Cellphone religion

The religious can now find inspiration on the run thanks to that omnipresent companion - a cellphone.

Italy`s largest mobile phone operator, TIM, is offering clients SMS messages with `the prayer of the day`, `saint of the day` or `gospel of the day`.

The four beeps that signal an incoming inspiration are the latest opportunity given to Italian Catholics to help them on the technological stairway to Heaven. But even prayer is not free these days: the service costs about 15c a message. [Reuters]

Video game publisher Activision said yesterday it has extended a deal to license games based on characters owned by comics publisher Marvel Enterprises through to 2009.

The deal gives Activision worldwide rights to develop games based on X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and Iron Man.

Activision`s Spider-Man title, released earlier this year on the heels of the blockbuster film, was a major hit for the company, which is working on several new Spider-Man games for 2003 and 2004. [Reuters]

Anti-virus company Trend Micro is adding spam protection to its security collection thanks to Postini`s anti-spam engine.

The engine, which performs heuristic analysis of e-mail content, is capable of identifying spam messages even if they have been customised or have never been seen elsewhere on the Internet.

Trend Micro will license the Postini engine to its corporate customers as a software application that can run behind a firewall. Although Trend Micro customers will get the benefit of Postini`s anti-spam technology and frequent updates to the engine`s scanning heuristics, they won`t get the full range of services offered to Postini`s managed service customers, according to Doug McLean, VP of marketing at Postini. [More at ComputerWorld]

It`s been a big week for teen pop singer Avril Lavigne: first she collected five Grammy nominations and now she has a virus named after her.

A new worm, going by various names including Avril, Lirva and Naith, is infecting machines around the world. In addition to forcing users to visit Lavigne`s Web site, the worm also attempts to disable various anti-virus and firewall products.

The worm searches the hard drives of infected PCs for HTML files that may contain e-mail addresses and then uses its own built-in SMTP engine to send copies of itself to whatever addresses it finds. [eWeek]

Online news sites may well be the survivors of the dot-com downturn, according to a recent survey. The survey, by Market Facts, reports that workers are racking up more time reading news and information online than they are consuming traditional media such as television, newspapers, radio and magazines.

The survey also reports that of the 351 users surveyed, 35% use the Internet for news and information during the day, while 25% read newspapers, 21% read magazines and 17% listen to the radio. [InfoWorld]

This week on TechNiche:
Apple restarts browser war
Microsoft to release software for CDMA networks