Hackers are claiming they have kidnapped children in a bid to infect PCs with a Trojan Horse virus, says Sophos.

The security firm is warning users that e-mails entitled "We have hijacked your baby" are being sent to Web users around the globe. As well as asking for a $50,000 ransom for the "release" of the child, the messages also contain an attachment supposed to be a photograph of the child. Instead the file actually contains a Trojan horse that will steal personal information.

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"Receiving or reading these widespread emails themselves does not mean you are infected, but if users open the attachment they will be infecting their Windows computer, they will give hackers an open door to take control and steal information," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

"There's no other way of putting it -- this attack is sick. Hackers have no qualms about exploiting a family's natural instinct to defend its most vulnerable members," added Cluley.

PC Advisor is an InfoWorld affiliate.

U.S. companies are pulling back hard on IT spending as the economic downturn continues, a new study by ChangeWave Research has found.

ChangeWave surveyed 1,947 people involved with IT spending in their organizations. The survey was conducted Aug. 11-21. Eighty percent of those surveyed were located in the U.S., along with small percentages in Canada and other countries.

Thirty percent overall reported that third-quarter IT spending was lower than previously planned, an increase of three percentage points since ChangeWave's May spending survey. Meanwhile, only 12 percent spent more than planned.

In addition, 29 percent said spending will drop or even cease in the fourth quarter, a 5 percent increase over the last study. Thirteen percent plan to spend more.

"Thus, the brief period of stabilizing we picked up in May has given way to another major leg downward," ChangeWave director of research Paul Carton wrote in a blog post Wednesday. "In fact, you have to go way back to the middle of the last recession (August 2001) to find a ChangeWave survey projecting this big of an IT spending downturn."

Higher energy costs stood as a top factor for the spending slowdown, cited by 35 percent of respondents.

ChangeWave's findings show a turnaround is not imminent; 39 percent of respondents predicted IT spending in their companies would not rise until the second quarter of 2009 or beyond.

Oracle has developed prebuilt integration software for its CRM On Demand product and the on-premise Siebel CRM, providing customers with a single view of their CRM data, the company announced Wednesday.

Companies can benefit from a hybrid approach to customer relationship management, because the on-demand model allows companies to more easily add new users, while enabling data from both systems to be analyzed at once, Oracle said. The integration software employs Oracle's Application Integration Architecture framework and Fusion middleware. Pricing was not disclosed.

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Oracle's news release on the product stressed its benefits for customers. But the vendor's real goal is to fend off competition from Salesforce, which has based its entire strategy on pushing the benefits of on-demand software, analysts said.

"This is how you sell against Salesforce," said analyst Bruce Richardson of AMR Research. "You talk about that as a dead-end silo while selling end-to-end business processes."

"I don't think it will lead to an increase in demand for Siebel," he added.

Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research largely echoed Richardson, while noting that Salesforce offers Salesforce to Salesforce, a means of integrating with fellow Salesforce customers, and also has strong capabilities for tying into systems such as Siebel.

" I expect this is a strategy by Oracle to keep its Siebel customers from looking outside of the barn," he said.

On the whole, Oracle has taken a cautious approach to on-demand software. During an earnings conference call in May, CEO Larry Ellison told analysts that while the company has been selling on-demand products for nearly 10 years, it only recently began making money at it.

"The entire industry has to get better at making money selling on-demand ... That's what we're focused on before we scale the business," Ellison said at the time.

Salesforce's stock dropped sharply following its recent quarterly earnings report, which saw the company beat analyst expectations for revenue but also indications that business is slowing down.

The IEEE has completed 802.11r, a standard that lets Wi-Fi devices roam quickly between access points, improving the performance of VoIP on enterprise LANs.

The IEEE 802.11 standards were originally defined with single access points in mind, but in offices multiple access points are needed. Devices can move from one access point to another, but it takes around 100ms to re-associate, and several seconds to re-establish authenticated connections using 802.1x.

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The new standard, 802.11r, known as Fast Basic Service Set Transition, allows the network to establish a security and QoS state for the device at the new access point, before it roams between the two, so the transition can take place in less than 50ms - the standard required for voice roaming.

The IEEE has been working on 802.11r for four years, and the concept has been solid since 2005, but the standard was formally approved and published by the IEEE this summer.

Till now, vendors have either used lower security options on Wi-Fi VoIP (using WEP encryption for instance) and put VoIP traffic on separate VLANs to protect the rest of the network, or implemented technology close to the eventual 802.11r standard.

Other vendors, including Meru and Extricom, has built networks where there is no roaming because all the access points are on the same channel.

IEEE 802.11r could open up a bottle-neck in enterprise Wi-Fi VoIP installations, and should allow VoIP certification to move ahead. Although the Wi-Fi Alliance, delivered a VoIP brand, known as Wi-Fi Certified Voice-Personal in June, this has had limited success, and the Alliance is expected to follow up with a Voice-Enterprise brand, including 802.11r, in 2009.

Cisco and Meru branded enterprise-grade equipment under the Voice-Personal brand, but other business Wi-Fi companies have shunned it.

"We primarily address the enterprise market, so we would certainly look for voice-enterprise when it comes out," said Roger Hockaday, Aruba's director of marketing EMEA.

"[Voice-Personal certification] is for low range stuff and SME equipment," said Alistair Mutch, worldwide business development director for Wi-Fi switch vendor Trapeze (now being acquired by Belden). "We have not submitted to the low end one as we felt it was really not worth it."

Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

The popularity of low-cost PCs around the world is driving "explosive growth" for SSDs (solid-state drives), Samsung said Wednesday as it announced three new models of the device.

SSDs are made from NAND flash memory chips and are used to store software, songs, pictures, documents, and other data on computers. The drives hold several advantages over common HDDs (hard disk drives), including being speedier, lighter, quieter, and using far less power.

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The market for low-density SSDs will grow by 57 percent per year annually until 2011, due mainly to brisk demand for low-cost PCs, Samsung said.

The company said it will start mass producing three new low-capacity drives -- 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB SSDs -- next month. The storage drives are each about 30 percent smaller than 2.5-inch HDDs, a small size normally used in low-cost PCs and netbooks, or mini-laptops.

The new SSDs will also run faster than older-generation SSDs made for low-cost PCs, Samsung said, because they include high-performance SATA II (serial advanced technology attachment) controller technology inside.

Samsung's latest SSDs can all read data at 90MBps, while writing at speeds varying from 70MBps for the 32GB SSD, to 45MBps for the 16GB SSD, and 25MBps for the 8GB SSD.

These speeds mark an improvement over the company's first SSDs aimed at small devices, which were launched in 2006. Those devices, 32GB and 16GB SSDs, could read at 57MBps and write at 32MBps.

Samsung is the world's largest memory chipmaker.

The most popular style of low-cost PC on the market today that use SSDs are mini-laptops, or netbooks, such as the Eee PC by Taiwan's Asustek Computer.

The devices are a new style of mobile PC that weigh less than 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds), sport 7-inch to 10-inch LCD screens, carry long-lasting batteries, and connect wirelessly to the Internet. They generally cost far less than the average notebook PC as well, between $199 to $599.

Global netbook shipments are forecast to reach 8.02 million this year and then more than double to 18.3 million units in 2009, according to Taiwan's Market Intelligence Center (MIC).

Acer, the world's third-largest PC vendor, has said it expects to ship 5 million to 6 million of its Aspire one netbooks this year, while Asustek has forecast Eee PC sales at 5 million this year.

An experimental extension to Mozilla Firefox lets people substitute simple text commands for complex Web tasks such as putting links to maps in e-mail messages.

On Tuesday, Mozilla Labs released its first version of Ubiquity, which is related to software called Enso that was developed at a small Chicago company called Humanized. Mozilla hired three executives of Humanized in January, and Aza Raskin, the former president of that company, introduced Ubiquity 0.1 in a Mozilla Labs blog entry on Tuesday. Raskin is now head of user experience at Mozilla Labs.

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Ubiquity is designed to help ordinary people create something like mashups and to do it on a personal basis instead of in the form of a public Web page. The commands that users type in Ubiquity, such as "map" and "e-mail," find resources on the Web and can gather information from those sources in one place.

For example, someone inviting a friend to dinner could highlight the name of the restaurant, type "map," and instantly call up a Google Map showing the location of the restaurant. The user could then edit that map and place it in the body of the e-mail message. Similarly, typing "yelp" and the name of the restaurant would bring the text of reviews from Yelp.com right into the message.

In an interview, Raskin compared it to a search engine, except that Ubiquity users type in what they want to do instead of what they want to find.

Other commands that are already available include "defi," which brings up a definition for a highlighted word; "trans," which translates any highlighted text; and "twit," which takes the highlighted text and puts it up on Twitter.

It's easy to create new commands, so average users can do it without advanced Web development skills, according to Raskin.

"You don't have to wait for a developer to think of a user case. ... You can do it for yourself," Raskin said.

Users who created commands for Ubiquity can post them on the Web and allow others to subscribe to them for free.

Ubiquity may or may not be added as an extension to Firefox. Mozilla Labs is designed to be an open test environment for new ideas, with participation by anyone, in which some ideas will graduate to use in Firefox and others won't, Raskin said.

-- Additional reporting by Elizabeth Montalbano in New York.

It's a typical business scenario. Several people on a project have to create a set of documents: a report in Microsoft Word, a budget spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, the final presentation to the board using Microsoft PowerPoint. One person writes the draft, and wants input or changes from other project participants. So far, so good. But that's when productivity-not to mention disk space-heads down a rat hole.

All too often, people share documents by sending the files around in e-mail. Everyone involved adds his own changes (using revision marking, if the leader is lucky), and then e-mails back that unique file. The project leader has the unenviable job of incorporating all those changes, or there's a flurry of confusion when everybody waits for Jane to finish with the file so Joe can add his own text. And never mind that the security of your document is practically nonexistent as well; what would you do if your competition happened to latch on to your latest and greatest project description? Or your sales presentation for a key client? As a byproduct, the team creates huge attachments (often with no consideration given to file size-and PowerPoint files can reach 40MB in a hurry).

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It's terribly inconvenient -- especially when there's a better way. And it takes only a few moments to learn.

In short: keep the Microsoft Office documents on a network drive to which all participants have access. Microsoft Office manages access to the files, far better than you can. If Jane has the file open when someone else attempts to bring it up, Microsoft Word will say that the document is in use (by Jane) and give Joe the option to open it as read-only (which sometimes is all that's needed) or to be notified when the file is unlocked again. (Unfortunately, none of the options include "automatically send Jane an e-mail message to tell her to hurry up already," but that cattle-prod technology has not yet been perfected.)

The benefit: Everyone works on one version of the file, so it's impossible for things to get out of sync. Your e-mail inbox (and mail server ) isn't stuffed with contradictory versions of important documents. And, since-presumably-your network servers are backed up on a regular basis (far more so than are most users' laptop computers), the documents may be more secure as well.

The downside: It requires the document editors to be connected to the office network and to be logged into the VPN. That's not especially helpful for mobile executives who imagine that the best time to work on a PowerPoint presentation is on the flight to the board meeting . Those individuals need to think ahead, and to grab a copy of the latest version from the server before they leave on their trip.

This may sound like a "Well, duh!" tip-unless you didn't know it already. I've watched too many otherwise savvy business staff blithely send huge files in e-mail-a dozen times a day.

CIO.com is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Private information stored in Apple's iPhone and protected by a lock code can be accessed by anyone with just a few button presses.

The iPhone, like most mobile phones, can be locked with a four-digit code, but where other phones in their locked state only permit calls to emergency service numbers such as 911 (in the U.S.), 999 (in the U.K.) and 112 (throughout Europe), a locked iPhone can be used to make a call to any number.

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However, that's not all you can do with a locked iPhone running the latest version of Apple's software, 2.0.2.

Pressing the emergency call button at the unlock screen, followed by two taps on the home button, takes you to the iPhone's private 'favorites' page without the need to enter the unlock code. If the owner of the phone has favorite entries in their address book containing URLs, e-mail addresses or mobile phone numbers, then those entries can be used to launch the browser, mail application or SMS (Short Message Service) software, and gain access to private Web favorites, e-mail messages, and text messages stored in the phone, again without entering the unlock code.

The security flaw, revealed by a member of the MacRumors.com forum, came as a surprise to an Apple spokeswoman in London, who said she would look into the matter.

One way to avoid such unauthorized access to e-mail messages or Web favorites would be not to add e-mail addresses or URLs to favorite address book entries.

Apple pushed version 2.0 of its iPhone software as being more enterprise-friendly: some businesses had been reluctant to adopt the first version of the iPhone because it did not adequately protect corporate information stored in the device.

China has stepped up investment in its homegrown Godson microprocessor and hopes to build its first petaflop-class supercomputer using the chip in 2010, one of the country's senior engineers said on Tuesday.

China made a decision 20 years ago not to invest in microprocessor development, and it was only in 2001 that it reversed course and began to make a serious effort in this area. As a result, its technology trails far behind that of world leaders like Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and IBM.

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But China has now made a long-term commitment to Godson and since 2006 has increased funding for it "quite a lot," said Zhiwei Xu, CTO of the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The country still lags behind its international rivals in chip development but is doing its best to catch up, he said in a presentation at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, California.

China has produced four Godson processors, the latest being the Godson 2f. It struck a deal last year with STMicroelectronics to manufacture and sell the chips, and they are now used by 40 companies in set-top boxes, laptops and other products, Xu said. The commercial name for the chips is Loongson.

Next month China will complete the design of a new version of the chip, the Godson 2g, which integrates more functionality on the silicon. Next year it hopes to include graphics capabilities on the same silicon as the main processor, much as AMD and Intel are doing today.

China is also hard at work on the Godson 3, which is aimed primarily at servers and will be the first Godson to use a multi-core design. A version of the chip due in 2009 will have four general-purpose cores, and four specialized cores for tasks like scientific computing. The general-purpose cores will run at 1GHz and be similar to those on the Godson 2, Xu said.

China hopes the Godson 3 will allow it to build a high-performance computer in 2010 that can perform at one petaflop per second, Xu said. That would match the IBM system based on an advanced Cell processor that led this year's Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

Asked after his speech if the goal is realistic, Xu said, "it's possible, but it will be hard." Besides developing the system, China will have to find markets to sell it to, he noted. The U.S. is skittish about buying Chinese equipment for government-related work for security reasons.

Godson's use in PCs has been held back by the fact that it is based on a MIPS core, as opposed to the x86 design used by Intel and AMD. To run Windows it has to use translation software to achieve x86-compatibility, and the Godson loses a lot of its native MIPS power in the process.

The Godson 3 adds new instructions that speed the x86-to-MIPS translation by a factor of 10, Xu said. "Our goal is to eventually reach 80 percent of the native MIPS performance," he said. "Right now we are at 40 percent, so we have a long way to go."

Tom Halfhill, a senior analyst at In-Stat, said the goal of a petaflop computer in 2010 might be realistic. "Why would they set a target they don't think they can achieve? That would only embarrass them," he said.

Halfhill was given an overview of the Godson in Beijing about two years ago. China was developing applications to run on Godson PCs, he said, including productivity software based on OpenOffice.

With its huge population, China can become a significant player in the microprocessor market even if it sells only domestically, he said.

"What China wants to do is develop its own technologies so that its manufacturers aren't dependent on paying licenses and other fees to other countries," he said.

Fujitsu is developing an eight-core version of its Sparc64 processor, which should give a performance boost to the Sparc Enterprise Servers that Fujitsu jointly develops with Sun Microsystems.

Fujitsu's Takumi Maruyama mentioned the chip briefly at the end of a presentation at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, California, Tuesday but he provided few details, including when the processor will ship.

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It will succeed the four-core Sparc64 VII processor released in servers from Fujitsu and Sun in July. The Sparc Enterprise Servers use Fujitsu's chips and Sun's Solaris 10 operating system. The companies develop the systems together but market and sell them separately.

The eight-core processor is code-named Venus and will be manufactured using a 45-nanometer process, Maruyama said, a step up from the 65-nanometer process used for the quad-core Sparc64 VII.

It will have an embedded memory controller and offer peak throughput of 128Gflops (floating operations per second), he said. He said it is being designed for the age of "petascale computing."

"I hope I can tell you more about it at Hot Chips next year," Maruyama said.

The chip will be likely be welcomed by Sun, which confirmed in a separate presentation that its own Rock processor won't ship until the second half of 2009, about a year later than originally planned.

Rock is a 16-core processor that Sun has billed as a dramatic step forward in chip design. It will be able to address very large amounts of memory and uses innovative data "pre-fetching" techniques to achieve high levels of parallelism.

Sun says the chip will offer lightening-fast performance for databases and other enterprise applications. However, the newness of the design may have contributed to the chip's delay, which Sun disclosed earlier this year.