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A security firm researching the safety of the mobile Android operating system has discovered a long list of security bugs, with at least some being thought of as a serious risk.

In a report, security firm Coverity claims to have identified several hundred bugs in the Android operating system. The researchers scoured over 60 million lines of open source code in their Coverity Scan Open Source Integrity Report, including the Android OS source used with the HTC Droid Incredible.

In total, 359 bugs were discovered by the team, with 88 of them categorized as being a "high risk". Coverity praised Android for having a lower density of bugs per thousand lines of code than average open source software, but said it had a higher bug density than the Linux kernel. Some of the bugs, it argues, should have been caught before release.

All Android distributions are different in some way or another, but it is thought that most Froyo-based Android phones will be vulnerable to the discovered bugs.

A previously unknown Internet Explorer bug has been used in target attacked online, security researchers warned today.

An unidentified website has been breached by the unknown attackers, who injected code that can exploit a flaw in the Internet Explorer browser. The perpetrators sent e-mails to selected individuals who were part of targeted organizations, luring them to the hacked webpage.

If the user was running Internet Explorer 6, or Internet Explorer 7, they may have been infected with a backdoor trojan. No user intervention would have been required for the malware to be delivered if the flaw was exploted successfully. Internet Explorer 8 "might" be technically vulnerable to the flaw, but the browser's built-in Data Execution Protection (DEP) would cause the webpage to crash instead.

"Looking at the log files from this exploited server we know that the malware author had targeted more than a few organizations," Symantec reported. "The files on this server had been accessed by people in lots of organizations in multiple industries across the globe."

The flaw lies in IE's handing of Cascading Style Sheets. The browser under-allocates memory, allowing data to be overwritten in memory vtable pointers. This can allow an attacker to inject code and execute it.

As reported during the weekend, the Supreme Court started examining legislation from California that would make the sale of violent video games to minors illegal.

The Schwarzenegger vs EMA case landed in the highest court in the United States and the reaction of the court can only fairly be described as very critical. Justice Antonin Scalia in particular had a lot of questions to ask the California attorney general, who was arguing for the law previously declared unconstitutional by a lower court.

"I am concerned with the First Amendment, which says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech," Scalia said. "It was always understood that the freedom of speech did not include obscenity. It has never been understood that the freedom of speech did not include portrayals of violence. You are asking us to create a whole new prohibition. What's next after violence? Drinking? Movies that show drinking? Smoking?"

Scalia also took issue with the use of the term "deviant violent videogames" used by proponents of the law. "As opposed to what? A normal violent videogame?" asked Scalia. "Some of the Grimm's fairy tales are quite grim, to tell you the truth... Are you going to ban them too?" he added.

UK Information Commissioner Christopher Graham has revealed in a statement that Google Inc. broke UK laws by intercepting payload data from wireless networks while photographic UK streets.

Google recently admitted that regulators around the world found passwords and entire e-mails in the payload data it accidentally retrieved from wireless networks. Investigations are ongoing in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Canada over the privacy breach.

"There was a significant breach of the Data Protection Act when Google Street View cars collected payload data as part of their wi-fi mapping exercise in the UK." Graham said in a statement.

"The Commissioner has rejected calls for a monetary penalty to be imposed but is well placed to take further regulatory action if the undertaking is not fully complied with." The ICO is requiring Google to destroy the data collected in the UK when it becomes legally possible to do so.

Google's Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer apologized to UK Internet users for the mistake. "We are profoundly sorry for mistakenly collecting payload data in the UK from unencrypted wireless networks," he said. "We did not want this data, have never used any of it in our products or services, and have sought to delete it as quickly as possible."

Just days after it was widely reported that Turkey had ended a two year ban on YouTube in the country, it now seems likely that Turkish Internet users will be blocked from accessing the site again.

Access to YouTube had been blocked since May 2008 until just a few days ago due to videos uploaded by users deemed to be offensive to Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. On Saturday, a court in Ankara lifted the ban when the video disappeared from the site.

YouTube was quick to point out that it had not removed the video at Turkey's request. Instead, a German firm had utilized Google tools that are provided to tackle copyright infringement on the website to get it automatically removed. The video has now appeared once again on the popular video sharing website because the company found the copyright claim to be bogus.

A Turkish court has now ruled that the ban should be re-instated, but not because of the original "insulting" videos. This time, the Turkish authorities are mad about a video which allegedly shows the former chairman of the opposition, Deniz Baykal, in a bedroom with a female aide.

Telecommunications Board spokeswoman Guleser Aykara said that the board was notified of the court ruling on Tuesday and that it would make a decision by Thursday on whether or not to implement the ban. "We will first check if the undesirable content still remains on the website," Aykara told Reuters.

News Corp. has sent a warning out to its social networking site MySpace that its continued losses have become a serious problem.

"We've been clear that Myspace is a problem," News Corp. chief operating office Chase Carey said during a conference call. "The current losses are not acceptable or sustainable. Our traffic numbers are not going in the right direction."

MySpace has had to present itself as a hub for musicians and their fans as Facebook has increasingly out-grown it. News Corp. bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million, and the company now counts about 100 million users worldwide.

Facebook, on the other hand, now counts over 500 million worldwide users and the sites phenomenal growth seems set to continue for the time being. Carey said that News Corp. had been encouraged by a recent relaunch of the MySpace service but that it now needed to make a clear path to profitability.

"We need to make real headway in the coming quarters," he said.

The Ministry of Sound has been forced to abandon targeting thousands of alleged music pirates in the UK after BT deleted most of the data it was seeking.

Solicitors for the record label had been trying to force BT to hand over subscriber information from gathered IP addresses to identify music sharers. Those users would then be contacted and offered a chance to settle a case to avoid going to court.

BT had delayed handing over subscribers details as it demanded to know exactly how the user information would be used and stored. However, BT has since deleted over 80 percent of the data that the solicitors were seeking. Ministry of Sound's solicitors said that BT had deleted 20,000 of the 25,000 requested details. The ISP says it was only complying with data retention policies.

"The Ministry of Sound and its solicitors are well aware of this," said a spokesperson for BT. "Upon request from Ministry of Sound, we saved as much of the specific data sought as we reasonably could and any not preserved must have been too old."

Despite the setback, Ministry of Sound says it remains committed to targeting uploaders of its music on file sharing networks. "We will be making further applications for information from all ISPs," Ministry of Sound CEO Lohan Presencer said.

The Wireless Gigabit Alliance, or WiGig, has announced a partnership with the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA), promising to deliver next generation wireless DisplayPort.

VESA and the WiGig Alliance will share technology expertise and specifications to develop multi-gigabit wireless DisplayPort capabilities. A certification program for wireless DisplayPort products will be developed in parallel.

The ability to connect PCs and handhelds to monitors, projectors and HDTVs wirelessly is highly desired among consumers and IT users. The WiGig-VESA collaboration will deliver a wireless display capability with image quality and I/O experience equal to that of wired interfaces.

"As a high-quality content creator in Hollywood, it is exciting to see the innovative solutions being offered by advanced wireless technology to fulfill the ever-increasing demand for anywhere, anytime content consumption," said Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation.

"WiGig technology is a perfect match for DisplayPort since it provides the multi-gigabit bandwidth, packet architecture and bi-directional I/O capabilities needed to support the DisplayPort v1.2 feature set and beyond," said Bruce Montag, VESA chairman.

Microsoft has raised its three million holiday sales prediction of the new Kinect motion sensing system to five million following stronger-than-expected presales figures.

The $150 device that allows a user to control an Xbox 360 and its games software with movements and voice commands is set to go on sale at midnight in over 30,000 stores in the United States. It comes into a market dominated by the Nintendo Wii console and on the heels of Sony's PlayStation Move system for the PS3.

Industry figures hope that the new motion control systems will help to spark more life into the $60 billion industry following a slump brought on by the global recession. Microsoft's prediction of Kinect's success this holiday season, if true, could potentially add up to $750 million in revenue for the Redmond-based giant for the quarter.

"Presales have exceeded expectations," said Mattrick. "People are coming to us and saying this is must-have holiday item." Mattrick has warned that the company expects supply shortages throughout the holidays. "We're anticipating that some of our partners will be sold out at points of time this holiday, and that's something we'll do our best to work through," he said

Facebook has admitted to two U.S. congressmen that third-party applications have shared user data with other companies, and promised to fix the problem.

Republican Congressmsan Joe Barton and Democratic Congressman Edward Markey had written a letter to Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg about reports that third-party applications were sharing user information with other companies. Facebook Vice President Marne Levine responded in a letter, released on Wednesday, and confirmed that some apps have violated the social networking site's policies by sharing user data.

"We have taken enforcement action against the applications in question, and steps to ensure the deletion of the Facebook user data that was improperly transferred," Levine wrote. The Wall Street Journal had previously reported that Farmville and other popular applications on Facebook were transmitting user IDs to outside parties, while Facebook has also revealed that a handful of applications intentionally shared information with a data broker.

"The third-party data broker in question has also agreed not to operate on Facebook Platform in the future," Levine wrote.

Nokia has gotten a boost in a patent infringement case involving Apple Inc., as staff at the International Trade Commission finds that the company did not violate the iPhone-maker's patents.

The investigative staff at the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) made its opinion clear in a brief submitted on Monday. The staff finding has equal standing before the commission's administrative law judge with statements by other parties arguing their own cases, according to an ITC spokeswoman.

The judge is not required to follow staff advice. The spat between both companies started when Nokia filed suit against Apple in October 2009 in a U.S. district court. The Finnish giant said that the iPhone infringed 10 patents it held. Apple countersued Nokia, and both companies later filed cases with the ITC.

Apple is asking the ITC to halt imports of Nokia devices that it claims infringes on its intellectual property. The judge will provide a ruling, expected by February 2011, and then the ITC will vote whether to follow the judges ruling in the case.

Dish Network VP of Online Content Development and Strategy Bruce Eisen has made a bold statement today, saying that popular streaming site Hulu is destroying the TV industry.

"If I can watch Glee tomorrow morning and I don’t have to pay a pay TV service –- I think that’s bad," said Eisen.

Hulu makes new content from Fox, NBCU and ABC available the day after it airs online via Hulu.com, with users getting to watch it at their leisure, with a tiny amount of ads.

Eisen says the shows should only be made available 30 days after they air, and only on authenticated "TV Everywhere" services and devices.

"If people decide that they don’t have to pay for pay TV, then one of the pillars (of the TV industry) starts crumbling," he concluded.

GigaOM also spoke with Greg Kampanis, SVP of Content Strategy and Operations for South Park Digital Studios, who had a completely different take on the situation.

South Park Digital Studios is a site where all previous South Park episodes are available for streaming, from all 14 seasons, with new episodes made available a week after they air. Kampanis says they made the move to create the site after piracy rates for South Park episodes began to explode.

Windows Phone 7 handsets in Europe are selling extremely well, say multiple sources, with Microsoft already seeing supply shortages.

Carrier Orange has started pre-orders for the handsets, even giving customers £20 HMV vouchers as a way to entice them to hold their pre-orders until new stock comes in.

The new devices, from HTC and Samsung are sold out in most retail shops.

Samsung's supply issues seem to be thanks to a shortage of AMOLED acreens and the HTC issues seem to be stemming from software problems.

Windows Phone 7 is set to launch next week here in the States, and that may be the bigger test of how popular the devices really are.

According to the latest figures from Nielsen, 28 percent of U.S. mobile phone owners own smartphones, as of the Q3 2010.

The strong growth was attributed mainly to an explosion in iPhone and Android device sales.

While all data firms release different numbers for the same data, the consensus is clear. RIM still leads the market, with Apple a close second. Android, seeing incredible growth, continues to take share.

For the quarter, RIM controlled 30 percent of the U.S. market for smartphones, followed by the iPhone at 28 percent. Android has moved to 19 percent share.

Getting into interesting demographics, RIM had the most users over the age of 45, while Apple had the most under 45. Over 50 percent of Android users were under 35 years of age.

Over the past six months, 41 percent of all new phone buyers are choosing to purchase smartphones, a six percent increase from the six month period before it.

Amazon has expanded their Disc+ On Demand program to over 10,000 titles this week.

Disc+ is a program that gives customers a chance to watch digital versions of movies they have purchased on DVD/Blu-ray via Amazon Video on Demand.

When a customer purchases a Blu-ray or DVD title from Amazon, if it is a Disc+ title a digital copy will be added to your Video On Demand library.

The copies are playable on PCs, Macs and all Amazon VOD-compatible devices and HDTVs.

"When we launched Disc+ On Demand last year, we were excited by the overwhelmingly positive response from our customers," added Steve Oliver, category leader for Amazon.com DVD. "Customers love instant gratification, and this program allows customers to watch Disc+ On Demand titles instantly, without having to wait for their DVD or Blu-ray to arrive in the mail."

You can check all the titles here: Amazon Disc+ Catalog