The latest news from RIM, maker of the Blackberry wireless email device, says it has restored the service to "most" of its North American users following a network failure. Research In Motion said it was now looking at the cause of the breakdown, which first happened on Tuesday night.

Some US and Canadian users will still experience delays until the backlog of undelivered emails clears, it added.

But with eight million global users, some analysts have questioned whether the network has reached capacity.

Barracuda Networks is profiling email as it’s received by antispam appliances in order to augment spam filtering based on the reputation of a sender. The Mountain View, Calif., antispam appliance maker on Tuesday plans to announce "Predictive Sender Profiling" as its latest technique to combat junk email. Filtering email is more effective by profiling messages and senders on the fly than by just looking up a reputation score in a database that’s based on past behavior, said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management at Barracuda.

Online criminals have pounced on the unpatched Windows DNS Server service vulnerability, using the security hole to seed and replenish for-profit botnets. The latest twist in the ongoing attacks comes less than a week after Microsoft’s pre-patch advisory provided clues for hackers to write and release detailed exploit code.

Anti-virus researchers have detected signs of a variant of the talkative Nirbot Trojan squirming through the worm hole created by the vulnerability. According to data from Arbor’s ATLAS threat monitoring portal, the bulk of the attacks are coming from the U.S., China, India and Korea.

A widespread system failure of Research In Motion’s network has left BlackBerry users in the Western Hemisphere without email on their handheld devices.

The problem, first reported on news site WNBC.com, is believed to have originated around 8 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday and has not yet been solved. Because the problem concerns the RIM BlackBerry network, all cellular carriers that support BlackBerry are affected. [Ed. note: Please bear in mind, your provider’s tech support can do nothing about this problem, so please don’t pester them with this issue. When the system is back you’ll know because you’ll begin receiving your email again.]

Google plans to launch software similar to Microsoft’s popular PowerPoint program as the two companies vie to dominate the online experience.

Google Chairman and Chief Executive Eric Schmidt described the software Tuesday at a conference for Internet entrepreneurs. He also blasted Microsoft and AT&T, whose executives complained over the weekend that Google may soon have an illegal monopoly in online advertising.

Google announced Friday it would pay $3.1 billion to acquire ad-management technology company DoubleClick. Almost as soon as Google announced the cash acquisition, Microsoft and AT&T executives said the deal could violate antitrust legislation–and result in a dangerous concentration of Internet users’ personal data at Mountain View-based Google.

Microsoft made available a plug-in that allows its Windows Media Player to integrate more smoothly with the Firefox Web browser, a growing rival to Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser. With competitors like Adobe vying for Web developer mindshare, Microsoft may have to give an inch to open source in order to keep WMP strong.

Available via Port 25 as well as the Firefox add-on site, the plug-in is designed to support Windows 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, including Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista. It is also backwards compatible with the older 6.4 Windows Media Player.

Symantec officials announced the release of an upgraded version of Backup Exec System Recovery that features enhanced Microsoft Exchange support and data recovery capabilities they hope will speed and simplify the Windows system recovery process.

Backup Exec System Recovery 7.0 works by creating recovery points to capture an exact copy of a system, company officials said.

Think botnets are bad now? We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

A select group of some 40 security researchers gathered in the first Usenix event devoted to these networks of infected machines. The invitation-only event, called HotBots, was held in Cambridge, Mass.

At the event, researchers warned that botnets–which can contain tens or even hundreds of thousands of zombie PCs that have been taken over for use in spamming and thievery of financial and identity-related data–are on the brink of a technological leap to more resilient architectures and more sophisticated encryption that will make it that much harder to track, monitor and disable them.

Microsoft officials have used "Cloud OS" as shorthand to refer to the Windows Live Core, or the platform that will power Microsoft’s current and forthcoming datacenter-based family of services.

But what, exactly, is Microsoft’s Cloud OS? Is it an operating system at all?

In the initial phases of its Cloud OS rollout, sources say, Microsoft is looking to build atop Windows Server and create a distributed technology layer, or platform, that will handle the back-end chores required by users, partners and service providers. There are a number of elements of this distributed layer, sources claim, including at least two different databases. One of these is known as the Cloud database; a file-system-based storage system, sources say.

A House committee gave the federal government a grade of C-minus for 2006 as part of the committee’s annual assessment of how well information is protected on government computers.

The annual report by the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee is meant to judge compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act. The committee has given the government overall grades of D, D-plus and D-plus in 2003, 2004 and 2005, respectively.