Botnets could eat the Internet

Vint Cerf warned attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the Internet is at serious risk from botnets, reports ZD Net.

Vast networks of compromised PCs, used by criminals for sending spam and spyware and for launching denial-of-service attacks, are reported to be growing at an alarming rate. Cerf has warned they could undermine the future of the Internet - likening their spread to a pandemic.

Cerf said Trojans, which covertly seize control of a computer and its broadband connection, handing control to remote criminals, could infect a quarter of all PCs currently connected to the Internet - around 150 million.

Google has announced via its corporate blog that it has altered its search engine algorithm to minimise the impact of Googlebombs by improving the way they analyse link structures on Web sites, reports ARS Technica.

Googlebombs, or Googlebombing, refers to the act of hundreds of Internet users linking up specific words with certain Web sites in order to produce desired (and usually comical) search results. The company's previous stance was that this was an Internet prank and it did not want to manually alter otherwise-harmless antics on the Web.

Google's Matt Cutts says "the actual scale of this change is pretty small" since most Googlebombs were not in the range of public awareness.

Trend Micro Client Server Messaging Security 3.5 will be made available from today and is aimed at meeting the security needs of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It offers protection against spyware, rootkits and bots, reports eWeek.

The product also features automated checks to identify outdated Windows machines, without the added requirement of visiting individual desktops.

The program was designed with customers' needs in mind and allows users to manage security for the entire network by looking at a single console, said Raj Ventak, Trend Micro's director of small business marketing.

IBM has developed a long-sought improvement to the transistor, the tiny on/off switch that serves as the basic building block of virtually all microchips made today, reports Playfuls.

Working with AMD and its other development partners Sony and Toshiba, the company found a way to construct a critical part of the transistor with a new material, clearing a path toward chip circuitry that is smaller, faster and more power-efficient than previously thought possible.

The technology can be incorporated into existing chip manufacturing lines with minimal changes to tooling and processes, making it economically viable. It is expected to have widespread impact, leading to improvements in electronic systems of all kinds, from computers to consumer electronics.