As part of their coverage of the Black Hat security conference, eWeek's Brian Prince has written on the perils of "friend-spoofing" and some of the other security risks presented by popular social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

There are no more Scrabulous invites for anyone these days, courtesy of recent legal action by game maker Hasbro, which owns the Scrabble board game and concept in North America. There will be likely be lots of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth of the "how dare those mean old corporate giants?" variety. What was Hasbro (and Mattel) thinking?

Google now offers an all-digital television advertising platform using an interface very similar to its popular AdWords offering.

Software security firm Sophos has just released a new study which finds that more than 60% of users don't apply security patches and more than half disable firewall software.

Thanks to Yahoo and a developer named dataffect, I can now track USGS earthquake data and map it on the good ole US of A. Or I can find Long Beach hotels close to the airport, courtesy of 'cityres'.

Wall Street Journal reports today that Google's Android mobile platform won't launch until Q4 and not Q3 as originally hoped. Hardly a surprise but it goes to show how difficult it can be to pull all of the pieces together on a platform -- no matter how promising the software -- when you are dependent on hardware vendor timetables.

According to an announcement made at Google Developers Conference in San Francisco, MySpace e-mail is getting a shot in the arm from Google Gears. Read our piece on Google Gears: Google Gears: The future of application development?

The gang at Google Labs have announced a new hosted AJAX library solution intended to provide a globally-available, load-balanced sets of common used toolsets which are often used in the development of web-based applications.

In recent research completed by Gartner Group, analyst Adam Sarner adds Generation Virtual or Generation 'V' into the alphabet soup of generational grouping (e.g., Gen X, Gen Y and so on). Sarner suggests that companies and organizations have to dramatically rethink the way they market online since Gen V presents some extraordinary and unprecedented challenges to traditional assumptions about reaching customers online.

Beware of strangers bearing Hallmark E-Cards. The Hallmark E-Card phish from last summer is back again. Bearing the Hallmark logo, a somewhat reasonable set of options, and sporting a gradient design, it looks almost believable.