Week in Review: The internet is infected

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There’s a certain amount of trust involved when you surf the net. If you go to a website that you’ve bookmarked or regularly use there’s an expectation that it won’t link you to anywhere strange or dangerous.

However, it’s not that easy these days as the threat of the drive-by download, where criminals plug legitimate websites with corrupted code, becomes more of a problem.

This week we saw several examples of this. First security vendor Websense saw a new threat called ‘Beladen’, which it had recorded injecting malicious Javascript in more than 40,000 websites.

Then, McAfee released a survey that said that criminals were using SEO techniques employed by businesses, and targeting particular search terms commonly clicked on by users.

Finally, Google came out with a top 10 list of the most dangerous malware sites, the domains responsible for compromising the most number of websites on the web.

Answer to Wolfram Alpha?

Google is rather well-known for its expertise in search, and this week Google Labs released a new search tool called Google Squared that looks to give answers, rather than pages.

Could it be a Wolfram Alpha killer? Google has admitted that the technology is by no means perfect, and doesn’t work using a human-made database.

Mobiles killing the planet?

Research suggests that mobile phone users in the UK leave their phones plugged in to charge for much longer than is necessary, costing money as well as wasting tonnes of CO2.

Mobile manufacturers like Sony Ericsson are working on green phones, but this could be undoing some of that good work.

BT customer broadband boost

Thanks to ASDL 2+ technology, millions of customers will have available speeds of up to 20Mbs, more than double what they have had previously.

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