Visitors to the world’s largest adult BitTorrent tracker were met with a surprise this morning. According to Google and Firefox, users accessing Empornium.us are exposed to four trojan horses and three exploits. The malware doesn’t appear to be hosted by the site itself, but it is coming from outside sources.

Mozilla Corp. will drop antiphishing protection from the final version of Firefox 2.0 at Google Inc.’s request when Mozilla updates the browser later this month, a company executive confirmed today.

When Mozilla rolls out Firefox 2.0.0.19, the browser will be missing the antiphishing feature that the aging browser has sported since it debuted in 2006, said Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, in an e-mail today.

“The latest published update for Firefox 2, which is Version 2.0.0.18, has the Phishing Protection feature enabled and working,” Beltzner said. “However, the next planned update for Firefox 2, Version 2.0.0.19, will be required to disable this feature.”

Firefox 2.0.0.19, which will be the last security update for the browser before Mozilla discontinues support, is currently slated to ship on Dec. 16, according to notes from a status meeting earlier this week. Mozilla’s policy is to support a browser for six months after it has been superseded by a new version. The company unveiled Firefox 3.0 in mid-June.

Dubbed “Phishing Protection” by Mozilla, the feature warns users when they attempt to reach a site suspected of hosting identity theft scams. The list of blocked sites is generated by Google, the search company that provided 88% of Mozilla’s revenue during 2007.

Beltzner said Google asked Mozilla to disable the feature in Firefox 2.0.0.19 because the older browser line uses an obsolete protocol.

“The Phishing Protection feature in Firefox 2 relies on data provided by Google via the first version of the SafeBrowsing protocol,” said Beltzner, who explained that Google and Mozilla had worked together to update the protocol, first to SafeBrowsing v2.1 late last year, and more recently, to SafeBrowsing v2.2.

Firefox 3.0 has relied on SafeBrowsing v2.1 since its release several months ago, but is transitioning to v2.2 this month for its antiphishing and anti-malware features, both which ping Google’s servers for blacklists.

THE world’s first superconducting transistor, a long-standing goal for applied physicists, could lead to dramatically faster microchips.

Last year Andrea Caviglia and his colleagues at the University of Geneva in Switzerland grew a single crystal containing two metal oxides, strontium titanate and lanthanum aluminate, as separate segments. At the interface of these materials, the team found a layer of free electrons called an electron gas (Science, vol 317, p 1196). At 0.3 kelvin - just above absolute zero - these electrons flow without resistance and so create a superconductor.

Now the same group says it can switch this superconductivity on and off by applying a voltage to the interface. The result is a superconducting version of the field effect transistor (FET) - a mainstay of digital electronics.

Nintendo Co Ltd’s Wii has emerged as one of the few hot products this holiday season, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc will offer “tens of thousands” of the hard-to-get video game consoles on its website starting on Monday.

Walmart.com said it will offer the Nintendo Wii console for $249.24, and a “value bundle,” which includes the console and other items like an extra set of controllers, for $329, while supplies last.

The Wii has emerged as one of the most sought-after gifts this holiday season, which has otherwise been lamented for a lack of new and hot products.

On Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving which marks the start of holiday shopping, the Wii was the most searched-for product on the Yahoo Shopping site. It was also the most popular product on eBay, with 3,171 of the consoles selling for an average price of $349 that day.

As of Friday night, the Wii console was sold out on Walmart.com, bestbuy.com and circuitcity.com. Bestbuy.com listed the sold-out Wii for $249.99.

Walmart.com also said that it will offer, beginning on Monday, certain Wii video games at a price of two for $30, and certain accessories, like the Nintendo Wii Racing Wheel, starting under $10.

A freeware application for the iPod Touch can turn the music player into a virtual mobile phone.

Truphone uses wi-fi technology in an iPod Touch to allow users to make calls to other iPod Touch owners and Google Talk’s messaging service users.

The software is a spin-off from technology Truphone developed for smartphones and iPhones.

The developers plan to have the ability to make calls to and from landlines in place very soon.

Truphone is the latest firm to offer voice over internet protocol (VoIP), alongside Unlicensed Mobile Access and proprietary protocols such as Skype.

Geraldine Wilson - Truphone’s CEO - said the firm had ambitions to become a global internet player.

“There are a slew of new features we’re rolling out for the iPod Touch that will let users call landlines, Skype users or send instant messages. We’re talking weeks, not months, before these go live.”

Researchers have identified a new trojan that can tamper with a wide array of devices on a local network, an exploit that sends them to impostor websites even if they are hardened machines that are fully patched or run non-Windows operating systems.

The malware is a new variant of the DNSChanger, a trojan that has long been known to change the domain name system settings of PCs and Macs alike. According to researchers with anti-virus provider McAfee’s Avert Labs, the update allows a single infected machine to pollute the DNS settings of potentially hundreds of other devices running on the same local area network by undermining its dynamic host configuration protocol, or DHCP, which dynamically allocates IP addresses.

“Systems that are not infected with the malware can still have the payload of communicating with the rogue DNS servers delivered to them,” McAfee’s Craig Schmugar writes here of the new variant. “This is achieved without exploiting any security vulnerability.”

Criminals are taking advantage of a bug in the Asterisk Internet telephony system that lets them pump out thousands of scam phone calls in an hour, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation warned Friday.

The FBI didn’t say which versions of Asterisk were vulnerable to the bug, but it advised users to upgrade to the latest version of the software. Asterisk is an open-source product that lets users turn a Linux computer into a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) telephone exchange.

In so-called vishing attacks, scammers usually use a VoIP system to set up a phony call center and then use phishing e-mails to trick victims into calling the center. Once there, they are prompted to give private information. But in the scam described by the FBI, they apparently are taking over legitimate Asterisk systems in order to directly dial victims.