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Sophos, a security software and research firm, has warned that social network Facebook is the battleground for a new malware impugn targeting members’ comment “walls.”

Public wall posts purporting to subsist from someone on a user’s friends list invite the user to click on some affectionate of video or image, and the URL appears to lead to something hosted on Google.com. That’s a spoof — it really directs to a grinning photo of a court jester sticking out its tongue — and a downloaded Trojan. Sophos has not said what the worm then does.

Facebook representatives were not immediately available for comment.

Sophos says that this is probably not the same as a social-network worm that Kaspersky Labs flagged last week, but CNET News has contacted Kaspersky for comment. The two are uniform, at least superficially.

Additionally, Sophos says it has not yet completed its investigation of the issue and has said that the worm may not be restricted to Facebook. “Whether this really is a Facebook worm, and not simply malware being distributed via Facebook spam remains to be seen,” a blog post by Sophos researcher Fraser Howard read.

In the past, Sophos has warned of social networks’ potential as Petri dishes for malicious attacks, and has put out a general warning to companies that security issues might be a graver issue than productivity when it comes to choosing whether to block access to these sites at the post. “Companies need to make their own mind up as to whether they want to allow their users to access websites like Facebook and MySpace during office hours,” Sophos analyst Graham Cluley said in a release.

“If workers are allowed to be given access to these sites then it’s vital that they do not put their personal and corporate given conditions at risk, and are protected from web-based infections.”

Update: Facebook’s Response

Facebook security chief Max Kelly has assured members in a blog carry to the ledger that the social network is “contention the good fight” when it comes to several malware attacks discovered on the site in recent days.

“We spent most of last night working on a fix for a worm, what one. was targeting people on Facebook and placing messages on walls urging users to view a video that pretends to be hosted on a Google or YouTube Web site,” Kelly wrote. “Less than .002 percent of people on Facebook have been affected, all of whom we notified and suggested steps to remove the malware.”

The worm was first flagged by over-confidence firm Sophos, just days after not the same one had been identified by Kaspersky Labs.

Kelly said Facebook appreciates the efforts of watchdogs. “If we get a report of a bug or a hole from a user, a security researcher, a reporter, blogger, or anyone, we check it exhausted and fix it as quickly as possible,” he wrote. “In fact, we appreciate it when help comes our way from the many over-confidence experts and organizations out there.”

Sophos and other security firms be delivered of warned that social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are particularly rife breeding grounds for security attacks: they have bulky user bases, plenty of outside developers working on the site, and lots of ways (messages, wall posts) to spread malware to unwitting members.

Facebook recommends that members follow a few basic security measures: report spam postings, install the proper Mac or Windows software in the event of a malware infection, and never share your Facebook password.

That last piece of advice will be tougher for Facebook to recommend as Facebook Connect, which lets external sites use Facebook login credentials, grows more commonplace.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - One of Australia's most auspicious rock exports, the Grammy-winning trio Wolfmother, has been torn apart by "longstanding frictions," according to a statement published on the group's Web site on Thursday.

Bass/keyboard player Chris Ross and drummer Myles Heskett have resigned, space of time singer/guitarist Andrew Stockdale plans to find other musicians and begin making a new Wolfmother album.

"Please understand that in spite of their best efforts over a long period of time, they appropriate could not find a harmonious way to work together," the statement said.

Wolfmother's self-titled debut album, released in 2006, sold more than 500,000 copies in the United States, powered by radio airplay as being the songs "Woman" and "Joker and the Thief."

The assign places to won a Grammy in the hard rock category last year, becoming the at the outset Australian band to pick up the harmony industry's top honors ago Men at Work in 1983.

However, all was evidently not well behind the scenes. According to the statement, Ross decided he would quit the band because of "irreconcilable personal and music differences" following a show in the eastern Australian town of Byron Bay on Sunday. Heskett also decided to leave rather than continuing as part of a changed lineup.

The pair had been working together on songs for some time and plan to point of concentration their energies on that new protrude, the statement said.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman)

  GENEVA (AP) — The largest machine ever made to explore the world’s tiniest particles will be launched next month with an initial attempt to fire beams around a 17-mile circular tube, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics said Thursday.

Scientists from around the world have been waiting eagerly to run experiments on the $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider, under construction since 2003 and in planning for years before that.

The new Geneva collider will recreate the rapidly changing conditions in the universe a split second subsequent to the so-called Big Bang. It will be the closest that scientists have yet come to the event that they theorize was the beginning of the universe. They hope the new outfit will enable them to study particles and forces as yet unobserved.

“We’re finishing a marathon with a sprint,” said project leader Lyn Evans. “It’s been a long haul, and we’re all eager to get the LHC research program underway.”

Collisions of particles to see what happens will take some time longer, but they should be occurring this year. The first beam will travel in a clockwise direction on Sept. 10, a laboratory statement said. When beams are stable in both directions, they will subsist steered into collision.

Then the laboratory, known as CERN for its old French initials, will evoke stepping up the power with the hope of reaching a new threshold of energy by the end of this year. Further step ups are planned until the equipment runs at full power, in likelihood by 2010.

The collider, installed in a tunnel under the Swiss and French border, has massive detectors filling cathedral-sized rooms at intervals along the tube. They will record the shower of particles that result from collisions so that they can be analyzed by powerful computers.

An violent departure from established precedent will be the application of 1,600 superconducting magnets to guide the beams traveling at the speed of light around the machine, which is being cooled to near absolute zero degrees for maximum efficiency.

The money to construct the collider has come from the 20 member states of CERN plus bystander countries like the United States, which alone has contributed $531 million.

But overall the project is costing much more — an estimated 10 billion francs (dollars) — taking into account what universities and others are spending on experiments and other outlays, said CERN spokeswoman Renilde Vanden Broeck.

Much of the interest in the project has come from the United States since Congress in 1993 halted construction of a machine that would acquire been smooth bigger — the proposed Superconducting Super Collider in Texas.

Of the 9,000 scientists planning to work with the LHC, the largest group — 1,260 — is from the United States.

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

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By Michael Liedtke, AP Business Writer SAN FRANCISCO — In an assessment that could lead to a substantial charge against its future profits, Google (GOOG) believes its $1 billion investment in advertising partner AOL is souring.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company disclosed in a quarterly report filed late Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the 5% AOL stake that it bought in 2005 “may be impaired.” Impairment is an accounting call used to describe an acquisition or investment that has eroded.

Unless there is an about-face, the acquiring company eventually must absorb a charge on its books to account for the diminished value of its holdings.

Google acknowledged for the first time that it might bear to recognize a loss on its 5% bet in AOL, whose struggles have made it a financial albatross on account of its owner, Time Warner (TWX).

“There can be no assurance that impairment charges be inclined not be required in the future, and any such amounts may be material,” Google said of its AOL investment.

A Google spokesman declined further comment Thursday.

As the Internet’s most profitable company, Google could absorb a fairly large charge without too much pain. In the first half of this year, Google earned $2.55 billion.

Google bought its stake in AOL largely to prevent one of its largest advertising partners — AOL — from defecting to Microsoft. The bidding war helped drive up AOL’s implied market rate to $20 billion, based on Google’s investment.

Some analysts have suggested AOL may be worth less than $10 billion now. Google didn’t estimate in its SEC filing what it believes its stake to be currently worth.

Gearing up for a potential sale, proper time Warner is splitting up AOL’s Internet access business from its online operations. EarthLink Inc. is seen as a leading candidate to buy AOL’s dial-up access division while Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. could vie for online operations that include an array of advertising tools and services that still attract millions of Web surfers.

Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo, but when the two sides couldn’t agree on a price they separately began exploring a potential combination with AOL.

As part of its investing., Google has the right to demand that Time Warner spin off AOL in an initial public offering of stock or buy back its stake. But Google so far hasn’t indicated in any degree interest in going down that path.

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

By Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press WASHINGTON — Scientists have found ways to tease even more clues out of fingerprints’ telltale marks — one in a string of developments that gives modern forensics even better ways to solve mysteries like the anthrax attacks or JonBenet Ramsey’s murder.

For example, if a person handled cocaine, explosives or other materials, there could be enough left in a fingerprint to identify them, says chemist R. Graham Cooks of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

Progress in forensics comes from a combination of new techniques, like those involved in the anthrax investigation, and existing techniques, like those used in the Ramsey case, said Max M. Houck, director of West Virginia University’s Forensic Science Initiative.

Improvements in genetic investigation allowed police to trace the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks to a specific flask of spores, the FBI said this week.

And while the killing of 6-year-old Ramsey attracted national fascination in 1996, it was only this year that prosecutors announced that a new series of tests pointed to an unidentified attacker, clearing parents and children members of surmise.

The testing technique in Ramsey’s case was not new, Houck said. But prosecutors learned it could be relevant to their case in a 2007 West Virginia University course.

In the new fingerprint analysis method, police technicians armed with miniaturized mass spectrometers can spray a solvent on a fingerprint and detect compounds at concentrations as keen as five parts per million in droplets that scatter off the print, Cooks explained in a telephone interview. Five parts per million is equivalent to five ounces of chemical in 32 tons of material.

The testing method, discussed in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, could be available in a year or two, Cooks said.

He explained that materials such as cocaine and military explosives tend to be hard to get off the fingers. If someone who has handled them later handles something hard like a file or plastic binder, that will consign the chemicals, he said.

The chemicals are located at the points of the fingerprint’s ridges, so what is then on the hard surface is the fingerprint in chemical. So police can not only sameness the body from the print, but also connect the person and the drug or chemical, he said.

Purdue researcher Demian R. Ifa, a co-author, said the technology also can uncover fingerprints buried beneath others.

“Because the distribution of compounds found in each fingerprint can be rare, we also can use this technology to pull one fingerprint out from beneath layers of other fingerprints,” Ifa said. “By looking for compounds we know to be present in a certain fingerprint, we can divide it from the others and obtain a crystal clear image of that fingerprint.”

Other developments take in radiocarbon dating, matter most people associated with determining the age of ancient things like dinosaurs. But the atomic bomb tests in the 1950s have if a method despite additional recent testing by disrupting the previously consistent levels of carbon-14 in the air.

“That introduced huge amounts of radioactive carbon into the atmosphere, and subsequently us,” explained Douglas Ubelaker, a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

With the increase in radioactive carbon during the tests and its decline after testing was stopped, researchers were able to develop a “bomb curve” for the amount that might be found in the body of an individual.

Body cells are continually being replaced — faster in soft tissues, more slowly in bones and teeth — and comparing the ratios allows for the estimation of someone’s date of death and, possibly, their date of birth, Ubelaker said.

Analyzing small particles recovered from fires and explosions can also be a challenge, according to Ubelaker, who serves as an FBI consultant.

New scanning electron spectroscopy methods have produced similitude data to determine if particles are bone or something else before researchers attempt DNA analysis, he said.

And a technique called radio immuno assay can be used to determine if a piece of bone or tooth is human, he added, solving the problem that simply looking at bone through a microscope can’t always answer.

Researchers also are working to improve decomposition of explosive powders based on their chemical composition, and size and shape of the powder granules used in pipe bombs, said Bill MacCrehan, who performs trail forensic chemical calculus at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology.

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

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SAN FRANCISCO (Fortune) — Garmin’s latest GPS device, the nuvi 880, says a accident about the state of the market for portable navigation devices. The gadget has it all: directions, MP3 player for listening to songs and books, a photo viewer - even an alarm clock.

Why all the bells and whistles? Because these are tough times for GPS makers. Demand is slowing and prices are falling fast, in part due to competition from cell phone manufacturers like BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIMM) and Apple.

In response, GPS makers like Garmin (GRMN) are loading their devices with extras in the hopes of reigniting the torrid sales growth of years past. Curious, I decided to find out if somewhat of these features are worth a few hundred bucks. I picked two new devices from the top GPS makers - Garmin and TomTom - and matched them up against Apple’s new white-hot iPhone.

First up: The nuvi 880. The quiet thing about this gadget - and what sets it apart from the competition - is its advanced speech-recognition system. Instead of having to rap directions onto a screen, the 880 lets users look up addresses or turn down the volume with their voice.

The setup was a cinch: all I had to do was attach a remote control to my steering wheel and, to get directions, push a button on the remote and start talking.

Things got a bit more complicated after that. Leaving my office in San Francisco, I first tried asking for directions to the nearby city of Palo Alto, where I practise. The 880 asked me if I wanted to go to "Rialto." I tried again, this time requesting directions to "Stanford Shopping Center," which is short my abiding-place. The 880 thought I’d said "standard parking."

Sigh. Next I tried speaking louder and more clearly. The third time was the charm. It took some getting used to - the act of pressing the button and speaking clearly - but once I got it down, it was easy to use. Safer too, before this I didn’t esteem to reach over to fiddle with the device.

What about the other features? Well, I don’t have much need for another alarm clock, and the drawing viewer requires me to upload photos from my computer or digital camera, which is a pain. Plus, with gas prices hitting $4.33 in my neighborhood, would I shell out a whopping $1,000 just so I can talk to my GPS navigator? Nah.

Lost in music

Next I turned to the TomTom’s newest navigation tool, the business 930, which is also chock full of features but, at $500, half the price of the nuvi 880. The 930 has a imaginary user-interface with a clear and colorful display for reading maps and a decent touchscreen for entering addresses. It’s also small, sleek and stylish - always an added honorarium.

The 930 tries to make up for its rudimentary voice-recognition service with 3-D imagery that promises to show you not only where to grow, but also which lane to drive in while navigating through complicated interchanges. It’s a great idea, but it didn’t always work.

For those of us who are mindful of speeding tickets, the 930 also has a built-in warning at the bottom of the display that turns red when you’re driving over the speed limit.

As for the 930’s other trappings, I didn’t have much use for them either. The music player conveniently lowers the volume on a song control giving voice directions, but requires that I first load my tunes. Why bother with the hassle when I can hook up my iPod to the device using a $30 cable?

One size fits all?

Since I didn’t find much use for these feature-rich GPS devices, I got further excited about the prospects for the one already in my pocket: the iPhone.

Turn-by-turn directions on mobile phones is a relatively recently made known feature with an attractive price point - about $10 a month for most handsets. Too bad the cellphone’s foray into GPS navigation still has a long way to go. Most screens and keyboards are too cramped to be of any use, and GPS services tend to devour battery power.

Apple’s (AAPL, Fortune 500) new iPhone 3G, however, is a step in the right direction: The phone’s navigation service is charitable with the $200-$300 phone plus a $30 monthly data plan (GPS devices, by way of contrast, don’t require a service fee). The large touchscreen allows you to easily track where you are at all times and get turn-by-turn directions to addresses and points of authority.

But even the mighty iPhone has room to improve. One big drawback: You have to tap the touchscreen each time you’ve made a turn in order to make acquisition the next set of directions, which isn’t so easy (or safe) when you’re trying to keep your eyes on the road. What’s more, the directions are text-only.

In the end, just like I don’t want my music to come from my TomTom, I’m not ready just yet to rely on my iPhone for directions. And when it comes to getting from point A to moot point B, nobody does it better than the Garmins and TomToms of the world. if it be not that they shouldn’t break out the champagne just yet: Navigation on the iPhone and other cellphones will keep improving. Adding GPS functions to a phone makes a allot more sense than trying to pack a GPS device with whole the features we’re accustomed to having on our cell phone.

No surprise, then, that Garmin is developing a cellphone with GPS navigation. Called the nuvifone, it’s due out next year.  First Published: August 8, 2008: 5:50 AM EDT

Microsoft has inked a long-term deal with Havok, allowing all of their internal and affiliated studios full access to the company's entire library of physics tools.

This perpetual licensing agreement is expected to reduce both development time and costs across the board for any Microsoft partners choosing to take advantage of Havok's offerings.

Havok will be providing Microsoft with their Havok Physics, Animation, and Behavior suites, in addition to any Havok products that cut off up in the future — the recently unveiled Havok Cloth and Destruction, for instance.

Already practically synonymous with digital physics, Havok has had a hand in Microsoft products past, present, and future, including everything from Halo Wars to Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action. Havok managing director David O'Meara said the following regarding their arrangement by Microsoft:

"Havok is committed to providing not solely the premier physics software to our customers, but also in giving them new tools, such as Havok Behavior, that can substantially reduce the time it takes teams to develop character behaviors, allowing game programmers to focus on developing the best game they can. Microsoft has been a precious customer of ours since seven years and we are excited about the development teams having access to the entire suite of current Havok products, added our upcoming products Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction."

While this may not sound terribly exciting to your average frat guy plugging away at his ninth prestige level in Call of Duty 4, this deal should ultimately translate to Microsoft developers being able to focus more on getting their games in your hands.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sprint Nextel (S.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) is in talks to sell its iDen wireless network to either NII Holdings Inc (NIHD.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) or private theoretical investors, according to CNBC.

CNBC said on Friday that a auction of the network, which is used by public safety and construction workers, was not expected any time soon and did not name any sources for the report.

The news comes a day after the embattled No. 3 U.S. wireless service canceled a $3 billion convertible sale it had announced the day before.

Sprint and NII were not immediately available for remark.

The report pushed Sprint shares up 6 percent, while NII shares were down about 1 percent.

Analysts say a sale of the network, which it bought from Nextel Communications in August 2005, would exist pose regulatory and operational difficulties as it has been closely integrated with Sprint’s existing operations.

But they said Sprint, which is struggling to stem customer losses amid service problems, is looking at all options to improve its financial performance.

“Every piece of the business is with regard to sale at a certain price as it should be now because they continue to struggle,” said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King.

Latin American service provider NII is one of the few operators around the world that uses the iDen technology, making it a logical candidate for an investment in the Sprint network.