News about what is happening in technology today!

The Register reports that nogoodniks have developed a Trojan horse program that produces fake Google ads posing as the real thing. The as-yet unnamed Trojan replaces legitimate ads served via Google AdSense with promos for penis pills, porn sites and the like. Techshout says the Google AdSense team confirms ‘that these are fake Google ads, formatted to look like legitimate ads. We agree that this phenomenon is likely the result of malicious software installed on your computer.’

Steering clear of jokes about overheating power supplies, one company is claiming to have constructed a watercooling kit for the XBox 360. HEXUS.gaming has obtained pictures of the product, seemingly attached to an XBox 360, though how it works and how it is installed remains something of a mystery.

Security researchers uncovered nearly 5,200 software vulnerabilities in 2005, almost 40 percent more than the number discovered in 2004, according to Washingtonpost.com. From the article: ‘According to US-CERT…researchers found 812 flaws in the Windows operating system, 2,328 problems in various versions of the Unix/Linux operating systems (Mac included). An additional 2,058 flaws affected multiple operating systems.’

Dual core finds its way inside a laptop (albeit a not-so-portable DTR) in the form of Rockdirect’s Xtreme64. The DTR features an Athlon 64 X2 4800+, two 7200rpm hard drives and a GeForce Go 6800 Ultra GPU. HEXUS.net has a review of the laptop, one of the most powerful we’ve seen hit the market to date.” From the article: “Rather than change a formula that works, Rockdirect has opted to stick with the Clevo D900-based chassis that its other performance-based laptops use. The obvious downsides are bulkiness and weight, with the laptop sitting almost 5cm high and weighing in at 5.7kg. It’s a desktop replacement in the truest sense of the words, and with an 8kg travel weight (including charger and supplied carrying case) and relatively poor battery life, it’s about as portable as a concrete slab.

David Pogue, the influential personal technology columnist for the New York Times, has chosen what he calls ‘10 of the year’s best small, sweet improvements in our electronic lives.’ Rather than your average pseudo-commercial list of branded devices, it’s a list of improvements. As Pogue puts it at the end of his column: ‘Come New Year’s Eve, raise one tiny toast to the anonymous engineers whose eccentricities or idealism brought these sparkling developments to life.’ They are (sans explanation): the folding memory card, the voice mail VCR, the front-side TV connector, the bigger-than-TV movie, TV à la carte, the outer-button flip phone, the free domain name, the modular DVD screen, the family-portrait burst mode, and the hybrid high-definition tape.’