she will become the first of 26,000 people sued by the recording industry to take the case to trial.

The Brainerd, Minn., resident is accused of illegally sharing 1,702 songs for free on a file-sharing network. Her trial offers the first chance for both sides in the debate over online music sharing to show a jury its version of the facts.

Thomas is accused of violating the song owners’ copyrights. Her lawyer says the record companies haven’t even proved she shared the songs.

Most of the 26,000 people the record industry group has sued have settled by paying a few thousand dollars.

“We think that speaks to the clarity of the law here,” said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America.

But lawyers for the defendants say they’ve settled because trials cost tens of thousands of dollars. Thomas’s lawyer, Brian Toder, said she was determined to fight. He declined to make her available for an interview.

“She came into my office and was willing to pay a retainer of pretty much what they wanted to settle for,” he said. “And if someone’s willing to pay a lawyer rather than pay to make it go away, that says a lot.”