Since then, it’s received a bunch of feedback on the usability of the product and has decided to make some changes. The changes are welcome, indeed.

Making sure calendars between devices, platforms, and PCs are all in sync can be a serious pain.

Last month, Google sought to lessen some of that pain with its Google Calendar Sync product.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite go all the way. Users sent in feedback on a few issues, and Google felt an update was necessary.

The Official Gmail Blog wrote up a brief entry explaining the changes. It said:

“Previously, your Google Calendar e-mail address needed to be the organizer or an attendee of your Microsoft Outlook events for the Outlook events to sync to your Google Calendar. Now, when you choose to do a 2-way sync or a 1-way sync from Outlook calendar to Google Calendar, all of your Outlook events will be synced to your Google Calendar.”

This latest enhancement should relieve some frustration of users who were caught in the organizer/attendee web.

Google is auto-updating people who use the sync program, but if you’re impatient and want to download it directly, you can. The new version is 0.9.3.2.

It’s apparently so easy to infect existing Web sites that there’s decreasing need for criminals to set up shill sites. At least that’s the takeaway from a recent report published by security vendor Websense, which attempts to examine security trends for the second half of last year.

In fact, 51% of Web sites infected with malicious code are actually legitimate, but compromised, Web sites. This is actually a stark increase from the 30% or so of infected legitimate sites the company reported for the first half of 2007.

So this means that miscreants — because the Web site security and development practices of conventional businesses are negligent — don’t even have to go through the trouble of developing and hosting a Web site, or even the bother of deluging everyone with spam designed to lure folks to a Web site trap.

No, all they have to do is find a trusted site that’s already vulnerable and that, unfortunately, seems all too easy.

The most obvious problem is that it’s simply not possible to update filtering software frequently enough to catch all of the spammers’ assorted innovations.

Techniques like disguising unsolicited messages by replacing the “i” in Viagra with a “1″ or using images in lieu of text, for example drive me crazy.

At the same time, an overly aggressive approach can be disastrous, trapping legitimate email as false positives which also sucks.

One possible route to improvement: Instead of focusing on suspicious content, consider the trustworthiness of the sources.

Oscar Boykin, a computer engineering professor at the University of Florida, suggests that filters would work better with more widespread use of authentication systems, which make it harder for spammers to forge source addresses.

Emerging standards like Sender ID and DomainKeys, for instance, verify that a message’s sender and domain are legit.

Improved computer security would also help, since many illicit messages are sent from computers infected with malware. Here’s some additional food for thought on the issue of spam.

There’s egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam;

So what do you think? Could we do the egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam then?

Urgghh! What do you mean ‘Urgghh’? I don’t like spam!

“Genica dba Geeks.com (‘Genica’) recently discovered on December 5, 2007 that customer information, including Visa credit card information, may have been compromised,” said a letter posted on The Consumerist from Jerry L. Harken, Genica’s chief of security, to an undisclosed number Geeks.com customers.

“In particular, it is possible that an unauthorized person may be in possession of your name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, credit card number, expiration date, and card verification number. We are still investigating the details of this incident, but it appears that an unauthorized individual may have accessed this information by hacking our e-commerce Web site.”

Geeks.com has reported the incident to federal authorities and Visa, and is encouraging customers to review their credit card statements for unauthorized charges.

The company has set up two help numbers — 1-888-529-6261 or 1-212-560-5108 for non-US customers — that will be active starting this morning for those with questions about the incident.

It is also providing contact information for the major credit agencies to make it easier to report any identity theft fraud arising from the incident.

Geeks.com describes itself as a direct-to-consumer e-commerce site that specializes in computer-related excess inventory, manufacturer closeouts, and popular and esoteric products for the tech-savvy.

McAfee acquired ScanAlert in October and describes it as the world’s leading provider of e-commerce Web site security services.

The Hacker Safe certification, McAfee explains on its Web site, lets “shoppers of ScanAlert customer sites instantly know that they are a secure Web site and respond by buying more from them.”

The ScanAlert Web site explains that the Hacker Safe certification doesn’t mean 100% safe.

“Research indicates sites remotely scanned for known vulnerabilities on a daily basis, such as those earning ‘Hacker Safe’ certification, can prevent over 99% of hacker crime,” the site says.

If so, you’ll be pleased to hear that it’s doomed to crash and burn faster than Britney’s, Lindsey’s (or insert scandal-ridden starlet’s name here) career.

At least, that’s what one UK-based research firm claims. The folks at Scivisum predict that 2008 will see the end of Web 2.0.

Their logic: worried about the effect that questionable content might have on their products’ good names and reputations, companies will begin pulling advertising from the open pastures of social networks, wikis, Second Life and so forth.

In other words, Disney might think twice about advertising family vacation getaways on a Myspace or Facebook-esque site where half-naked, drunken co-eds proudly post their Spring Break pictorials.

Or will they?

Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch thinks the odds of this happening are slim at best, and I’m inclined to agree.

Sure, there might be some flight risks among a few advertisers who hold their corporate images and name brands in high esteem, but ultimately, what company is going to let their principles outweigh the prospect of serious revenue?

So what if your billboard overlooks a Red Light District in Second Life? Who cares about a couple of off-color comments in a LiveJournal blog post?

High-traffic sites mean more eyes on the ads, and more cash in pocket.

So while you won’t see ads for the Alvin and the Chipmunks sequel on some Triple X site, you can be sure the marketing folks will continue to plaster MySpace and similar sites with them.

What do you think? Will 2008 ring in as the year that Web 2.0 soars or strikes out?

Not only are we celebrating the upcoming year 2008, we are also celebrating 25 years of TCP/IP which is a very important part of the intarweb

So with that in mind, how about a little TCP/IP technology trivia?

The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet and most commercial networks run.

It has also been referred to as the TCP/IP protocol suite, which is named after two of the most important protocols in it: the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), which were also the first two networking protocols defined.

Today’s IP networking represents a synthesis of two developments that began in the 1970s, namely LANs (Local Area Networks) and the Internet, both of which have revolutionized computing.

The Internet Protocol suite—like many protocol suites—can be viewed as a set of layers.

Each layer solves a set of problems involving the transmission of data, and provides a well-defined service to the upper layer protocols based on using services from some lower layers.

Upper layers are logically closer to the user and deal with more abstract data, relying on lower layer protocols to translate data into forms that can eventually be physically transmitted. The TCP/IP reference model consists of four layers.

Want to know more? Check out the official Internet protocol suite Wiki.

On that note, have a Happy New Year. See you next year!

The Web portal, which took over Netscape Navigator in the $4.2 billion acquisition of Netscape Communications in 1999, said development on the browser had recently devolved into a “handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.” Firefox is the open source browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation.

While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

-Tom Drapeau, director of development

While once commanding 90% of the browser market, Netscape Navigator now accounts for less than 1%, and AOL had no interest in spending what it would take to revive the brand.

Instead, the company, which was once a subscriber-supported portal, preferred to spend its resources on its transition into an ad-supported Web business.

The change left “little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be,” Drapeau said.

Instead, AOL said it would leave it to the Mozilla Foundation to do battle against IE. When AOL acquired Netscape, the latter company was working on converting its browser into open source software that was later called Mozilla and became the foundation of Firefox.

Mozilla also was the underpinning of version 6 of the Netscape browser released in 2000. The Mozilla Foundation was formed in 2003 and AOL continued to develop versions of Netscape based on the work of the foundation.

Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape-branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla, and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.

As of November 2007, IE accounted for 77.35% of the market, and Firefox 16.01%, according to Internet metrics firm Net Applications. Netscape had 0.6%.

AOL planned to release security patches for Netscape Navigator 9, the latest version of the browser, until February 1, 2008. After that, all active product support would end for all versions of the browsers.

AOL, however, planned to post a Netscape Archive link for people who wanted to download versions of Netscape without support.

Besides the archive, two other sites offering information would continue to exist: UFAQ and the Netscape Community Forum, AOL said. Netscape.com would also remain live as a general use Internet portal.

The Netscape browser made the commercial Web possible by providing a ubiquitous platform to view and interact with Websites.

The browser was based on the Mosaic browser developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the University of Illinois. Andreessen and James Clark, former patriarch of SGI, founded Netscape Communications in 1994.

The Web software maker was among the stars in the dot-com era of the mid- to late 1990s, becoming the most successful public stock offering of its time. Netscape Communications forced Microsoft to restructure its entire product line to become Internet compliant.

Microsoft’s tactics in grabbing market share from Netscape Navigator with IE was one of the main issues in the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust cast against Microsoft.

Microsoft was found to have abused its Windows monopoly and was forced to make changes in its business practices.

For any users feeling nostalgic for the days of old can install Netscape’s theme and extensions pack for Firefox.

Source: Netscape blog post

In its public statement, the FTC explicitly said privacy concerns are not its problem. Privacy issues are “not unique to Google and DoubleClick,” the FTC statement said, and even if they were, the agency denied it could do anything about it.

“As the sole purpose of federal antitrust review of mergers and acquisitions is to identify and remedy transactions that harm competition.

The FTC lacks the legal authority to block the transaction on grounds, or require conditions to this transaction, that do not relate to antitrust.”

The DoubleClick acquisition, announced in April, comes on the heels of a few similar deals from competitors: Yahoo has spent nearly $1 billion building up its advertising arsenal in the last six months.

In July, it closed on its acquisition of Right Media ($650 million) and in October it closed on BlueLithium ($300 million), an online behavioral ad company. Meanwhile, Microsoft bought online ad company aQuantive for roughly $6 billion in August.

The FTC didn’t take nearly as long to approve any of Google’s competitors’ deals. Yahoo closed on BlueLithium in a month, and on Right Media in about three months. And it only took Microsoft roughly three months to complete the aQuantive acquisition.

Privacy groups were quick to chastise the FTC for not probing the privacy angle harder. Jeff Chester, executive director, Center for Digital Democracy, who has been one of the most vocal critics of the deal, is already calling for Congressional oversight hearings into the FTC’s probe of the merger.

“The FTC is supposed to protect the privacy of Americans in the digital age. The excuse offered by the majority of the commission–that consumer privacy can’t be addressed by current antitrust law–reveals a lack of leadership and determination to protect U.S. consumers.”

Watch for each of them to be a force for change in their own corner of the tech world.

Meet 8 people who will help shape the business technology world in the coming year:

Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt
With very different approaches, this duo’s dragging the stagnant phone business into the Internet age. Jobs’ Apple iPhone embraces a closed network, and Schmidt’s Google Android platform envisions a wide-open one. Both are forcing change for the better.

Mark Zuckerberg
It’s not Facebook that matters, it’s Facebook thinking. IT will feel growing pressure to provide social networking functions–to customers, along the supply chain, and inside their workplaces.

Mark Hurd
He’s got Hewlett-Packard back atop the PC market. How big a splash can he make in business software? The year ahead will tell.

Ray Ozzie
For a Microsoft exec, Ozzie sure is quiet. That’s fine, but it’s time for his vision of software-plus-services to make some noise. That means delivering some surprising products businesses can put to use.

Sam Palmisano
IBM can’t afford to stand pat in software. After making the company’s biggest acquisition ever this year, count on IBM’s CEO to keep dealing in 2008.

Diane Greene
Microsoft storms the virtualization market next year, along with a growing horde of Xen-based rivals like Sun and Oracle. The VMware CEO is a leader, and this is her toughest test yet.

Charles Phillips
2008 needs to be about new products, as Oracle promises to deliver the first of its Fusion applications, which draw together software from past acquisitions. But don’t expect Oracle’s president, a former Wall Street analyst, to lay off the deal-making.

The mega-retailer is mandating that suppliers provide MP3 versions of everything, according to Billboard. Most have already complied, its article suggests, with Sony BMG the predictable holdout.

Let us forget for a moment that Wal-Mart’s online music store is a joke. When Wal-Mart tells content publishers to jump, they don’t ask how high: they just do it. No-one wants to be taken off that particular shelf.