Apple is planning to drop the prices of the iPhone and iPod line within the next month or two - perhaps at a rumoured late February announcement - a Mac enthusiast site has climed.

Website 9to5Mac received word that the cuts are on their way. The reduction is said to be $100 off the price of models in both the iPod Touch and iPhone lines. The 8GB iPod Touch will apparently be dropped from the line-up just as the 4GB version of the iPhone was before it.

If true, this means that the 16GB iPhone will be $399 - the current price for the 8GB version and the 32GB iPod Touch will come in at $399 too. Speculation suggests that the price drops are in order to make way for “pricing space” for the 3G iPhone, expected this year.

Not satisfied with the iPhone’s camera? Wish LG’s Viewty had a larger screen? Well, one manufacturer will now make you a handset to order, built from the chipset upwards, with all the features you want, for an eye-popping $149.

The ZZZPhone company takes an unbranded handset and allows you to customise numerous features and specifications for individual prices, just like a Subway sandwich. For example, you could choose to add a seven-megapixel camera, 4GB of memory and Skype VoIP connectivity to the phone.

However, specifications aren’t very descriptive. For example, there’s no indication of how many megapixels your optional front facing camera will have.

The phone’s basic price is $149 (£75/€100), but selecting all the juicy add-ons like GPS, a seven-megapixel camera, custom case printing and Skype bump the price up considerably because most decent extras cost between $40 and $100 each.

For as long as he can remember, Shane Kelly has taken a keen interest in taking things apart. When he was 11 and his family took delivery of its first PC, he promptly pulled off the cover and disassembled it, much to the chagrin of his parents.

“They weren’t too impressed at the time,” Kelly, who is now 16, says. “But I put it back together. It worked.”

A few months ago, the Solihull teenager successfully acquired an accreditation in Certified Ethical Hacking, making him possibly the youngest person to do so. While computers and networking have always captured his imagination, he says his interest in security prompted him to go for the hacking certification.

“That certainly stood out because it was the one qualification that focused not on the defensive side but it actually took you into the mind of the hacker,” he says. “It was the mindset that gave me the motivation into taking the course.”

Once upon a time, network security and penetration testing was a specialized field that was mainly inhabited by expensive outside consultants. Now that the net has become a core part of transacting business, more and more organizations are bringing these workers in-house.

The Web site for Indian antivirus vendor AvSoft Technologies has been hacked and is being used to install malicious software on visitors’ computers, security researchers said last week.

The download section of AvSoft’s S-cop Web site hosts the malicious code, according to Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor AVG. “They let one of their pages get hit by an iFrame injection,” he said. “It shows that anyone can be a victim…. It’s hard to protect Web servers properly.”

The technique used on the site has been seen in thousands of similar hacks over the past few months. The attackers open an invisible iFrame Window within the victim’s browser, which redirects the client to another server. That server, in turn, launches attack code that attempts to install malicious software on the victim’s computer.

The malicious software is a variant of the Virut virus family.

Documents dating from the Civil War and others to and from Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt are among hundreds of stolen documents sold online that eBay is agreeing to buy back and return to New York’s archives, a state official said Saturday.

The online auction giant has no liability in the sale of the stolen artifacts, but agreed voluntarily to offer buyers the amount that they paid, according to the official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because not all details of the investigation have been announced.

Yahoo Inc. is set to reject Microsoft Corp.’s offer, initially worth $44.6 billion, as undervaluing the business, a source familiar with the situation said on Saturday.

The Internet media giant is expected to reject Microsoft’s offer on Monday, the source said.