A 21-year-old California resident was arrested on charges that he attacked the Web sites of two businesses using a botnet made up of about 7,000 computers, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California stated on Monday.

An indictment released last week, but kept under seal until the arrest, charged Greg King of Fairfield, Calif., with four counts of electronic transmission of code to cause damage to protected computers. King allegedly identified himself as “Silenz”, “sZ,” and “GregK” online, according to the indictment.

Analysts for investment bank Piper Jaffray recently spent more time tracking unit sales at Apple Inc.’s retail stores and reported Thursday that their observations indicate that as many as 10 percent of the iPhones sold by the stores during the month of September were being purchased with the intention to be resold unlocked.

“In late September we spent 12 hours counting iPhone, iPod and Mac sales in Apple stores across the country,” analyst Gene Munster wrote in a research note to clients. “During our store checks we noticed many people buying iPhones in the maximum 5 per customer allotments, which we believe were being purchased to be unlocked and operated on carriers other than AT&T.”

The analyst said this trend was especially noticeable in the New York City stores, where one Apple employee acknowledged that customers were buying five iPhones per store visit in order to turn around and resell them unlocked.

“At one point during the visit, the store sold out of iPhones,” he added. “Judging from our checks, as much as 10 percent of the iPhones sold in September were purchased with the intention to be resold unlocked.”

Attackers can slip past Windows system defenses due to a flaw in the way Apple’s QuickTime for Windows handles URLs in the “qtnext” field in QTL files—i.e., media link files.

Apple on Oct. 3 put out a security advisory with an update for QuickTime 7.2 for Windows.

Apple distributes the QuickTime Player to play QuickTime and other media files.

According to an advisory sent by Symantec to its Deepsight Alert Services customers, a successful exploit would let an attacker launch command-line arguments on a target machine.

The vulnerability affects QuickTime version 7.2 running on Windows Vista or XP SP2.

There are no known exploits out for the issue at this point, according to Symantec. An attacker could exploit unpatched systems by putting together a malicious .qtl file and then luring a victim into viewing the rigged file, either by distributing it in e-mail or by hosting it on a Web site.

After a victim views the rigged file, an application is launched with attacker-supplied arguments on the targeted computer.

The Japanese group Sony is to cut the price in Europe of its new generation video game console PlayStation 3 (PS3) by 100 to 200 euros (141-282 dollars) in order to boost sales ahead of Christmas, a report said here Thursday.

A new model, equipped with a 40 gigaoctet hard drive, will go on sale in Europe at 399 euros, 200 euros less than the current sales price of Sony’s more powerful, 60-gigaoctet device, which is already in stores, according to the newspaper Les Echos.

The more powerful version will see its sales price lowered by 100 euros to 499 euros, the paper said.

A Sony spokesman would not confirm the figures cited by Les Echos but said an announcement was “imminent.”

Microsoft is making its Internet Explorer 7 browser available to all Windows XP users—even those using pirated software—and installation will no longer require that the operating system first be validated as genuine.

The company said the move is about security and ecosystem safety, because if even one user in a network is not using the security enhancements provided in IE 7, that user places the entire network at risk.

A jury has handed a victory to the music recording industry, which had claimed a Minnesota woman infringed song copyrights by using online media to download and distribute music, according to court documents.

In the civil case, a jury in the U.S. District Court of Minnesota on Thursday found that Jammie Thomas infringed copyrighted song recordings, according to documents. The jury awarded damages of $9,250 for each of 24 recordings, or a total of $222,000, according to documents.