Web threats have risen significantly in the first quarter of 2008, with one Web page being infected every five seconds, according to a new report from security vendor Sophos.

Sophos said in its Security Threat Report that an average of over 15,000 Web pages were compromised daily between January and March.

In contrast, the daily average for the entire 2007 was about 6,000, or one infected Web page every 14 seconds.

Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz rightly gets credit for pioneering the corporate blog as a tool to reach customers, employees, and others. But pretty soon the novelty of his methods will wear off, he predicted.

"At some point the word ‘blogging’ will be anachronistic," Schwartz said at the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco. "I communicate."

And he predicted, in effect, that the rest of the executive world will catch up. "Historically, communication took place by being a celebrity CEO who met with heads of state, and got the local media to cover it," he said in an on-stage interview with O’Reily Media chief Tim O’Reilly. "You got the message out in an inefficient and environmentally irresponsible way. Then the Internet came round and gave you a way to reach the entire planet."

Our ongoing story about the security of White House email took a strange turn on Friday, proving some of the national security concerns I’ve been discussing to be true in a particularly tangible and unfortunate way. What makes this topic so troubling, of course, is the serious national security breach that may have occurred. But there’s more to the story, including issues of the relationship between the United States and Mexico, and even how racial stereotyping may have contributed to spinning this story in a way that may be obscuring the true magnitude of the possible damage to our national security.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Jargon shows up in all professions, but in few is it more apparent, or more divisive, than in the world of technology. Picture this. You’re in the middle of a presentation to a business team about some technology it would behoove the company to invest in and this comes out of your mouth:

"Just last week, we loaded 15 BGUs in the OTB and got an output of 1,300 cycles, which shows our testing program is right on target."

You might have missed it, but half the room was day dreaming and the other half were checking email on their BlackBerrys. What they were not doing: considering whether they should budget for this technology, because you had lost their attention. Can an over-reliance on tech jargon be bad for your career? Some experts say yes.

Microsoft could re-think plans to phase out its Windows XP operating system by June 30 if customers show they want to keep it but so far they have not, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said.

"XP will hit an end-of-life. We have announced one. If customer feedback varies we can always wake up smarter but right now we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments," Ballmer told a news conference on Thursday.

Microsoft has announced that it will stop licensing Windows XP to computer makers and end retail sales by June 30.

Here are Eric Lundquist’s new rules of being the techie gentleman or lady.

Looks like our own David Gewirtz was right in his concerns. Here’s a breaking news report on the subject:

ZATZ Publishing today announces that national security concerns published by David Gewirtz, ZATZ Editor-in-Chief and the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? have been proven true in a particularly tangible and unfortunate example.

Today, Fox News reported that Rafael Quintero Curiel, lead press advance person for the Mexican Delegation was caught stealing six or seven BlackBerry devices belonging to White House staffers who were attending meetings between U.S. President George W. Bush and Canadian and Mexican leaders in New Orleans this week. Unfortunately, Quintero Curiel was caught after the devices had been in his possession for some time.

That’s the equivalent in strategic U.S. government information of about 28,000 printed pages of data, or seven complete sets of all seven Harry Potter novels. And that’s per BlackBerry. Given today’s incident, that’s seven times seven complete sets of all seven Harry Potter novels.

Read the full text.

Comcast is throttling more traffic than it has previously admitted, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin told a U.S. Senate panel April 22. Martin also told lawmakers it appears Comcast broadband customers are not free to access all content on the Internet, including the ability to fully use peer-to-peer networks.

Martin’s comments come after two FCC hearings on charges that the nation’s largest cable provider deliberately throttles P2P applications such as BitTorrent during peak network hours, a practice that Comcast admits to. Comcast says its policy not only falls within the FCC’s reasonable network management exception to the FCC’s network neutrality rules, but it is also "imperceptible to the customer."

Martin refuted Comcast’s claims, telling the Senate Commerce Committee, "It does not appear that this technique [throttling] was used only to occasionally delay traffic at particular nodes suffering from network congestion at that time." According to Martin, the testimony so far presented to the FCC indicates Comcast’s efforts at managing P2P traffic "is typically deployed over a wider geographic or system area and would therefore have impacted nodes within a system simultaneously."

Comcast’s technology, Martin added, "blocks the uploads of at least a large portion of subscribers in that part of the network, regardless of the actual levels of congestion at that particular time."

Martin also said he had no fix on when Comcast will actually stop using its current approach, although Comcast said it plans to move to a "content-agnostic" platform available for up to 20 percent of Comcast’s customers by the end of the year. One of the primary network neutrality complaints against Comcast is that it singles out one program over another.

Computer software giant Microsoft has seen third quarter profits fall, but beat market expectations. Profits fell 11-percent to $4.39bn in the three months to 31 March from $4.93bn a year earlier. Sales were stable at $14.5bn.

Sales in the division selling Office and other business applications fell, hit by lower demand. The results come before a deadline the firm has given Yahoo to respond to its $44.6bn bid for the Internet firm.

A computer hacker testified on Wednesday that a News Corp unit hired him to develop pirating software, but denied using it to penetrate the security system of a rival satellite television service.

Christopher Tarnovsky–who said his first payment was $20,000 in cash hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada–testified in a corporate-spying lawsuit brought against News Corp’s NDS Group by DISH Network Corp. The trial could result in hundreds of millions of dollars in damage awards.