InfoWorld News

The exploit for a critical unpatched bug in Adobe Reader that's now circulating is "clever" and "impressive," security researchers said this week.

First uncovered on Tuesday by Washington-based researcher Mila Parkour, attackers are using rigged PDF documents that include code to exploit a zero-day vulnerability in the widely used Reader PDF viewer as well as in Acrobat, Adobe's PDF creation software.

The Android will edge out Research In Motion's BlackBerry and Apple's iOS for all of 2010 to become the second best-selling mobile OS globally behind Nokia's Symbian, according to market research firm Gartner.

Oracle's newly minted co-president, Mark Hurd, is set to deliver a keynote speech at the vendor's OpenWorld conference on Sept. 20, in what could be the former Hewlett-Packard CEO's first high-profile appearance since leaving that company in August.

If the idea of using Linux in your business is one that makes you nervous, chances are you've fallen prey to one or more of the many myths out there that are frequently disseminated by competing vendors such as Microsoft. After all, each Linux user means one less sale for such companies, so they have a powerful motivation to spread such FUD.

MicroStrategy, a business intelligence software maker, has deployed 1,100 Apple iPads to executives and sales personnel to conduct critical job-related tasks. The company said it expects 700 more iPads to be deployed soon.

Adobe on Thursday said it would resurrect a tool that lets developers port Flash applications to the iPhone after Apple did an about-face earlier in the day.

Microsoft apologized to customers of its hosted software services for businesses after at least three outages over the past few weeks.

Security experts warned Thursday of a fast-spreading email worm, the first large outbreak of this type in nearly a decade.

The worm appears in email messages with the subject "Here you have," and contains what seems to be a link to an Adobe PDF file. In fact the link takes the victim to a Web page hosted on the members.multimania.co.uk domain that then tries to download a screensaver (.scr) file. If the user agrees to installing that file, he is then infected by the worm, which mails itself to his email contacts.

Google made searching a smidge faster this week, while proving yet again they really are smarter than the rest of us combined. What else happened? Craigslist responded to complaints from 17 state attorneys general, Mark Hurd got a new gig, Apple opened its App Store kimono, and the planet got a brief reprieve from two boulder-size asteroids. Have you got what it takes to ace our quiz before we're all blown to kingdom come? Give yourself 10 points for each correct answer. Now strap on your tinfoil helmets and begin.

Nokia has named Stephen Elop, former president of Microsoft's business software group, to become its new CEO effective from later this month.

Elop will replace Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in the top job on Sept. 21. Kallasvuo loses his board seat with immediate effect and will step down from the CEO position on Sept. 20, Nokia said. Elop will leave Microsoft immediately, that company said.

Codesion, which offers hosted source code management, has added the Git distributed version control system to its services, the company said this week.

The company enables users to host code repositories, including Subversion and CVS. Developers can use "best of breed" development tools with Codesion, said company CEO Guy Marion. These repositories are deployed to cloud platforms such as Amazon Elastic Compute Service (EC2).

Microsoft today said it will issue nine security updates to patch 13 bugs in Windows, Office, and its Web server software next week.

The number of Sept. 14 updates will be more than double the maximum the company has delivered in any other of this year's odd-numbered months. Microsoft traditionally delivers relatively few patches in those months.

Microsoft will launch Windows Phone 7 on Oct. 11 at an event in New York, according to a report on the Pocket-lint website.

Pocket-lint, which publishes gadget news and reviews, cited multiple Microsoft sources that it did not name.

Apple today reversed its decision earlier in the year that barred developers from using rival programming tools, including one that has since been discontinued by Adobe, to build applications for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

Mark your calendars! Sept. 9 is hereby declared Debugging Day. It's been associated with removing bugs for more than 50 years now but is rarely formally celebrated. So let's start the tradition this year.

It all began with a log entry from 1947 by Harvard University's Mark II technical team. The now-classic entry features a moth taped to the page, time-stamped 15:45, with the caption "Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay" and the proud boast, "First actual case of bug being found."

With a new range of hardware announced Thursday, Dell's is targeting high-performance and cloud computing environments that share similar hyperscale characteristics.

Software vendor MobileIron announced the release of version 3.0 of its Virtual Smartphone Platform today, giving IT shops the ability to integrate mobile management with other enterprise-based systems.

The new version costs the same as version 2.0, which is $4 per user per month, MobileIron CEO Bob Tinker said.

WASHINGTON -- Among the proposals President Barack Obama made this week to boost the U.S. economy is one that will allow businesses to write off all of the investment they do in 2011. But there's a lot of uncertainty ahead for IT managers interested in this tax break.

In a speech Wednesday, Obama was specific about when he wants the tax break to apply -- "in 2011," he said. There was initial expectation that the White House would ask Congress to approve a tax break that applied through 2011, with a retroactive start date to this month.

Arm Holdings has taken the wraps off its next major chip design, promising a five-fold increase in performance that the company hopes will take it beyond smartphones and into new types of equipment such as high-performance routers and servers.

Arm's top executives launched the Cortex-A15 MPCore at a press conference in San Francisco Wednesday evening. The name is supposed to reflect how much of an advance the chip represents -- Arm's current designs are the Cortex-A8 and the Cortex-A9.

While Apple has been unequivocal in banning Java and Adobe's Flash from the iPhone and related devices, third-party iOS application development tools have been allowed to flourish. Uncertainty over Apple's stance toward third-party toolmakers, however, has left at least one such vendor -- Novell -- anxious about the future of its iOS development platform.