"At the commercial break, Watson had amassed $23,881, after hitting two "Daily Doubles", where contestants pick the amount they want to bet on the response. The machine chose rather bizarre bets of $6,435 and $1,246. The way Watson was playing, the machine should have bet much more, but apparently, it's a tad cautious. Jennings had $1,200 and Rutter had $3,400 at the commercial break, and they were clearly frustrated by the machine's speed."

"Microsoft says it will offer a privacy setting in the next version of Internet Explorer that will make it easy for users to keep their browsing habits from being tracked by advertising networks and other third-party websites." | more

"AMD has joined chip-rival Intel's MeeGo initiative, which aims to build a Linux platform for mobile devices. The company said on Monday that it's providing MeeGo with engineering expertise to help establish "the technical foundations for the next-generation mobile platforms and embedded devices." | more

"A Facebook engineer has publicly chastised Google for snipping Facebook's access to the Gmail Contacts API, accusing the search giant of data-hoarding hypocrisy. But in doing so, he unloads more than a little hypocrisy of his own." | more

"Open sourcers have seized control of the OpenOffice project and product and declared their independence from database giant Oracle. The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company..." "Until there's a decision from Oracle the OpenOffice.org suite will be retain the LibreOffice name.

Federal prosecutors have accused three men of running an operation that used fraudulent ads to dupe internet users around the world into buying more than $100m worth of bogus anti-virus software.

Researchers say they've devised a way to bypass protections built in to dozens of the most popular desktop anti-virus products, including those offered by McAfee, Trend Micro, AVG, and BitDefender.

The method, developed by software security researchers at matousec.com, works by exploiting the driver hooks the anti-virus programs bury deep inside the Windows operating system. In essence, it works by sending them a sample of benign code that passes their security checks and then, before it's executed, swaps it out with a malicious payload.

An Adobe product manager has apologized for allowing a potentially serious bug in Flash Player to remain unfixed for more than 16 months.

The admission, by Emmy Huang, product manager for Flash, came a week after Apple CEO Steve Jobs lambasted Adobe engineers as "lazy" and said when Macs crash, "more often than not it’s because of Flash." Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch struck back, insisting that at Adobe, "we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs."

The crash bug at issue in Huang's blog post published over the weekend was reported in September 2008, but it has yet to be excised from release

Updated Hackers who breached the defenses of Google, Adobe Systems and at least 32 other companies used a potent vulnerability in all versions of Internet Explorer to carry out at least some of the attacks, researchers from McAfee said Thursday.

US military boffinry chiefs have stated that they will shortly issue a brace of contracts for "refrigerator sized" laser blaster cannons. One of the deals will see a full-power ground prototype built which will be the final stage prior to America's first raygun-equipped jet fighter.