Computers in companies, hospitals and schools around the world got stuck repeatedly rebooting themselves Wednesday after an antivirus program identified a normal Windows file as a virus.

McAfee Inc. confirmed that a software update it posted at 9 a.m. Eastern time caused its antivirus program for corporate customers to misidentify a harmless file. It has posted a replacement update for download.

McAfee could not say how many computers were affected, but judging by online postings, the number was at least in the thousands and possibly in the hundreds of thousands.

Opera Software’s Internet browser for Apple’s iPhone was downloaded more than one million times during the first day when it was available to consumers, the Norwegian firm said on Thursday.

On April 13 Apple accepted distribution of Opera’s browser for its iPhone after a long review, opening a new and potentially lucrative market it has so far closely guarded.

Opera’s browser promises up to six times faster download speeds than Apple’s own browser, and to cut data traffic by up to 90 percent.

Amazon.com Inc said on Thursday it released an application to allow its Kindle e-books to be read on Apple Inc Mac computers.

Amazon, maker of the popular Kindle e-reader, is trying to cement its leading position as the top maker of e-readers — and distributor of e-books — by making content available on other devices.

The move comes just two weeks ahead of the launch of Apple’s new iPad tablet, a device with broader functionality than the Kindle, but which includes an e-reader application. The iPad is seen as a strong challenge to Amazon.

Even if you’re careful about cookies or even if you use your browser’s private surfing feature, sites can still track you through cookies stored by Flash. However, soon enough the next version of Flash, 10.1, will support private browsing and will integrate with browsers to turn it on when the browser itself is in private browsing mode. Browsers still store data during a private browser session, but they will delete it all at the end of the session. The same will be true of Flash private browsing.

Another Flash news: Finally, a little bit of respect from Adobe with this alpha release of the Adobe Flash Player 10 that was made available for all Linux 64-bit enthusiasts! As noted, ‘this is a prerelease version,’ so handle with care. Just remove any existing Flash player and extract the new .so file in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (or /usr/lib/opera/plugins).

Mozilla has officially released the first mobile Firefox, a condensed version of the popular open-source browser that runs on Nokia’s Maemo platform.

Codenamed ‘Fennec,’ Firefox 1.0 for Maemo was previously available only as a beta. Mozilla calls this the first mobile web browser to accomodate add-ons - long a staple of the Firefox desktop browser. More than 40 add-ons are already available for the new mobile platform, including AdBlock Plus, the most famous of Firefox extensions.

For those small business owners who choose to do their own taxes this year, there are more software choices than ever to help them file. Indeed, tax prep software companies, like banks and credit card companies before them, are now increasingly targeting small businesses. And recognizing that many small business owners seamlessly blend their personal and professional lives, some software companies are now bundling their individual and small business tax return products together to save you time and money as well.

But sorting through the many different product tiers, price structures, and claims can be confusing, so here’s a quick rundown of what three popular tax prep software companies are offering this year.

Makers of the multinetwork chat application Trillian threw open doors to the company’s latest beta, previously available onto to private beta testers, allowing any Windows user to test Trillian 4.1 beta before the code becomes final.

Chief among the changes in the beta are new social networking features and tight integration with Windows 7 for users of Microsoft’s most recent operating system. Trillian 4.1 beta supports story links and avatar pictures in more locations on the interface, as well as Twitter hash tags and direct (@) replies. You can now also tweet from the contact list, follow and unfollow users, and edit a message before you retweet. Here’s the full list of changes for Twitter and Facebook users.

Although the current stable version, Trillian Astra 4.0, works fine in Windows 7, the beta brings on optimizations, like support for jump lists, and an animated progress bar that displays during file transfers

Lavasoft has updated its popular malware and spyware detection and removal tool Ad-Aware. Rather than a dramatic redo, version 8.1 builds on the improvements made in the previous version. The new version is faster, has better removal abilities, and introduces a behavioral detection engine.

Called Genotype, Ad-Aware’s heuristic-based behavioral detection engine isn’t explicitly called out in the interface. However, I noticed that files that had been flagged falsely as threats in earlier versions were no longer called out as such, and the Quick Scan was able to complete in about three minutes, as opposed to 10 minutes in the previous version. These are empirical observations, of course, but this version’s improvements should be easy to see for longtime users of Ad-Aware.

Removal techniques have also been improved. Lavasoft is calling the new system Neutralizer, although it’s not called out as such in the program interface. What users will see is a “family” of grouped similar threats, such as cookies, the category of the threat, and the action taken. The program defaults to the Recommended action, which means you need to click on the drop-down menu to the right of the listing to see what action will be taken on a per-threat basis. The big action buttons introduced in version 8 still reside at the bottom of the window, which feels further than necessary–it’d be better to have the action button closer to where the mouse already is, at the top of the window.

The upcoming version 3.6 of Firefox will be able to tell if you’re listing to starboard–and pass that information along to applications running in the browser.

That’s because the browser will be able to detect the orientation of laptops and mobile devices equipped with accelerometers that can tell which way is down. The reason for the work: Web applications running in the browser will be able to use the information, useful for labyrinth-type games with virtual marbles rolling around boards, and any number of other gaming situations.

TiVo Inc., the maker of digital video recorders that can pause and rewind live programming, unveiled a free application Wednesday for the BlackBerry that lets subscribers set up recording of TV shows from the phones. Subscribers also can search for details about their favorite shows.

Live streaming of shows is not available.

The application works with TiVo DVR Series2 or the Series3 standalone DVR, not with a cable box that has a TiVo interface. The BlackBerry phone must have browsing capabilities and operating system version 4.2.0 or later.

TiVo unveiled its app for the iPhone last November.

Using smart phones as navigation tools is all the rage these days, what with a slew of applications available for the iPhone and Android platforms that utilize those devices’ built-in GPS systems in determining users’ real-time location.

One such service is from Waze, which in August released its iPhone app after being available on Android for several months. Waze’s service is meant to help drivers figure out where they are and how best to get where they’re going, all with the help of a large community of other motorists.

Among the information that Waze provides are traffic flow, road reports, and warnings about where drivers might run into speed traps.

At DemoFall 09 in San Diego on Tuesday, Waze plans to unveil its latest steps forward, which include rolling out its service on every major smart phone platform (except BlackBerry) and offering, for the first time, voice prompts for directions.

That could be good news for users of, say, Symbian-based smart phones, in cities where AT&T service is spotty. And that’s important because even in a city like San Francisco, using Waze on an iPhone–with AT&T as the only service provider–meant being subject to areas where there was a significant delay in information showing up on the screen.

Further, because the service will now be available on other platforms, it means that the overall amount of data available to drivers–via the crowdsourced nature of the system–will be broader. And, because users until now have had to occasionally look at their small screens to see where they need to go, the voice prompts may well mean an easier–and safer–way to get to a destination.

Waze’s application begins as a standard turn-by-turn directions tool and also offers a slew of other features, many of which give drivers something fun to look out for as they make their way to wherever they’re going.

“At the end of the day,” said Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s community geographer, Waze is “about a community of drivers helping to build this map.”

Novell on Monday will offer a kit for developers to build Apple iPhone and iPod Touch business applications using Microsoft’s .Net Framework instead of the Apple-designated C or Objective-C languages.

Leveraging Novell’s Mono runtime for running Windows applications on non-Windows systems, Novell’s MonoTouch 1.0 is a commercial software development kit that lets developers utilize code and libraries written for .Net and programming languages like C#.