PC rules supreme

The personal computer is king in the world of games, according to a new report by the PC Gaming Alliance, says The BBC.

On the opening day of the Game Developers Conference, in San Francisco, the Alliance said the industry made about $11 billion worldwide last year.

PCGA president Randy Stude said these figures underline the PC as the "number one platform for gaming worldwide".

Three of the UK's IT skills and career bodies have teamed up to fight the gender imbalance in the IT workforce, reports Computing.co.uk.

The British Computing Society (BCS), e-skills UK and Intellect have been collecting information since late last year on the proportion of females employed in today's IT profession. The organisations now hope to present the statistics as a "definitive evidence base for commentary".

Intellect said the information is also aimed at setting a standard to make sense of the large amount of conflicting industry facts and data.

Security researchers have identified a sophisticated piece of malware that corals consumer routers and DSL modems into a lethal botnet, says The Register.

The "psyb0t" worm is believed to be the first piece of malware to target home networking gear, according to researchers from DroneBL, which bills itself as a real-time monitor of 'abusable' Internet addresses.

It has already infiltrated an estimated 100 000 hosts. It has been used to carry out distributed denial of service attacks and is also believed to use deep-packet inspection to harvest user names and passwords.

Seeking to boost the US clean-energy industry, US President Barack Obama on Monday announced $1.2 billion for science research at national labs and a proposal to extend a business tax credit for investments in research and development, reports CNet.

At an event at the White House, Obama told researchers and green-technology business people that their work was vital to revitalising the US economy and cutting the country's dependence on foreign oil. About 120 researchers, lab directors, and CEOs from energy technology companies attended the event.

"We need some inventiveness. Your country needs you to mount a historical effort to end, once and for all, our dependence on foreign oil," Obama said. "Your country will support you, and your president will support you."