Office 2007, which launched the week of Jan 28, took in 106.3 % more dollars for retailers than the previous version, the NPD Group said. In addition, retailers sold 108.6 % more units. “It’s hard to get anything bad out of these good numbers,” NPD analyst Chris Swenson said.
On the business side, the numbers [...]

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Researchers at the University of Indiana and Symantec Corp. are warning that about half of internet users with a home router are vulnerable to having the hardware hijacked.
The researchers found that home router users are susceptible to attackers who could change settings on the devices to divert traffic without the owner’s knowledge. For example, a [...]

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Congress decided in 2005 to extend the period of daylight-saving time by three weeks in spring and one in the fall, reasoning that providing more daylight in the early evening would reduce energy use. However, the shift could cause trouble with software set to automatically advance its clock by an hour on the old [...]

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A new, yet-to-be-patched security hole in Word is being used in targeted cyberattacks, Microsoft has warned.
When a user opens a rigged Word file, it may corrupt system memory in such a way that an attacker could gain complete control over the PC, Microsoft said in a security advisory posted late Wednesday. Office 2000 [...]

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A bug was recently uncovered in Firefox that could allow a malicious Web site to appear authentic.
The bug affects the way Firefox handles writing to the “location.hostname” DOM property, according to a posting by security researcher Michal Zalewski on the security mailing list Full Disclosure. The vulnerability could potentially allow a malicious Web site to [...]

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Some unusual keyboard designs that you may have a use for, or may have just never seen before.
The marriage of eating and tipping: the decorative tablecloth, made of felt, contains a textile keyboard. The electronic is woven into a fabric, which finds itself between layers of water resistant felt as sandwich material. The soft felt [...]

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In October 2004, all but one member of the U.S. House of Representatives voted for a bill that was supposed to curtail the threat of malicious PC-disrupting spyware.
But the Senate ignored it. So the House once again approved spyware regulations in May 2005, which yielded precisely the same lack of a result.
Hoping that [...]

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The Energy Star program is set to release the first revision to the specification for PCs since 1992, which was practically the Bronze Age of the PC industry. Energy Star stickers are familiar to those who have shopped for household appliances over the last few years; it designates appliances or electronics that meet certain specifications [...]

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University of Maryland researchers say their study is one of the first to quantify the near-constant rate of computer hacker attacks.Assistant Professor Michel Cukier and two of his graduate students, Daniel Ramsbrock and Robin Berthier, set up four Linux computers with weak security and then recorded hacker attacks. “The computers in our study were attacked, [...]

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Imagine you open up your shiny new Windows Vista notebook. You’re feeling confident, feeling secure. You connect to the Internet. Suddenly, as you’re surfing a webpage, audio plays through the speakers. As you watch, the built-in microphone pics it up, and Vista’s voice recognition is enabled. The audio from the webpage then opens Windows Explorer, [...]

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