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A computer virus has made use of storms sweeping across Europe to infect email systems and spread rapidly before dying down, a Finnish IT security company has said. The virus appeared in emails with the subject line "230 dead as storm batters Europe" and attachments bearing names such as "Full Clip.exe," "Full Story.exe," "Read More.exe," and "Video.exe." The program infects computers when users click on the message.

State prosecutors offered to drop felony charges against former Hewlett-Packard Chairwoman Patricia Dunn and the four other defendants in the company’s boardroom spying scandal if they agree to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, a defense lawyer said Thursday.

Microsoft has re-released an update issued in its January 2007 patch batch to correct a glitch in the way Excel 2000 processes information. The company announced that the "targeted re-release" was necessary to correct the bug, which occurs in the way Excel 2000 processes the phonetic information embedded in files created using Excel in the Korean, Chinese or Japanese executable mode.

Opti wants a bite of Apple. The maker of controller chips for PCs and LCD monitors has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple, claiming the IT giant has been unfairly using Opti technology in its Macintosh line and its Xserve servers. Specifically, the lawsuit claims that Apple used Opti-patented "predictive snooping" technology, which involves the transfer of data from a PCI bus controller to a PCI master bus. This piece of technology helps shorten the delay in data transfer within a microprocessor.

Advantage International, Microsoft Exchange & Outlook solutions provider and Microsoft Certified Partner, announced many mobile professionals are using their Outlook synchronization solution, Add2Exchange, to help synchronize their Outlook calendars, contacts, & tasks between multiple mobile devices. Add2Exchange increases out-of-office productivity by synchronizing Outlook calendars, contacts & tasks between user’s mailboxes, so they can be wirelessly synced to their mobile devices. Now an entire group, department, or organization can have identical calendars, contacts and/or tasks on each of their BlackBerry handhelds, Pocket PCs, or Treo Smartphones.

Microsoft and Nortel Networks revealed more about their Unified Communications Alliance, announcing real deliverables and detailing a road map for further products due next year. The alliance, launched in the summer of 2006, has yielded over the last six months a series of integrated offerings due out this year. First of the new deliverables is to be a joint Unified Messaging offering that provides interoperability between Nortel’s Communication Server 1000 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. It represents the first integration of Exchange with Nortel’s native implementation of the industry standard SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). Nortel will supplement the offering with its professional services for design, deployment and support.

Last Friday, over at the IE Weblog, Tony Chor rightly boasted about 100 million Internet Explorer 7 downloads. How many of those downloaders are dissatisfied, though? Judging from the email coming into the Microsoft Watch Tips in-box or comments to IE 7 posts, there are many upgraders looking to turn back to Internet Explorer 6. Consistent complaint: application incompatibilities.

TJX Cos, which operates the T.J. Maxx and Marshalls chains, said on Wednesday that the computer systems that process its customer transactions had been breached and customer information had been stolen. The off-price retailer said it discovered the intrusion in mid-December, but it does not yet know the full extent of the theft or the number of customers affected.

An industry group has formally christened a faster second-generation version of the PCI technology that’s used to plug everything from video cards to InfiniBand adapters into computers. As expected, PCI Express turned 2.0 by fiat of the PCI Special Interest Group, the industry cooperative that governs the specification and announced the new version Monday. PCI Express–a modernized sequel to the original PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) that spread to essentially every server and PC since it was introduced in the 1990s–can transfer 2.5 gigabits per second on each wire, pin or other electrical connection called "lanes" between a computer and a plug-in device. PCI Express 2.0 doubles that rate to 5Gbps, and as with the existing PCIe, multiple lanes can be ganged together.