Attention: there is no Facebook Gold account. The new scam is released and do not fall for it. This is attacker's way of seeking a quick profit.

Facebook pages have been set up with names like “GET YOUR UPGRADE WHILE THEIR FREE!!” Moreover, it promises a simple use of the account and freedom from advertisements. However, bogus Facebook Gold account looks like a real one, but actually the spelling error in the page title is a clue that account is a fake. What is more, comments are not real at all. It is just an image file which itself links to the scam web page.

Two Chinese schools with links to the armed forces have become implicated as suspects in the ongoing Operations Aurora attacks against Google and at least 33 other western conglomerates last December.

Security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, now reckon the attacks date from April last year, far earlier than previously suspected, the New York Times reports. Although the attacks originated from China, it's by no means clear that they were orchestrated by the Chinese government. It's even possible that hackers from outside China ran, or had an involvement in, at least some of the attacks.

If you haven't changed the default password on your home router, you may be in for an unwanted visit from Chuck Norris -- the Chuck Norris botnet, that is.

Discovered by Czech researchers, the botnet has been spreading by taking advantage of poorly configured routers and DSL modems, according to Jan Vykopal, the head of the network security department with Masaryk University's Institute of Computer Science in Brno, Czech Republic.

The malware got the Chuck Norris moniker from a programmer's Italian comment in its source code: "in nome di Chuck Norris," which means "in the name of Chuck Norris." Norris is a U.S. actor best known for his martial arts films such as "The Way of the Dragon" and "Missing in Action."

Over the next few weeks, Microsoft will begin offering a “Web browser choice screen” to Internet Explorer users in Europe, as required by the European Commission.

Internal testing of the choice screen is underway now. We’ll begin a limited roll-out externally next week, and expect that a full scale roll-out will begin around March 1, a couple of weeks ahead of schedule. If you are an Internet Explorer user in Europe, here is what to expect.

First, a little background. In December, the European Commission and Microsoft arrived at a resolution of a number of long-standing competition law issues. Microsoft made a legally binding commitment that PC manufacturers and users will continue to be able to install any browser on Windows, to make any browser the default browser, and to turn access to Internet Explorer on or off.

In the last ten days we have learnt that “persons unknown” stole the identity of British citizens and cloned modern UK passports to enter Dubai to perform an assassination.

Last week, the Foreign Secretary got up in the House of Commons to say that his legal action before the Court of Appeal was to protect intelligence vital to national security given to the UK by the USA’s national security agencies.

There are obvious data protection consequences that flow from these events that are not being picked up by journalists as part of the current public discourse.

A Florida woman yesterday filed a class-action lawsuit against Google Inc., charging that the new Buzz social networking tool set violates the privacy rights of users.

Eva Hibnick, a resident of Sarasota County, Fla., filed the suit in a San Jose, Calif., federal court on behalf of herself and the approximately 31 million U.S. users of Google's popular Gmail e-mail service. The lawsuit alleges that Google violated federal privacy and computer fraud laws by adding Buzz to the Gmail service last week.

A suburban Philadelphia school district remotely activates the cameras in school-provided laptops to spy on students in their homes, a lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday alleged.

According to the lawsuit filed by a high school student and his parents, the Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa. has spied on students and families by "indiscriminate use of and ability to remotely activate the Webcams incorporated into each laptop issued to students by the School District."

Approximately 1,800 students at the district's two high schools have been given laptops as part of a state- and federally-funded "one-to-one" student-to-laptop initiative.

Link shortening has become a commonplace on services like Facebook and Twitter. Heck, even Google shortens URLs within its products now. People seem to be getting more used to the idea that shortened URLs, despite not showing you where they lead, are safe. Part of that, is that the companies that are doing the shortening keep blacklists of sites with malware or spyware, to keep people from accidentally visiting sites that will do harm.

A  website called PleaseRobMe claims to reveal the location of empty homes based on what people post online.

The Dutch developers told BBC News the site was designed to prove a point about the dangers of sharing precise location information on the internet. The site scrutinises players of online game Foursquare, which is based on a person's location in the real world. PleaseRobMe extracts information from players who have chosen to post their whereabouts automatically onto Twitter.

"It started with me and a friend looking at our Twitter feeds and seeing more and more Foursquare posts," said Boy Van Amstel, one of PleaseRobMe's developers. "People were checking in at their house, or their girlfriend's or friend's house, and sharing the address - I don't think they were aware of how much they were sharing."

Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach.

The damage from the latest cyberattack is still being assessed, and affected companies are still being notified. But data compiled by NetWitness, the closely held firm that discovered the breaches, showed that hackers gained access to a wide array of data at 2,411 companies, from credit-card transactions to intellectual property.