Spam is 95% of All Email
The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has released its new spam report that indicates about 95% of emails are spam. The survey found that 95% of all email is spam. 70% of the respondents consider spam extremely significant or significant for their security operations.
Amazon.com to Let Developers Create Kindle Apps Amazon has the launch of the Kindle Development Kit. The Kit gives developers access to programming interfaces, tools and documentation to build active content for Kindle. Some of the Kindle apps Amazon.com says can be developed include travel books that suggest activities based on real-time weather and current events, cookbooks that recommend menus based on size of party and allergies, and word games and puzzles. Amazon says Handmark is building an active Zagat guide featuring their ratings and reviews. A company named Sonic Boom is building word games and puzzles.
"We've heard from lots of developers over the past two years who are excited to build on top of Kindle," said Ian Freed, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. "The Kindle Development Kit opens many possibilities--we look forward to being surprised by what developers invent."
Intel Infoscape at CES
Intel displayed its Infoscape at CES 2010. The technology using Intel's new Intel Core processor allows people to interact in real-time with numerous data sources at once on one giant touch screen. The display is pulling from hundreds of different data sources at once. You can read more about the interface here. Take a look:
U.S. Drones Hacked in Iraq
Elizabeth Palmer reports for CBS News that U.S. Predator drones were hacked in Iraq. The report says the insurgents were able to use $26 software to hack our drones and watch the surveillance video. This does not sound good. However, the video was unencrypted so if the video was just encrypted the insurgents would be less likely to intercept it. Take a look:
OfficeMax Cyber Monday Deals OfficeMax has some good deals on Cyber Monday. The special product offers and deals will be live on the OfficeMax.com website starting at 12am on Monday, November 30th. There will be limited quantities so be sure to shop early. Here is a list of the offers.
Electrobite, a Trilobite-shaped DIY vehicle
Boing Boing says this unusual trilobite-shaped DIY vehicle was created by "Oilpunk" enthusiasts Kyrsten Mate and Jon Sarriugarte, with help from Amy Jenkins and Tansy Brooks. A prehistoric bug isn't really the first thing you think of when you think of personal transport but it seems to work fine. Take a look:
Impressive iPhone Costumes
There have been plenty of lame iPod costumes made out of cardboard. Reko Rivera and John Savio went the extra mile and made impressive iPhone costumes that have 42" displays that actually work. Take a look:
Hard Drive Storage Gets Super Cheap in 2020
Physorg.com has an interesting article about what technology will follow hard drives. The article cites a study that has hard drive storage costing as little as $40 for a 14 TB drive in 2020.
According to a new study, if HDDs continue to progress at their current pace, then in 2020 a two-disk, 2.5-inch disk drive will be capable of storing more than 14 TB and will cost about $40 (today, a typical 500 GB hard drive costs about $100). Although flash memories have also become popular - with advantages such as lower power consumption, faster read access time, and better mechanical reliability than HDDs - the cost per GB for flash memories is nearly 10 times that of HDDs. In addition, flash memory technology will reach technical limits that will prevent its continued scaling before 2020, keeping them from replacing HDDs.
The article describes a couple potential replacement technologies - random access memory (PCRAM) and spin transfer torque random access memory (STTRAM) - but nothing that is cheaper than the hard drive before 2020. However, sometimes technologies emerge that surprise you.
Green Ecofont Uses Less Ink Ecofont is a free font designed to be more eco-friendly. The font has holes in it so that less ink will be used when the font is printed. CNET reports that Ecofont claims to use 20% less ink than regular fonts. They also say it is basically "Arial with holes." The font is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux systems.
Pace of Domain Registrations Slows Internet Newsreports that Verisign reported that the number of registered domains climbed to 184 million in the second quarter of 2009. 9 million new domains were registered in the second quarter - this was a 15% plunge from the second quarter in 2008.
VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN) said in its report that, "around nine million new domain names were registered across all of the TLDs in the second quarter of 2009." Still, that figure represents a 15 percent decline from the second quarter of 2008.
"The overall base of domain names grew by 9 percent year-over-year and 1 percent quarter-over-quarter," Jill McNabb, vice president of naming services at VeriSign, told InternetNews.com. "While the number of new registrations declined, there were new registrations coming in, thus resulting in the growth of the overall base."
McNabb said the continued growth in domain name registrations in the second quarter of 2009 was in line with expectations. VeriSign has seen that there is seasonality in domain name registrations with the second quarter of the year dropping from the first.
There is some hope by investors that the economy is recovering. It will be interesting to see if this helps domain registrations start to climb higher again in the fourth quarter of 2009 or first quarter of 2010.
Russian Hackers Paid 43 Cents a Mac Computerworld reports that a network of Russian malware writers have been paying hackers 43 cents for each Mac computer they infect with malware.
A network of Russian malware writers and spammers paid hackers 43 cents for each Mac machine they infected with bogus video software, a sign that Macs have become attack targets, a security researcher said yesterday.
In a presentation Thursday at the Virus Bulletin 2009 security conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Sophos researcher Dmitry Samosseiko discussed his investigation of the Russian "Partnerka," a tangled collection of Web affiliates who rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars from spam and malware, most of the former related to phony drug sites, and much of the latter targeting Windows users with fake security software, or "scareware."
43 cents a mac is very low so the hackers must be able to infect a lot of mac computers to make it worth their time.
iTwinge is a real QWERTY physical keyboard that appears to fit on the iPhone like a sleeve. For $30 it might be a nifty addition for those who want to use a real keyboard instead of the touchscreen. Gadgetwise says the keyboard was originally developed by Mobile Mechatronics founder Mike Nykoluk as a training device to help transition people from a regular keyboard to iPhone's touchscreen. Now it is being targeted at people who would prefer a regular keyboard. There is also $5 shipping with iTwinge. Shipments begin on November 19th.
RIM Tops Fortune's List of Fastest Growing Companies The BBC reports that Research in Motion (RIM) - the company behind the popular Blackberry device - has topped Fortune's list of the fastest growing companies.
Canada-based RIM has come top of the magazine's latest annual guide to the 100 fastest-growing businesses.
In second place was US chipmaker Sigma Designs, with Chinese internet business Sohu.com coming in third.
Fortune rates a firm's growth on a combination of its profits, turnover and investment return over three years.
The BBC says RIM's profits have soared 84% over the past three years and its revenues have climbed 77%. Fortune's list of the 100 fastest growing companies can be found here.
Microsoft to Power Yahoo Search The long awaited Microsoft Yahoo deal has happened. Microsoft's recently launched Bing search engine will power the Yahoo search engine in a long term 10-year deal. The BBC reports that Yahoo will keep 88% of the revenues for search ad sales on Yahoo.com for the first five years.
In return for ceding control of its search engine, Yahoo will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft sites.
Yahoo's search team, meanwhile, will have to brace itself for job losses over the next two years. Some staff will transfer to Microsoft, others can stay on with Yahoo, but redundancies would be unavoidable, Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz told the BBC.
The BBC also says the Microsoft-Yahoo deal wasn't possible until Jerry Yang departed.
The deal became possible after Yahoo's co-founder Jerry Yang stepped down as chief executive of the company late last year.
"Only a Yahoo outsider like Ms Bartz could do such a deal," said Tim Weber, business editor of the BBC News website.
The deal will give Microsoft a bigger piece of the search engine pie and mae it more competitive with Google in search and search advertising.
Amazon has the launch of the 
OfficeMax has some good deals on Cyber Monday. The special product offers and deals will be live on the OfficeMax.com website starting at 12am on Monday, November 30th. There will be limited quantities so be sure to shop early. Here is a list of the offers.
Internet News 
Computerworld 
The BBC 
The long awaited Microsoft Yahoo deal has happened. Microsoft's recently launched 
