A key Republican lawmaker said on Thursday he would introduce legislation designed to stop the sale of private cell phone records and push wireless carriers to better protect customer privacy. Texas Rep. Joe Barton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he will propose making it illegal to get cell phone records under false pretenses and "substantially increase the penalties" if telephone companies release consumer telephone records without consumers’ permission.

Security vendor F-Secure issued a patch Thursday to deal with critical flaws in a number of its antivirus and Internet security products. Flaws in the way F-Secure software handles ZIP and RAR data compression archives could allow an attacker to execute remote code on users’ systems and also to bypass F-Secure’s antivirus-scanning capabilities. Vulnerabilities were found in 19 versions of F-Secure’s antivirus products for Microsoft Windows, as well as in its products for Linux.

Yahoo said that it recently turned over information about its users searching habits to federal investigators, a startling admission that has touched off a new round of privacy concerns. As previously reported, search inquiries may be evidence in an upcoming trial that the government hopes will revive a controversial 1998 Internet law to protect children from stumbling onto inappropriate material on the Web. The law was struck down two years ago. The search queries are to serve as the raw material so the government can test whether Web filters are a match for the overwhelming amount of pornography that a child could run into while online.

Dealing with viruses, spyware, PC theft and other computer-related crimes costs U.S. businesses a staggering ##$67.2 billion a year,## according to the FBI. The FBI calculated the price tag by extrapolating results from a survey of 2,066 organizations. The survey, released Thursday, found that 1,324 respondents, or 64 percent, suffered a financial loss from computer security incidents over a 12-month period.

Microsoft said its next-generation Internet Explorer 7 browser will feature more sophisticated and effective tools for clearing the application’s memory of Web usage data. In a posting to the company’s IE 7 blog site, Microsoft Program Manager Uche Enuha reported that the new software will offer a "Delete Browsing History" feature that will allow users to more easily delete information regarding what sites they visit online. Whereas previous versions of IE forced people to execute several different functions in order to fully wipe out their browser memory, Enuha’s report said the new system will greatly simplify that process.

The Bush administration, seeking to revive an online pornography law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google for details on what its users have been looking for through its popular search engine. Google has refused to comply with the subpoena, issued last year, for a broad range of material from its databases, including a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period, lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department said in papers filed Wednesday in federal court in San Jose.

Daniel Lin, the first person prosecuted under the 2004 federal antispam law, pleaded guilty Tuesday to three felony charges, federal prosecutors announced. Two of the counts were related to sending millions of unsolicited spam emails, and the third was for a firearms violation. Lin, 30, faces a possible five-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine, federal officials said. Lin and three other men were accused of operating an illegal spam operation. The group sent more than 450,000 spam advertisements for fraudulent weight-loss and erectile dysfunction products, according to reports. Lin is scheduled to be sentenced in May.

A Web site that earned an enterprising British student $1 million suffered a crippling attack by ransom-seeking hackers. Alex Tew, 21, said Wednesday that his Million Dollar Homepage was targeted after he publicized how it had helped him raise money for his university studies. Tew said that on Jan. 7, he received a threat from an organization calling itself "The Dark Group," demanding that he pay them $50,000 within 72 hours or face having his site taken down.

Microsoft on Wednesday gave developers access to a key piece of Windows Vista, months ahead of the operating system’s release. The company posted near-final versions of two software development technologies that are part of WinFX, the underlying programming model being introduced with Vista, which is slated to ship late this year. The release is "a significant checkpoint" on the road toward delivery of the company’s new programming model, since it allows developers to build and deploy applications on their core production systems.

Microsoft has begun to take a serious look at how its software-as-a-service strategy can be applied to its developer business. Last week Microsoft moved one of its emerging developer tools strategy thinkers, John Montgomery, from a marketing role, and assigned him to the job of helping to figure out just how the software giant should proceed in this space. In a blog post Tuesday, Montgomery said the project he is working on goes by the code name Tuscany. Otherwise, "we’d all start calling it Visual Studio Live, which it may or may not be," he said. However, the Apache Software Foundation also has a Web services-related project known as Tuscany.