InfoWorld Top News

A & quot;worrying number & quot; of Facebook users are sharing a link to a malware-laden fake CNN news page reporting the U.S. has attacked Iran and Saudi Arabia, security firm Sophos said Friday.

The world of hypervisors is complicated by the fact that there are proprietary and open source tools, each with different strengths and weaknesses. One expert says the difference between the two is that innovation is coming out of the open source products at a quicker pace. But another expert doesn & #039;t quite believe that first to market is the key to success. He says this market is too important to be downloading open source bits frequently. With that dilemma, enterprises instead turn to commercially supported products.

Steve Appleton, chairman and CEO of memory and semiconductor maker Micron, was killed in a small plane accident in Boise, Idaho, on Friday. & quot;Our hearts go out to his wife, Dalynn, his children and his family during this tragic time, & quot; the company said in a statement. [ Keep up on the day & #039;s tech news headlines with InfoWorld & #039;s Today & #039;s Headlines: Wrap Up newsletter. ]

Dell & #039;s formation of a new software group, which was announced Thursday, could be the forerunner to a string of acquisitions by the vendor, with some observers predicting a focus on systems management and cloud services provisioning.

Details about Windows Phone 8 are bustin & #039; out all over. And while those technical details are devastating for Windows Phone 7.5 & quot;Tango & quot; sales, there & #039;s a bigger picture.

The PHP Group released PHP 5.3.10 on Thursday in order to address a critical security flaw that can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on servers running an older version of the Web development platform. The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2012-0830 and was discovered by Stefan Esser, an independent security consultant and creator of the popular Suhosin security extension for PHP.

Google does not plan to delay its new privacy policy despite calls from Europe & #039;s data protection watchdog.

Data routinely gathered in Web logs -- IP address, cookie ID, operating system, browser type, user-agent strings -- can threaten online privacy because they can be used to identify the activity of individual machines, Microsoft researchers say. At the same time, analysis of such data when anonymized can help detect malicious activity and so improve overall Internet security, they add.

H-1B workers are better educated than U.S. born workers and earn more, according to a new study by an independent research group. The report by two economists at the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California, also found that, on average, H-1B workers are about 10 years younger than U.S. born workers.

Researchers from security vendor Symantec have identified a new premium-rate SMS Android Trojan horse that modifies its code every time it gets downloaded in order to bypass antivirus detection. This technique is known as server-side polymorphism and has already existed in the world of desktop malware for many years, but mobile malware creators have only now begun to adopt it.

Research in Motion is trying to woo developers by giving a free BlackBerry PlayBook tablet to coders who port their Android application for its BlackBerry Tablet OS. & amp;nbsp;The promotion, announced on Twitter by Alec Saunders, RIM & #039;s vice president for developer relations, comes as RIM struggles to generate int

Apple this week patched 51 vulnerabilities in Mac OS X, most of them critical, in 2012 & #039;s first security update. Both Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion, and 10.6, better known as Snow Leopard, were updated with fixes. The two operating systems were last updated in mid-October 2011.

In an effort to improve security in its Android Market, Google has been using a service providing automated scanning of applications submitted to the mobile application store, Google revealed on Thursday afternoon. Code-named Bouncer, the service scans the market for potentially malicious software without disrupting the user experience or requiring developers to submit to an application approval process, said Hiroshi Lockheimer, vice of engineering for Android, in a blog post:

AMD has put the brakes on adding more cores to its server chips, stopping at 16, the company said Thursday during a financial analyst day. AMD & #039;s new server chips code-named Abu Dhabi and due out in 2013 will have 16 cores, the same number as the existing Opteron 6200 chips code-named Interlagos that shipped last year. Servers are being redesigned to match specialty workloads and adding more cores to the Abu Dhabi chip wasn & #039;t the way to boost performance, said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of Global Business Units at AMD, during a speech.

Companies and home users whose computers or routers are infected by the DNSChanger Trojan risk being unable to access the Web come March 8, 2012, when the FBI unplugs the legitimate DNS servers it set up to replace the rogue DNS servers that were forwardi

AMD will take a fundamentally different approach to designing chips as it tries to move away from playing second fiddle to Intel. The company will blur the lines between CPUs and graphics processors in future chip design cycles, with both units sharing a memory pool and running common software applications, said AMD CTO Mark Papermaster Thursday during a financial analyst conference speech that was webcast.

In October 2011, Internet infrastructure firm VeriSign released its usual quarterly report. Buried in the 50-page filing to the SEC was the revelation that the company had been breached multiple times the previous year.

Dell on Thursday said it is forming a Software Group, which will bring together disparate products under one roof as the company tries to sharpen its end-to-end enterprise offerings. The software unit will be led by John Swainson, who will assume the title of President of Software Group. He was previously senior advisor at Silver Lake, an equity firm, but also served as CEO and CA from 2005 through 2009.

Just when you thought Internet Explorer was on a years-long losing streak, about to drop below 50 percent of all browsing activity worldwide, the January figures from Net Applications showed a substantial, remarkable 1.19 percent jump in IE use in January.

With the Facebook initial public offering (IPO) now official, industry and financial analysts say that a huge influx of cash could enable the social networking company to topple Google from its dominant position in the online world.