In a filing with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which was picked up by Domain Name Wire, the iDevice and Mac maker takes aim at seven domain names that use Apple's trademarked term "iPhone."

The seven sites lead to Web sites that sell pornography, instead of being related to Apple or Apple products.

As Domain Name Wire notes, whoever owns the domains is protected using a Whois privacy service, which is likely part of why Apple's gone through the WIPO versus contacting the owners.

Those names include (and duh, none of these are safe for work):

The WIPO was created, in part, to curtain "cybersquatting," which is the practice of buying up domains with name similarity to companies, products and services owned by other... Read more »

A German data protection authority contends Facebook is tracking users even after they delete their accounts, and it wants the company to respond to this potential privacy violation by Monday.

Hamburg's Data Protection Authority (DPA) has published a report about how Facebook uses cookies, or small pieces of data stored in a person's Web browser that record browsing behavior, said Johannes Caspar, head of the agency.

Caspar said if users do not give their consent, Facebook should delete information it has stored, in accordance with European privacy regulations.

If the discussions break down, the Hamburg DPA will pursue legal options, Caspar said. The agency has the power to levy fines.

The agency concluded that Facebook does not need to leave persistent cookies on a person's computer, some of which remain for up to two years even if they delete their accounts, Caspar said. "Our investigation gave no reason for the setting of cookies," he said.

When it comes to deploying Microsoft Office alternatives such as Google Apps, Zoho or Lotus Symphony, enterprise IT managers are in a state of intense curiosity but are still not ready for widespread adoption, according to a new Forrester research report entitled "Market Update: Office Productivity Alternatives."

What they are willing to do more and more is complement Office with alternative tools and, in some cases, do full Office replacements for specific employee groups, writes Forrester analyst Matthew Brown. Regardless of the low adoption rates of Office alternatives, companies are eager to cut license costs, eliminate software assurance and curb dependency on Microsoft.

Office alternatives, however, have only a tiny slice of the enterprise office productivity pie even as the buzz increases around Google Apps and other alternatives. Of the 150 IT decision-makers that responded to Forrester's survey, only 8% support Google Apps, 8% support Oracle Open Office (recently released back into the community as OpenOffi... Read more »

Almost 100 computer experts from 16 European countries jointly battled to hold off serious cyberattacks on the European Union's security agencies and power plants as part of a simulated exercise on Thursday.

The event, Cyber Atlantic 2011, was the first joint cybersecurity exercise between the EU and the U.S. Two scenarios were acted out. The first was a targeted, stealth APT (advanced persistent threat) attack aimed at extracting and publishing online secret information from EU member states' cybersecurity agencies.

Security experts at Europe's network and information security agency, ENISA, said that this type of attack was possible in a real-world situation. "It is typical of the type of threat that is out there, although it is not based on any one specific situation. We've chosen threats that we think are real, and we haven't made life easy for ourselves by choosing attacks that are easy to repel," explained ENISA spokesman Graeme Cooper.

The second simulation focused on the disruption o... Read more »

Thanks to its chattiness, the traditional communications protocol for shuttling data around the World Wide Web is not very efficient. Now an HTML5-related standard called WebSocket could cut some of this networking overhead, speeding responsiveness in Web applications, argued a Web app expert.

"If you were not constrained by the limitations of HTTP, what sort of truly interactive Web applications would you build?" John Fallows rhetorically asked, before a theater filled with Web developers and managers attending the HTML5 Live Conference held Tuesday in New York. Fallows is the chief technology officer and co-founder of messaging software provider Kaazing.

The use of the W3C's (World Wide Web Consortium's) WebSocket could enable a new generation of real-time, "zero-latency" Web applications whose communications requirements would be too demanding for today's HTTP protocols, Fallows argued.

As an example of WebSocket speediness, Fallows showed off an implementation of the popular 1990s comput... Read more »

The odds are that Microsoft won't patch the Windows kernel bug next week that the Duqu remote-access Trojan exploits to plant itself on targeted PCs, a researcher said Tuesday.

"Probably not," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security, when asked what chance he gave Microsoft fixing the flaw Nov. 8, this month's regular Patch Tuesday.

"I think we'll see an advisory today or tomorrow, but patching next week would really be pushing it for Microsoft," said Storms.

He based his assumption on Microsoft's apparently reactive move to news Tuesday from Symantec, which said that additional analysis showed the Duqu malware is installed after a Windows kernel bug is exploited.

"If Microsoft had information [about the vulnerability] before this, it would have been faster either patching or with an advisory," said Storms. "They're in reaction mode now, and probably working up an advisory."

Storms took a stab at what the advis... Read more »

New chip-design technology promises higher performance and lower power consumption.

To accomplish anything in the suburbs, you need to get in your car and drive to another address. Downtown, in a skyscraper, you just use an elevator.

Elevators are more efficient - and the semiconductor industry has taken notice (metaphorically speaking) with a trend toward 3D chip design. Instead of putting dies in separate packages, soldered to a circuit board and sending data through their I/O ports to other chips (i.e., driving through the suburbs), dies are stacked and data is moved from one layer to the next (i.e., via the elevator).

Ten years ago the argument over virtualization would have been a short one because VMware was the only game in town, but that early dominance is now being significantly challenged by Microsoft, Citrix, and Red Hat (KVM).

And Microsoft is on the offensive because of the forthcoming upgrade to Hyper-V coming with Windows Server 8. New features put it "on par and in some ways better than VMware," according to Aidan Finn, a Microsoft IT consultant in Dublin, Ireland. He says Hyper-V outstrips VMware in inexpensive server-attached storage, aspects of live migration and failover for site-to-site disaster recovery. Plus Hyper-V will have capacity access more virtual CPUs than ever before.

This flurry of improvements is in addition to progress Hyper-V has been making against ESX in licenses issued. Hyper-V grew 62 percent last year compared to ESX's 21 percent growth and Citrix's 25 percent, according to IDC. Separately, Gartner projects that by next year Hyper-V will account for 27 percent of the market, up from 11 percent... Read more »

Windows 8 may not launch until later next year, but many businesses are already aiming to jump to the new OS.

A full 52 percent of the 973 IT professionals polled by InformationWeek last month said they plan to upgrade to Windows 8. Among those, 5 percent said they'll deploy Windows 8 to their users as soon as it's available, while 13 percent said they'll switch within the first year, and 19 percent within the first two years.

Only 10 percent of the likely upgraders said they'll switch on an as needed basis, 24 percent said that ultimately all of their computers will be on Windows 8, and 34 percent reported that at least three-quarters of their PCs will get the new OS.

Though some of the IT folks seem jazzed about the new features in Windows 8, 36 percent of all those polled said they're upgrading mainly because Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP in April 2014. The powers that be in Redmond have been trying to convince businesses to get off XP before the support tap is turned off for... Read more »

Offering users the ability to switch to the new look as of yesterday, Google has spruced up the design of its e-mail service and mixed in a few enhancements.

As described in Google's official blog, the conversation view has been revamped so that it's easier to scour through all of your e-mail threads. You can also now see photos of your contacts in the conversation thread, making it clearer who wrote what.

Gmail's revamped site will start to pop up for everyone soon, according to Google. But users eager to check it out now can switch by clicking on a link in the lower right corner that says "Switch to the new look," which should begin to appear over the next few days.

Navigating around the Gmail interface has gotten a bit more user-friendly. The navigation panel on the left shows you all of your labels, a way of organizing e-mails by their content or importance. You can resize the areas for the labels and chat areas by dragging their borders up or down. You can also opt to hide the Chat area... Read more »