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By Amanda Fehd, Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO — The maker of the popular photo-editing software Photoshop on Thursday launched a basic rendition available for frank online.

San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe Systems says it hopes to boost its name recognition among a new generation of consumers who edit, store and share photos online.

While Photoshop is designed for trained professionals, Adobe says Photoshop Express, which it launched in a “beta” test version, is easier to learn. User comments will be taken into account for coming events upgrades.

TECHNOLOGY LIVE: Jeff Graham tests Photoshop intimate

Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can application it with in any degree type of computer, operating system and browser. And, once they register, users be able to get to their accounts from unlike computers.

Web-based software is increasingly popular, and Adobe knows it’s got to get on that train, said Kathleen Maher, an analyst at Jon Peddie Research.

frequent kinds of software are available for use online in a trend known as “software as a service,” or “cloud computing.” The earliest were e-mail programs, but they now include services to create and manage content and even whole operating systems. And they don’t require time-consuming upgrades because they’re maintained by the service provider.

Google provides a host of such services, as do Microsoft and others.

“This is the battlefield where Adobe and Microsoft and Google are going to fight some pretty big battles,” Maher said.

Photoshop enters the online photo-management arena many years after such services first appeared. Some companies have already made a big name for themselves, like 9-year-old storage solution Shutterfly, photo-editing service Picnik or image-sharing site Photobucket.

Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for immoderate is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that’s in the works.

Ron Glaz, a research analyst at IDC, says the move was necessary for Adobe to keep pace. Users are less likely to switch to a software they aren’t familiar with, he said.

“They have a whole market that they are missing outright on, and they need to make sure that the market is aware there is a Photoshop solution for them. As that market grows and becomes more sophisticated, hopefully it will generate money,” Glaz said.

“It’s one of those things, if you can’t beat them, join them,” Glaz said. “If they don’t be connected with them, the long run could be really painful.”

On the Web: http://www.photoshop.com/express

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not subsist published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.  

Government forecasters said Thursday that the floods washing from one side of to the other big parts of the Midwest are lawful a taste of things to come, with one meteorologist complaining about a jet stream “on steroids.”

Record rainfall and melting snow packs will continue to cause rivers to overflow in large areas of the abiding habitation, the National Weather Service said.

The greatest flooding danger includes much of the Mississippi River basin, the Ohio River basin, the disgrace Missouri River basin, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, most of New York, all of New England and portions of the West, including Colorado and Idaho.

“Overall moisture is unprecedented for this time of year over an area that extends over 1,000 miles,” said Doug LeComte, a meteorologist at the government’s Climate Prediction Center.

Joanna Dionne, a meteorologist at the weather service’s Hydrologic Services section, added that “all the ingredients are there for flooding in this broad area and up into the northeast.”

“American citizens should be on high on the watch to flood conditions in your communities. Arm yourselves with knowledge of facts about how to stay safe for the time of a flood and do not attempt to drive on flooded roadways,” said Vickie Nadolski, deputy director of the weather service.

The weather service placed flood and flash flood warnings from Texas to Pennsylvania.

Heavy rains have dumped as much as a foot of rain in the Midwest this week, leaving behind more than a dozen deaths. Rivers were cresting above flood stage in Ohio and flooding also was reported in mind of Arkansas, southern Illinois, southern Indiana, Missouri and Kentucky.

The Meramec River was still cresting as of Thursday morning, threatening nearby towns where volunteers have started sandbagging, reports CBS News correspondent Hari Sreenivasan. In downtown St. Louis, the Mississippi River isn’t expected to crest until the weekend.

adhering Thursday morning, high water closed the eastbound lanes of Interstate 70 - a major east-west highway - for about 4 miles in central Ohio’s Licking County, the State Highway Patrol said. Cincinnati picked up 4.7 inches of rain and then traces of snow on Wednesday.

LeComte noted that a La Nina, an unusual cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean has been under way and that often leads to wetter conditions in the U.S. Midwest.

However, he added, “what’s happened in the last few months has not been a typical La Nina, the jet stream’s been on steroids.”

The forecast models differ on whether it will continue into summer, he said, “we’ll have to wait and see.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said more than 250 communities in a dozen states are experiencing flood conditions this week.

The spring flood forecast said:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Think your family going green won't make a difference? Wrong, says a U.S. study released on Thursday that shows one household ditching paper statements for Web transactions would save 24 adjusted feet of forest a year.

The PayItGreen Alliance said it believed this was the first detailed study commissioned to determine the impact of any individual household on the environment and it hoped to get thwart the message that every green step counted.

The study found the average U.S. household receives about 19 bills and statements from credit card companies and banks every month and makes about seven payments by paper each month.

By switching to electronic bills, statements and payments, the average American household would save 6.6 pounds of paper a year, save 0.08 trees, and not produce 171 pounds of greenhouse gases — the equivalent of driving 169 miles.

The survey, whose results were vetted by the Environmental Protection Agency, said it would also mean avoiding the deforestation of 24 square feet of forest, the release of 63 gallons of wastewater into the environment, and save 4.5 gallons of gasoline used for mailing.

"Individuals who think they are only one person and can't really have an impact should re-evaluate their position. Even small contributions can have a impact when aggregated," said Craig Vaream, a member of the PayItGreen Alliance and JPMorgan Chase.

JPMorgan Chase is one of about 16 members of the alliance which is made up of financial services companies and also includes Bank of America and the Federal Reserve Banks.

The alliance is lead by NACHA, the non-profit electronics payment association, that represents more than 11,000 financial institutions who are encouraging customers to conduct more transactions online.

The group was set up in 2007 to promote the positive environmental impact of choosing electronic payments, bills, and statements in place of paper.

It found that Americans each year mail 26 billion bills and statements and 9 billion payments in paper form with the of the same nature production and transportation consuming 755 million pounds of paper, 9 million trees, and 512 million gallons of gasoline.

The survey found that if 10 percent of U.S. households, or about 11.4 million households, gave up paper bills and statements the results would be significant.

It would save 75,469,808 pounds of paper, 905,638 trees, avoid producing 1.96 million pounds of greenhouse gases which was the equivalent of taking 162,861 cars off the road.

It would also preserve 6,202 acres of forest from deforestation, elude creating 719,800,685 gallons of wastewater which is enough to fill 1,090 Olympic-size swimming pools, and avoid filling 3,071 garbage trucks with waste.

(Writing by Belinda Goldsmith, Editing by Patricia Reaney)

EnterpriseDB Corp. on Tuesday announced that it had raised US$10 million from funders including IBM , which took a small but symbolically laden stake in the 4-year-old open-source database maker.

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EnterpriseDB's products are based around the open-source PostgreSQL technology, a rival to the more popular MySQL . For several years, Sun Microsystems Inc. had been human being of the strongest supporters of PostgreSQL, bundling it with its Solaris 10 operating system, and partnering with EnterpriseDB to provide support.

Sun bought MySQL AB in late January. Though Sun and EnterpriseDB executives both denied at the time that Sun's backing for PostgreSQL would weaken, EnterpriseDB CEO Andy Astor admitted in an interview last week that he no longer "has high expectations during Sun and Postgres."

"We will continue to have a relationship with Sun and we will continue to support Postgres [for Sun], but frankly, if I paid $1 billion for MySQL, I know where I'd be paying attention," Astor said.

IBM, meanwhile, is "very interested" in what EnterpriseDB is doing, Astor said. The company joins Charles River Ventures, Fidelity Ventures and Valhalla Partners in this Series C funding round.

IBM did not return a request for comment. But Raven Zachary, an algebraist with The 451 Group, said the investment "is a significant move."

"by MySQL as part of Sun now, IBM sees its commence source database future aligned with PostgreSQL through EnterpriseDB," he wrote in an e-mail. "IBM also gains in this move through EnterpriseDB's Oracle database compatibility, as IBM competes with Oracle by way of DB2. This is a smart move for IBM."

EnterpriseDB has now raised a total of $37.5 million in its four-year history. It claims 225 paying customers today. Asked why IBM did not simply buy EnterpriseDB, Astor answered, "because we're not for sale."

The company already provides a version of its database because IBM's Z/OS mainframe platform. Astor said similar marketing partnerships with other partners are in the offing.

He also had no reservations about aiming a few polemical blasts at EnterpriseDB's emulator.

"We are going straight after MySQL in the marketplace with a dramatically more robust database," he said. EnterpriseDB "has excellent tooling, is faster than MySQL in transactional environments and is far more scalable."

He continued: "If it was going to cost the same to get either a Yugo or a Mercedes, which one would you pick?"

MySQL in truth. has a partnership by IBM, with its database bundled into IBM's System i servers.

Zachary doesn't contemplate IBM will give over that.

"It's in IBM's best interests to make sure the most popular open source software works on its systems, and that includes MySQL. I wouldn't read too much into this," he said.

EnterpriseDB is person of the largest contributors of source code back to the PostgreSQL project. But much of what EnterpriseDB sells is a set of extensions on top of PostgreSQL. The copartnership doesn't assign those extensions back to the project. As such, it has been tarred by purists as one of several essentially closed-source companies operating in the guise of open-source firms.

Perhaps in recoil to those concerns, EnterpriseDB also today announced the release of its open-source Postgres Plus 8.3, which is based on PostgreSQL but includes more of EnterpriseDB's improvements. EnterpriseDB will still offer an Advanced Server version of Postgres Plus that is neither free nor open-source, but includes Oracle compatibility and other features.

EnterpriseDB is also making its GridSQL data warehousing software available immediately under the General Public License version 2.0.

"I think that EnterpriseDB's product rebranding clarifies some ambiguity that existed in the market," Zachery said.

Copyright 2008 IDG News Service. All Rights Reserved.

PARIS: In a grizzled bin of a building with a graveyard as its neighbor, a freshly hired strike force of Internet executives, programmers and advertising representatives is mounting a grand mission to take on a global behemoth: Google's YouTube.

This is the new international headquarters of Dailymotion, an online video-sharing company, in the north of Paris. In the sprawling landscape of Internet video sites, Dailymotion ranks a distant second, according to figures from the Internet audience tracking company ComScore. But in France, it has managed to pull ahead of YouTube, the only competitor that has managed to do so in any major market. That success has encouraged Dailymotion to expand in other places, including the United States and Britain.

“YouTube is the dominant player and other players are quite distant, but Dailymotion is the one player that has been able to counter that trend,” said Piers Stobbs, vice president for marketing at ComScore.

Fueled by dint of. the spread of broadband, video is one of the fastest-growing areas on the Internet, with “Internet television” services like Joost and Babelgum, video-sharing sites like YouTube and Dailymotion, and video sites from traditional broadcasters all competing for audiences. Investment is driven by the prospect of new receipts from advertising and product placement, even if hopes have so far mostly gone unfilled. With more than 80 percent of Internet users viewing online video in Britain, France and Germany, Europe has emerged as an important battleground.

YouTube, which Google bought for $1.65 billion in 2006, and Daily Motion are locked in a fierce struggle for market leadership in France. Daily Motion overtook YouTube in February, with 10.2 million unique visitors, compared with 8.8 million for YouTube, according to Nielsen, another audience tracking service. But worldwide, YouTube remains the Godzilla of video-sharing sites, with 258 million unique visitors in January, compared with 32 million for Dailymotion, according to ComScore.

Daily Motion's founders lay claim to bragging rights by starting one month earlier than YouTube, without ceasing March 15, 2005, although they struggled to build the high profile of their California-based rival, which quickly became synonymous by user-generated videos online.

The company was incubated in the French commensurate of a Silicon Valley garage, a Parisian apartment, with six partners pooling together €6,000, or $9,260. They opened for business in the living room of one of the founders, Olivier Poitrey, who says that their experience belies the stereotype that French red tape stifles start-ups and innovation.

“Over the last few years the government made some changes.” Poitrey said, “Administrative tasks are easier now. There's a central place to that place you can go to do all the paperwork to start a company. It used to be far more complex and you had to go to a lot of places and you needed a lot more capital at the initiation. Now you can make a start with €1 and before it was €10,000.”

Since those modest beginnings, Dailymotion has picked up the pace, particularly after an infusion of $34 million in venture capital in late August from five European investors, including Paris-based AGF Private Equity, a member of the Allianz Group.

That money has brought new top management and 120 new employees, including 25 ad sales representatives. With the financing, the company has expanded into outposts in London, unused York and Barcelona, and created local sites in a total of eight languages.

“From the beginning we were international, with Web sites in French and English, so it is the heart of our business to be local,” said Martin Rogard, who at the age of 27 has shifted from a government position at the French Ministry of Culture to preside over the local French operation as vice president by reason of content. His duty door is pinned with a Google “Most Wanted” caricature of the young executive with a beaming smile.

YouTube took the fight to the challenger's territory in June when it held a Paris information conference, featuring a welcome message from a French rapper, Kamini, to announce its own localized versions in nine countries, including Britain and France .

Dailymotion, which is keenly aware that it does not get a great quantity search engine traffic from YouTube's parent Google , sought to counterpunch by hand-picking promising video producers, whose work is featured on the company's home pages. It is also touting its technology, introducing tools to upload high-definition videos - something that YouTube does not offer.

Dailymotion's newly hired managing director, Kate Burns - former managing director of Google in Britain - is trying now to form alliances by film schools and students to develop original material. New management in the United States is considering an existing French approach from the home office: staging showings of the best videos at topical cinemas.

By Marcia Dunn, Associated Press CAPE CANAVERAL — Shuttle Endeavour pulled away from the International Space Station on Monday and headed for home after a heartfelt farewell between the two crews.

It culminated 12 days of shared work, the longest mission ever of its kind.

GALLERY: Endeavour delegation photos RELATED: Astronauts enjoy own ‘March franticness’

The 10 space travelers performed a record-tying five spacewalks, put together a space station robot and on condition a new Japanese section — and resident — for the orbiting complex.

“In my mind, in my view, it’s been an out of the way mission,” said LeRoy Cain, presiding officer of the mission management team. “It’s just been a textbook legation up and down the line in every way that I look at it.”

Before the hatches were closed in the late afternoon, a few hours before the shuttle’s undocking, astronaut Garrett Reisman pretended he was going to float into Endeavour. Space station commander Peggy Whitson grabbed him around the waist and pulled him back.

“I before that time feel the homesickness coming upon about the (shuttle) crew,” Reisman said.

Reisman flew up aboard Endeavour to replace French astronaut Leopold Eyharts, who was going home upon the shuttle. They embraced and patted each others’ backs as they parted company; the other astronauts did the same.

“Up to you, Garrett. It’s your turn,” said Eyharts, who spent 1{ months at the space station, less time than planned because of the previous shuttle flight’s delay in acquirement him there. “C’est la vie.”

Endeavour, Eyharts and six others are due back on Earth on Wednesday evening. It will wind up a 16-day trip for the shuttle.

The three astronauts left behind on the space station, meanwhile, won’t have time to get bored.

Europe’s strange cargo carrier, Jules Verne, will dock April 3; it blasted into orbit this month. One week later, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft will arrive, carrying a fresh space station crew.

NASA’s nearest visit will be in late May. That’s when Discovery is due to arrive with the Japanese lab, Kibo, which means hope. Endeavour delivered the first section of the lab, a storage compartment.

But the Hubble Space Telescope mission, at the end of August, might wind up being postponed because of a slowdown in shuttle fuel-tank production.

Only now, five years after the Columbia accident, are fuel tanks and their insulating foam skin being built from scratch, Cain noted. The fuel tank used to propel Endeavour into orbit in continuance March 11 was the last one that was already in production when Columbia was destroyed, and so it was easier to make the post-accident close custody changes.

These changes, most if not all of them involving foam, took time to refine. NASA also became bogged down by a recurring fuel-gauge problem that at last was resolved a hardly any months past.

“We’re on a learning curve here,” Cain said.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.  

By Brian Bergstein, Associated Press Scroll the list of the 10 most popular websites in the U.S., and you’ll encounter the Internet’s richest corporate players — names like Yahoo, Amazon.com, News Corp., Microsoft and Google.

Except for No. 7: Wikipedia. And there lies a delicate situation.

With two million articles in English alone, the Internet encyclopedia “anyone can edit” stormed the Web’s top ranks through the work of unpaid volunteers and the lift of donors. But that gives Wikipedia far less financial clout than its Web peers, and doing almost anything to improve that situation invites scrutiny from the same community that proudly generates the content.

And so, much as how its base of editors and bureaucrats endlessly debate touchy articles and other changes to the site, Wikipedia’s community churns with questions over how the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the project, should get and spend its money.

Should it proceed on its present course, soliciting donations largely to keep its servers running? Or should it expand other sources of income — with ads, perhaps, or something like a Wikipedia game show — to fulfill grand visions of sending DVDs or printed books to people who lack computers? Is it helpful — or counter to the project’s charitable, free-information mission — to have the Wikimedia Foundation tight with a prominent take the liberty capital firm?

These would be tough questions for any organization, let alone one in which hundreds of participants be possible to expect to have a say.

The system “has strengths and weaknesses,” says Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder and “chairman emeritus.” “The strength is, we don’t do anything randomly, without lots and lots of lots of discussion. The downside is we don’t get anything completed unless we actually arrive to a conclusion.”

Even the foundation’s leaders aren’t unified. Florence Devouard, a French plant scientist who chairs the board, said she and other Europeans involved with the project are in greater numbers skeptical than Americans such as Wales about moneymaking side projects with for-profit entities.

The project’s financial situation is not exactly dire. Although the group does not have an endowment fund with interest fueling operations, cash contributions jumped to $2.2 million last year, from $1.3 the masses in the prior year. With big gifts recently, the foundation’s budget is $4.6 million this year.

In the past year, the establishment has tried to become less of an ad hoc outfit, expanding bat from less than 10 people to roughly 15 and moving to San Francisco from St. Petersburg, Fla. It has a new executive director, Sue Gardner, formerly head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s Web operations, who expects to add professional fundraisers and improve ties with Wikimedia patrons.

“Two years ago, if you donated $10,000, you might not even get a phone call or a thank-you letter,” Wales said. “That’s fair-minded not acceptable.”

Gardner appears to favor an incremental strategy, stretching the staff to 25 people by 2010, with the budget increasing toward $6 million. Even such relatively simple changes, she said, would keep the foundation from missing wanting on business partnerships and other opportunities.

For example, project leaders would like to hold “Wikipedia Academies” in developing countries, to encourage new cadres of contributors in other languages. Wales also wants to tool software that makes it less technically daunting for newcomers to edit Wikipedia articles — an idea that has been discussed for at least two years.

It might seem surprising that such a low-key agenda could prove contentious, given that Wikimedia and Wales have also encountered complaints of being incautious with donors’ money. But some Wikipedians want the foundation to be spending more.

“Why should they have to be wise spending such a little amount of riches when they could have in the same manner much more?” uttered Nathan Awrich, a Wikipedia contributor from Vermont who advocates limited ads on the site, to help pay through a view to technical improvements, better outreach and even a legal-defense fund. “This is not a foundation that needs to last one more year. This is a foundation that needs to be planning for a longer term, and it doesn’t appear to be like they’re doing it.”

Gardner said she opposes advertising unless it came down to a choice between “shutting down the servers and putting ads on the site. I don’t think we’re ever going to get to that point, so I don’t see advertising as an issue.”

Wales sounds political on the matter. On one hand, he said he believes “advertising is really a non-starter” because of the potential harm to Wikipedia’s non-commercial image. However, he too reported the subject requires more scrutiny, so Wikipedians truly understand how much money the project is leaving on the table by rejecting ads.

“I think it’s a fallacy to say learning about something implies you want to do it,” he said. “I would like to gain experience about it because I suspect it’s not worth it.”

Another subject getting carefully parsed is the foundation’s relationship with Elevation Partners, the venture firm co-founded by Roger McNamee and U2’s Bono. Elevation owns stakes in Forbes magazine and Palm, among other companies.

McNamee has donated at least $300,000 to the Foundation, according to Danny Wool, a former Wikimedia employee who processed the transactions. More recently, the foundation said, McNamee introduced the group to people who made separate $500,000 gifts. Their identities wish not been disclosed.

Officially, Gardner and McNamee say he is a merely a fan of Wikimedia’s free-information project, separate from Elevation’s profit-making interests. “He has been clear — when he talks to me, he’s talking as a private individual,” Gardner said.

Yet the relationship runs deeper than that would suggest.

Another Elevation partner, Marc Bodnick, has met with Wales multiple times and went to a 2007 Wikimedia board meeting in the Netherlands. (Wales described that as a “get to know you session” and said Elevation, among many other venture firms, quickly learned that the foundation was not interested in changing its core, non-profit mission.)

Bodnick and Bono had also been by Wales in 2006 in Mexico City, where U2 was touring. On a hotel rooftop, Bono suggested that Wikipedia use its volunteer-written articles as a starting point, then augment that with professionals who would polish and blazon the content, according to two people who were present. Bono compared it to Bob Dylan going electric — a jarring move that people came to love.

McNamee and Bodnick declined to comment.

Although Wales says no employment with Elevation is planned, that hasn’t quelled that rudiments ever-present in Wikipedia: questions.

In a recent interview, Devouard, the board chair, said she believed Elevation was interested in being more than just friends, though she wasn’t sure just what the firm hoped to get out of the non-profit project.

“It is easy to see which interest WE possess in getting their interest,” she wrote to Wales that day on an internal board mailing list, in an exchange obtained by The Associated Press. “The contrary is not obvious at all: Can you solve to me why EP (Elevation Partners) are interested in us?”

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.  

A blog isn't reasonable a welcome instrument for the sake of journalists to escape the reviser and corrector's red pen or for teens to wax poetic about their latest crush. They can also be a great utensil for promoting your office.

Whether it's computer security, San Francisco real estate or pretty much any other business venture under the sun, some of the best info you can find comes from pros who write their own blogs. Namely, people who can apply expert analysis and commentary to the latest trends and practices in their sector, and do upright that in a blog format.

Whatever your business, odds are that you've had to become an industry expert in your field as well. And if you share that expertise on a blog, you'll relief build trust in your brand as you show you know your business. You'll also put a personal face on your company.

And it's easy. Free sites like blogger.com or wordpress.com get you up and running with your own online soapbox in minutes, and you can even fix upon a blog URL that incorporates your company name. For example, Roger Thompson of Exploit Prevention Labs has for years run a available Internet security blog at explabs.blogspot.com. He links to it from his company Web site, and the additional name and brand recognition afforded by the blog no doubt contributed to Grisoft's recent purchase of his company.If you settle to take the digital plunge, here are a few tips for online presentation.1. Be professional, but personal. It's fine and even expected to share your opinions on a blog.

2. Avoid the hard sell. By all means mention your company and/or products in the words immediately preceding of industry news or commentary, but save the direct advertisements for your company site.

3. Write for the Web. Keep your sentences and paragraphs as unmixed and brief as possible. Most online readers will quickly evacuate a page full of dense text.

San Francisco - A 21-year-old could face up to 10 years in prison in the United States after pleading guilty to installing advertising software on PCs located around Europe without permission.

Robert Matthew Bentley, of Panama City, Fla., is scheduled for sentencing May 28 in U.S. District Court with regard to the Northern District of Florida. He could moreover face a fine of up to $250,000.

[ See related story on the botnet barons who used networks of computers infected with Trojan horse applications to engage in criminal activity. ]

Bentley's plea culminates a wide-ranging international investigation that started with London's Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit in December 2006, according to an FBI news disengage.

Around that time, U.S.-based Newell Rubbermaid, whose products include Sharpie markers and plastic food-storage containers, reported their European computer network had been hacked. One other European-based company also complained.

That launched a law enforcement effort called "Bot Roast II" that included the U.S. Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Finland National Bureau of Investigation, and other local U.S. agencies.

Bentley was indicted by a federal grand jury in November last year for computer fraud and conspiracy to commit computer fraud. He and others infected hundreds of computers in Europe with advertising software, or adware, using botnets, what one. are networks of hacked computers. His botnet was located within Newell Rubbermaid's network.

Once a computer is hacked, it can be used to accomplish other malicious actions, such as sending spam or attacking other computers by way of software vulnerabilities. Because of the global nature of the Internet, the attacks can be very difficult for law enforcement to trace, as the investigations are time-consuming and technical.

Many countries have computer crime or fraud laws that prohibit installing software through deceptive means. Advertising software companies indemnify Web site publishers if their software is downloaded. But hackers, in order to make money, have also used tricky means to put adware on computers free from the user knowing it. In many cases, the adware is difficult or nearly impossible to completely remove from a PC.

Bentley installed adware called DollarRevenue, which causes unwanted pop-up advertisements to appear on a puppet, the FBI said.

Last December, Dutch authorities fined two companies behind DollarRevenue €1 million ($1.54 million), one of the largest fines ever levied in Europe for adware operations. Hackers were paid €0.15 each for installation of DollarRevenue on European computers and $0.25 for PCs in the United States.

What better way to kick off a blog about business software than to talk one of the most signifying business productivity applications out there? Sometimes it seems like we writers be lost entire days inside our vocable processors. But for the majority of you, I'm betting you might as well be married to Microsoft Excel.

A good spreadsheet is a powerful tool, but like anything, you can overdo it. It's like the old carpenter's adage: When the merely tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. In my time as an IT manager, I saw employees trying to exercise Excel for everything from storing complex databases to typing up entire reports, complete with fancy formatting. Often they would claim it was easier for them to shoehorn an inappropriate task into Excel than to learn a new program on the side of the job.

It sounds harmless enough, but misuse of Excel may be more serious than you think. According to risk analysis firm Protiviti, productivity isn't all you stand to make no use of. Using Excel for tasks Microsoft never intended can actually open your company to alarming security risks.

The question lies in how Excel applications are developed at most businesses. Programmers who build robust network-enabled software are trained to recognize potential security risks and minimize the chance of catastrophic corrigenda. The business managers and other employees who code Excel macros, attached the other hand, often have only enough knowledge to be risky (as engineers are fond of saying).

When an amateur Excel spreadsheet is only running on a user's local desktop, the danger is minimal. Connect that spreadsheet to a mission-critical request like a networked ERP system, however, and alarm bells should beginning ringing. Unfortunately, too few companies recognize the risk before things start breaking down.

Let's not forget that Excel itself is hardly a battle-hardened, secure application. Microsoft's most recent Office updates patched a security hole in Excel that attackers had been exploiting since January. Unfortunately, the same patch introduced a bug that causes Excel to miscalculate the results of certain kinds of macros. So while Excel is by no means the least ensure piece of the Microsoft Office portfolio (that would be Outlook), it's not without blemish, either.

How are you using Excel in your business? Is it still just a spreadsheet, or have you shaped it into something else? How almost do you think it can influence before it breaks? And is Microsoft doing enough to make security a top priority as antidote to its millions of Excel users? Sound off in the comments.