Microsoft says it wants to emulate its PC model in building a mobile device application platform.

Microsoft wants to build a mobile device application platform as ubiquitous as Windows is on desktop PCs, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in his keynote address Oct. 23 at this year’s CTIA wireless conference in San Francisco.

Ballmer unveiled the company’s new mobile computing platform, the Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008, saying Microsoft intends to apply to the mobile computing world the same formula it used to democratize personal computing and make it readily available worldwide.

“We need to bring together four powerful computing [phenomena] that exist today: The desktop PC, enterprise computing, mobile services running in the cloud and phone devices,” Ballmer said.

“The notion of four text messaging accounts, four or five e-mail accounts, all based on different devices—that’s yesterday’s idea … If we want innovations to proceed, we have to meld together and weave business models for software developers, telecommunications, and software companies.”

Ballmer said the phone has a unique role in the emerging world of mobile computing with combined business models: While the PC is the most powerful device, the phone is the most ubiquitous in the world. Microsoft’s goal is to cause the phone to evolve so that it “participates fully in the world, in the lifestyle and business sides of the world.”

Nvidia’s GeForce 8 series of graphics chips can be used to crack Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM) passwords 25 times more quickly than was previously possible, security software developer Elcomsoft has claimed.

The Russia-based company this week announced the second major release of its Distributed Password Recovery application, a tool designed to recover forgotten or lost passwords for a wide range of application and document types, including PDP-protected ZIP files, Adobe Acrobat PDFs, Lotus Notes ID files and Microsoft Office documents.

Elcomsoft admits its software uses “brute force” to crack a file’s password, thus exposing the lost key to the user. The technique essentially tries all possible password combinations until it finds the one that fits. It works, but it’s time time-consuming.

“Using a modern dual-core PC you could test up to 10m passwords per second,” Elcomsoft said, “and perform a complete analysis in two months.”

But use a GeForce 8 series card and Nvidia’s Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) tools to run the cracking algorithms on the GPU rather than the CPU, and you can finish up in 3-5 days, the developer claimed.

Mozilla, the group behind the open-source Firefox Web browser, disclosed its 2006 revenue Monday night: $66,840,850.

That’s a 26 percent bump up from the $52.9 million that Mozilla garnered in 2005. And with 2006 expenses slicing off only $19.8 million, Mozilla has a tidy sum left at its disposal, even if it’s no Microsoft.

“The highlight is that Mozilla remains financially healthy: we’re able to hire more people, build more products, help other projects, and bring more possibilities for participation in the Internet to millions of people,” foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker said in a blog posting. The foundation released the results in conjunction with its 2006 tax form.

As in 2005, about 85 percent of the revenue came from Google, according to a related frequently asked questions page. Google is the default option in the Firefox search bar, and a Firefox-branded Google page is the default home page for Firefox.

A PDF Trojan horse is spreading malware by exploiting a URL-handling vulnerability in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 running Internet Explorer 7, Symantec warned customers of its DeepSight Alert Services on Oct. 23.

On Oct. 10, Microsoft released Security Advisory 943521 about this vulnerability and public reports of remote code execution. At the time, it said a patch was in the works.

The vulnerability is caused by insufficient validation of URLs. Attackers can leverage the flaw to execute arbitrary commands via maliciously crated URLs.

Symantec noted in its advisory that the issue was originally disclosed in July but initially received scant attention. In light of new research, public exploits and Microsoft’s advisory, Symantec considers the problem to be more severe.

“With the ease of exploitation, the availability of public proof-of-concept code, and further attention that this vulnerability is receiving, we will likely begin to see more exploitation of this issue in the wild,” the company, based in Cupertino, Calif., said in its advisory.

Gmail is getting support for IMAP clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, and the iPhone. This means that Gmail users will no longer limited to the Gmail.com user interface or to the weak integration they can get from clients using the much more rudimentary POP email protocol.

There’s no word on the official rollout schedule for IMAP support. Some users have it, some don’t. I do. Don’t ask me why. To see if you have support, click on the “Settings” link and then see if you have a “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.

Determined to sell more television ads, Internet search leader Google Inc. is sharpening its focus on the medium with demographic data from the influential Nielsen Co.

Under an agreement to be announced Wednesday, Google will pay Nielsen an undisclosed amount to obtain detailed information about the kinds of people who watch specific TV shows.

The breakdown, drawn from Nielsen’s rating service, typically provides viewers’ ages, gender, marital status and other personal data that help advertisers choose the audience most likely to be interested in their product or service.

New York-based Nielsen has been selling demographic data to television stations and advertisers for years.

Google’s access to the information is significant because it gives the Mountain View-based company more tools to draw upon as it tries to target television ads as effectively as it has done on the Internet.