Symantec on Thursday announced plans to purchase WholeSecurity, a deal that adds behavior-based and anti-phishing technology to its Internet security product roster.

Financial terms of the transaction, which is expected to close in October, were not disclosed.

The purchase of WholeSecurity Inc., based in Austin, Texas, gives Symantec Corp. ownership of a legitimate player in the anti-phishing sector and a set of technologies that analyze the actions of worms, viruses and other malicious programs for use in behavior-based protection products.

WholeSecurity’s anti-phishing technology is already being used in eBay Inc.’s online toolbar, and Microsoft Corp. plans to use the ‘CallerID’ concept in its Internet Explorer 7.0 browser refresh.

Source: eWeek

Google is laying the groundwork to enter the TV business, judging from a job posting for a GoogleTV product manager.

The search giant’s anticipated entry into TV land has been an evolving process, which has included the debut of a prototype earlier this year to search TV programming. And on Wednesday, Google’s TV efforts were a topic of discussion on several blogs that pointed to the job posting on Google’s site.

According to the posting, Google is looking for someone to help get its search and advertising technologies into products that enhance viewers’ TV experience. Google said it is seeking someone to “identify key market trends that are shaping user behavior when watching television.”

Source: News.com

Most articles have closely associated the RIAA letter writing campaign and the closure of WinMX with the inability to contact MetaMachine. This has caused tremendous confusion, as it implies that MetaMachine has ceased operations due to the RIAA’s letter campaign.

Let’s clear this up immediately. eDonkey’s offices are open for business, and Sam Yagan is readily available, as Slyck spoke with MetaMachine’s President on these wild rumors.

“We haven’t been operating out of New York City since 2004,” Mr. Yagan told Slyck.com. “Our offices are in New Jersey now.”

MetaMachine is clearly open for business. While its narrowly true that MetaMachine’s New York representatives are unavailable as many news articles report, this has been the case for almost a year.

Source: slyck.com

More than one million people have downloaded the Opera browser in the two days since Opera announced it was dropping the ad banner and going completely free.

The download rate doubles the previous record reached in April when the company released Opera 8. According to server logs, a majority of downloads came from Internet Explorer users.

In comparison the open source browser, Firefox reached the one million mark only after 5 days.

“The success of our free browser proves the world is ready for a fresh option,” said a dry and landlocked Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software. “I’m most excited about the hundreds of thousands of new users who have discovered the speed, security and usability of our browser for the first time.”

In the wake of recent activities by the RIAA and MPAA, many P2P users are trying to find a more secure P2P application.

Just yesterday two of the oldest P2P vendors closed down due to legal threats from the RIAA lawyers.

After the fall of Napster P2P developers saw that it is very easy to shut down a network that is based on centralized server, so the next logical step was decentralized network pioneered by Kazaa.

Now when decentralized networks are not enough the next phase in the war to get free content is anonymous and secure networks.

Although currently there are many small networks that are trying to grab attention, they did not swap many followers (mostly because of their small size and lack of content). But that is going to change as more and more users are being sued.

To those of you who are looking for an anonymous and encrypted P2P network I’ve listed below some of the better known networks.

• FileTopia (Recommended)– One of the oldest encrypted file sharing networks around (not full anonymity)
• Freenet - Encrypted network that allows anything from building web sites to running file sharing application
• MUTE - Open source peer-to-peer network that provides easy search-and-download functionality while also protecting your privacy
• ANts P2P (Recommended) - ANts P2P Open source java based third generation P2P net.
  It protects your privacy while you are connected and makes you not trackable, hiding your identity (ip) and crypting everything you are sending/receiving from others.
• Kdrive - Secure global virtual hard drive
• ProxyShare P2P - Using internet proxy servers to hide your IP
• WASTE - WASTE is a software product and protocol that enables secure distributed communication for small (on the order of 10-50 nodes) trusted groups of users.

Note: These networks are relatively small, compare to other non encrypted networks so do not expect to find large amounts of files there. But they are growing every day and probably one of them will reach the critical mass and will be the next file sharing king.

If you know of other good anonymous file sharing networks please write a comment to let other know.

British Midland and TAP Air Portugal will permit passengers to use their mobile phones in the air next year, the two European airlines said this week.

However, there are a couple of restrictions. Passengers can use their phones only from 10,000ft - they will still not be able to use wireless devices during take off and landing. Charges have yet to be determined, but rates will be in line with current international roaming charges, OnAir said.

Source: The Register

When Steve Ballmer yelled at a departing Microsoft employee that he would “kill Google�? we had no idea just how direct a method he had in mind. Buying all or part of AOL may be the first part of the master plan, as Google relies heavily on the advertising pages that come from Yahoo, since it now syndicates its search to Google.

One estimate suggested that Google would lose as much as $380m of advertising revenue if AOL dropped its search engine and took on MSNs. That would cut Google’s profit by something like 25 per cent, potentially giving its huge share price something of a tumble. No wonder Google is thought to be entering the bidding to partner with Time Warner on AOL instead of Microsoft.

Source: The Register