Russia

When Google began hiring in Zurich for its new engineering center in 2004, local officials welcomed the U.S. company with open arms. Google's arrival is still bearing fruit for Zurich: 450 employees, about 300 of them engineers, work in Google's seven-story complex in a converted brewery on the outskirts of the placid mountain metropolis.

Attackers bent on shutting down large Web sites -- even the operators that run the backbone of the Internet -- are arming themselves with what are effectively vast digital fire hoses capable of overwhelming the world's largest networks, according to a new report on online security.

In these attacks, computer networks are hijacked to form so-called botnets that spray random packets of data in huge streams over the Internet. The deluge of data is meant to bring down Web sites and entire corporate networks.

How much money can criminals make scaring naive computer users? Try $5 million a year.

That is how much a marketing associate of one Russian operation appears to be earning from its sales of fake anti-virus software through an elaborate scheme that relies on e-mail spam and indirect control of thousands of unprotected PCs, according to internal company files posted online by a Russian hacker.

The company is Bakasoftware, a clandestine effort based in Russia that markets what it claims is an anti-virus program strictly to English-speaking computer users.

For obvious reasons, most Westerners don’t view the Middle East as a very green place. Why would oil-producing companies have any interest in de-valuing their most precious resource, right? Turns out, though, that a small yet significant move towards alternative energy is beginning in the region. While it might not become a world industry leader any time soon, the Middle East is playing its part.

Russia has stopped the acquisition of a company by Internet search giant Google. The Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) blocked Google from acquiring Zao Begun, a text-advertising and contextual-search company owned by Rambler Media. Zao serves more than 143,000 Russian-language Web sites.

Microsoft released Silverlight 2 on Monday, the second major version of its platform for creating and delivering advanced multimedia applications and experiences in a Web browser.

The company also said it will continue to back Silverlight-related open-source communities, with funding for advanced Silverlight development based on the Eclipse Foundation's integrated development environment (IDE) and with new controls to developers via the Silverlight Control Pack.

Justin E. H. Smith

Anyone assessing the strength of Pascal's wager --that, though there may be an infinitesimally small chance that Christianity is true, the potential punishment for not believing it, or reward for believing it, is infinitely great, and therefore it is rational to believe it-- should watch this video before coming to any conclusions:

Justin E. H. Smith

Anyone assessing the strength of Pascal's wager --that, though there may be an infinitesimally small chance that Christianity is true, the potential punishment for not believing it, or reward for believing it, is infinitely great, and therefore it is rational to believe it-- should watch this video before coming to any conclusions:

Dell Inc. said Thursday it expects sales to outpace computer maker rivals despite a slowing global economy.

CEO Michael Dell told reporters that "our expectation is that Dell will continue to grow faster than the industry this year."

The company warned last week that corporate spending on technology is weakening further, causing its shares to fall to their lowest point since September 2001 and dragging down other industry stocks.