Here’s a heads-up for those of you who subscribe to the ZATZ RSS news feed: ads will be coming shortly. We know some people won’t like ads, but the simple reality is we have to pay the bills and a larger and larger percentage of our readers are getting their news and information from us through our feeds. So there will be ads.

The reason I’m telling you this now is that we’re starting the beta testing of the ad process. So, you may find the feeds to be a little finicky, on and off, for the next few days. Hopefully, things will stabilize by the end of the week (and hopefully the coding will be done by then as well).

As the system works now, an ad will be dropped into the feed every few items. We’re also going to intersperse different kinds of ads: graphics, short text ads, and more full-bodied ads. Every ad we show will be relevant, and probably useful to you. For example, only ads related to Lotus Notes and Domino will show in the DominoPower feed, and only ads related to Outlook, Exchange, and email will show in the OutlookPower feed.

For now, please hold off on telling me if something’s not working right. As we go through the testing process, we’re going to find a few things that need fixing. Once we think we’ve got it deployed properly, I will ask for bug reports.

Oh, and do us a big favor. Please click on these ads and buy stuff from our advertisers. You’ll help support a vibrant aftermarket and help us continue to bring you more and more great resources and information. — David

Google faces a federal patent infringement lawsuit by Northeastern University over technology used in its core Web search system, according to legal papers filed last week. The complaint was filed on November 6 in Marshall, in the Eastern District of Texas–the U.S. court with a history of decisions that are highly favorable to plaintiffs in patent cases–but the case only came to light over the weekend.

The plaintiffs are Northeastern University in Boston and Jarg, a start-up founded by a Northeastern University professor that is the exclusive licensee of search technology patented in 1997, a year before Google was incorporated.

A hacker has pleaded guilty to infecting hundreds of thousands of computers with malware in order to steal money from Paypal accounts. He could spend 60 years in prison and face a US$1.75 million fine.

John Schiefer, 26, admitted that he and some associates developed malware that allowed them to create botnet armies of as many as 250,000 computers. Schiefer was able to collect information sent from the infected computers, including usernames and passwords for Paypal accounts. He and his associates were then able to make purchases using the Paypal accounts. They also shared the password information with others.

IT managers have the responsibility of protecting data from internal and external intruders alike. Hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of users with access to sensitive data can also provide an equal number of access points for intruders.

Attackers rely to a large degree on sloppy security practices, such as failing to keep systems up to date with the latest security patches, using default Windows accounts–like Guest and Administrator–lax passwords and account security and a variety of exploitable bad habits by users.

IBM, Microsoft and SAP are taking a charge at the business Web 2.0 market, but the big vendors still lag behind smaller rivals who have developed far more innovative technology with quicker release cycles, according to a Forrester analyst.

Rob Koplowitz, an analyst at Forrester who is performing a comprehensive analysis of the market for blog, wiki, and content collaboration tools, issued research last month examining IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and BEA Systems. His next Enterprise 2.0 report will tackle the smaller players such as Socialtext, Jive, Awareness, Six Apart and Near-Time.

Small vendors have established themselves in the blog and wiki market with more robust technology, and can offer simpler, low-cost deployments, often through software-as-a-service, Koplowitz says.

Microsoft and Novell are using the one-year anniversary of their interoperability agreement to tout the increasing number of enterprise customers who are signing up because of the benefits offered through the collaboration.

The two companies announced Nov. 8 that Microsoft will give 30 new customers three-year priority support subscriptions for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. These agreements were negotiated over the past quarter, and they bring the number of such deals to about 60 that have taken place over the past year.

All of the deals involved non-Novell Linux customers moving over as a result of the technology bridge and intellectual property assurances, Susan Hauser, general manager of strategic partnerships and licensing at Microsoft, told eWEEK.

Microsoft introduced a new pilot program to encourage refurbishers to install legitimate copies of Windows XP on used PCs.

The new Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher (MAR) program offers a discount off the retail price of Windows XP, along with deployment tools to help refurbishers reinstall Windows and all of the relevant drivers on renewed PCs in as little as 15 minutes, said Hani Shakeel, senior product manager of the genuine Windows product marketing team.

When MAR is fully expanded, it will also help stem what Microsoft acknowledges as widespread flouting of Microsoft’s XP licensing rules by price-pressured refurbishers.

Patch Tuesday will bring two security bulletins from Microsoft, one of which is critical and involves a remotely exploitable hole on Windows systems, the other of which is rated important and also affects Windows. eEye’s Zero-Day Tracker, as of Nov. 9, is listing three active zero-day Windows and Internet Explorer vulnerabilities, all of which have been publicly disclosed and/or used in attacks, none of which have been patched.

The critical patch promised for the Nov. 13 Patch Tuesday could well be a flaw in a Macrovision driver on Windows XP and Windows 2003. That vulnerability was actively being exploited in the wild as of Nov. 5, when Microsoft sent a special security advisory to warn customers of the danger of complete system takeover.

Want some anti-spyware? How about a Trojan with that? That is not a literal sales pitch, but the end result of a multistep scam involving rogue anti-spyware that researchers at SecureWorks are warning Web surfers about. Though tricking users into downloading Trojans via bogus anti-spyware is nothing new, security researchers said the magnitude of the scam makes it problematic.

One year after former arch-rivals Microsoft and Novell partner up, what has resulted from their alliance? At the time, the news that Novell and Microsoft were becoming partners was shocking. But, a year into the alliance, what has really come from it? The analysts give their two cents on the first, and most surprising, of the Microsoft and Linux vendor partnerships.

According to the companies, the deal has exceeded its original business targets. "This agreement has been about the customer since day one," said Jeff Jaffe, Novell’s executive vice president and chief technology officer in a statement. "Customers told us they wanted Linux and Windows to work better together so they could focus on their businesses. By taking a leading position in delivering interoperability with Microsoft, Novell is becoming the preferred Linux choice for the integrated enterprise, a fact borne out by the significant sales increase we’ve seen over the past year."