IBM Creates Software for Holding Face-to-Face Meetings in Virtual Worlds

IBM is making it easier for widely dispersed businesspeople to interact and collaborate without the time and expense of in-person meetings.

What is making all this possible is the marriage between "virtual world" Web sites, and "unified communications and collaboration tools" -- technology that links such things as voicemail, audible chat, and instant messaging. Virtual worlds are interactive, immersive Web sites with three-dimensional graphics. There, people are represented by versions of themselves, called avatars. With origins in multi-player gaming sites, virtual worlds re-create the social and visual dynamics and cues of human interaction, and are now increasingly used in business settings.

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More trouble for Facebook users

As Facebook works to make itself more relevant and timely for its growing member base with a profile page makeover, attackers seem to be working overtime to steal the identities of the friends, fans and brands that connect though the social-networking site.

Indeed, Facebook has seen five different security threats in the past week. According to Trend Micro, four new hoax applications are attempting to trick members into divulging their usernames and passwords. And a new variant of the Koobface worm is running wild on the site, installing malware on the computers of victims who click on a link to a fake YouTube video.

The Koobface worm is dangerous. It can be dropped by other malware and downloaded unknowingly by a user when visiting malicious Web sites, Trend Micro reports. When attackers execute the malware, it searches for cookies created by online social networks. The latest variant is targeting Facebook, but earlier variants have also plagued MySpace.

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Hackers target Xbox Live players

Halo 3 players are a popular target for the Xbox attacks Xbox Live is being targeted by malicious hackers selling services that kick players off the network. The booting services are proving popular with players who want a way to get revenge on those who beat them in an Xbox Live game. The attackers are employing data flooding tools that have been used against websites for many years. Microsoft is "investigating" the use of the tools and said those caught using them would be banned from Xbox Live. "There's been a definite increase in the amount of people talking about and distributing these things over the last three to four weeks," said Chris Boyd, director of malware research at Facetime Communications. Read Full Story.

Facebook for galleries?

Museum visitors will be able to share their cultural passions in a social networking website.

Museum visitors will also be able to meet online

A group of the UK's most famous museums, including the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum, is creating a collective website.

As well as finding information about exhibits, museum lovers can use the website to create communities based on their historic and creative interests.

The National Museums Online Learning project is to be launched this week.

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Facebook Withdraws Changes in Data Use

Facebook, the popular social networking site where people share photos and personal updates with friends and acquaintances, lost some face on Wednesday. After three days of pressure from angry users and the threat of a formal legal complaint by a coalition of consumer advocacy groups, the company reversed changes to its contract with users that had appeared to give it perpetual ownership of their contributions to the service.

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Bluetooth over Wi-Fi Coming in April

The really good news is that your Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices may already support the specification

Two ubiquitous technologies that have made our mobile lives easier, wireless, and faster are Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Without these two specifications, we would be stuck with wires for connecting to mobile devices and networks in our homes and offices.

The two specifications are found in many smartphones and laptops today and usually operate independently of each other. A new specification called alternate MAC/PHY for Bluetooth will have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth working together.

The technical name for the new specification is a mouthful but at its core the specifications is Bluetooth over Wi-Fi. What happens is that two devices like your laptop and smartphone, for example, will find each other via Bluetooth. Once the devices find each other and are paired, you can start to send data like images over the Bluetooth connection. At the point of transmission, the data would be diverted from Bluetooth to the integrated Wi-Fi connection and sent at Wi-Fi speeds up to 54Mbps, much higher speed than Bluetooth is capable of. After the data is sent Bluetooth would be the controlling connection again.

Gizmodo reports that the specification for Bluetooth over Wi-Fi will be official in April. If you already own a stable of newer smartphones and laptops the good news is that many devices currently on the market already support the feature.

Broadcom's Mukul Suth told Gizmodo that some of the chipsets already on the market support the standard and will only need software update to activate it. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group says that the specification will allow you to wirelessly bulk synchronize music libraries between a PC and MP3 player, bulk download photos to a printer or PC and send video files form a camera or phone to your computer or TV all without wires.

Vodafone and HTC Team Up on New Google Phone

Five months after T-Mobile introduced the first phone powered by Google’s Android operating system, the cellphone giant Vodafone is unveiling the second. Like its predecessor, the new device is made by a Taiwanese manufacturer, HTC. It is called the HTC Magic and has a touch screen, but not the slide-out keyboard that the T-Mobile G1 has.

Starting this spring, the HTC Magic will be available exclusively to Vodafone customers in Britain, Germany, Spain and France and nonexclusively in Italy. Pricing was not disclosed. HTC executives, speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, said they were working on making the device available in the United States.

The T-Mobile G1 received generally good reviews, but its appeal was limited by its exclusive availability on T-Mobile, the fourth-largest carrier in the United States. The size of Vodafone, the largest mobile carrier in the world by revenue, should help Android gain broad distribution in Europe.

Google, however, is not pinning hopes for Android’s success on any one phone, but rather on a multitude of phones from different manufacturers. Several others are expected to unveil Android-based phones in 2009.