Card scammers get charitable

Credit card fraudsters are making charitable donations using stolen cards - but they are not trying to be nice, says The New Zealand Herald.

Symantec's security response weblog noted the interesting trend, where scammers will use charities to test if a card is active without raising suspicion.

"In the world of carding, where stolen credit card information is bought and sold," reads the blog posting, "carders need to know if the credit cards they are buying or selling can actually be used. It is sometimes difficult for them to verify this without raising any alarm bells and risking that their cards will be identified as stolen and disabled."

South Korea's Samsung and Sweden's Ericsson announced in a press statement that they have reached an agreement and signed mobile telecommunication cross-licensing deals, reports Monsters and Critics.

The agreement is the final step in ending tension between the companies over patent disputes, and ends a long legal battle between them.

Under the terms of a worldwide, royalty-bearing agreement, Ericsson has granted Samsung a non-exclusive licence under Ericsson's patent portfolio for the GSM, TDMA, GPRS, EDGE and WCDMA mobile telephony standards, to develop, manufacture, and sell 2G and 3G subscriber and infrastructure equipment.

A new study says past delays in Microsoft's products are causing some businesses to think twice about renewing the long-term service agreements that include rights to upgrade to future versions of its programs, according to Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Twenty-six percent of the 61 IT professionals surveyed by Forrester Research said they had decided not to renew their Microsoft Software Assurance agreements when they expire, opting instead to buy the software as needed.

Microsoft questioned Forrester's findings. The report "only looks at a subset of our customers and is not consistent with the feedback we have received," said Stacie Sloane, marketing and communications director for Microsoft's Worldwide Licensing and Pricing group, in a statement released by the company.

Google's dominance may seem unassailable in North America, but it is the search giant that is playing catch-up in Asia, according to new survey results, notes PC World.

Despite the popularity of Google's Web sites elsewhere in the world, it failed to attract the most visitors in any of the 10 Asian countries surveyed in May by comScore Networks.

Yahoo fared far better, claiming the most popular sites in Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan, while Microsoft sites were the most popular in Australia, China and New Zealand.