Research indicates Beijing is world virus capital According to UK-based managed security services company Network Box, Beijing accounts for 40 percent of all viruses that passed though the company’s servers in June, and 5.25 percent of detected spam. This compares with slightly lower percentages for cities in countries noted for having a malware problem. Moscow was second for spam with 5.12 percent, Seoul third with 3.58 percent, Turk in Turkey fourth with 3.4 percent, and London in fifth place at 2.47 percent. The percentage is calculated from event logs transmitted by about 700 customers using Network Box’s security appliance, which has a firewall along with anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-phishing and content filtering technologies. The company catches about four million samples of malicious software a day. As more and more users come online in China, there’s a good chance that those computers are using pirated software without up-to-date security fixes, making them prime targets for hackers who are actually located elsewhere in the world. Those compromised computers, which are used to send spam and make it more difficult to identify the spammer, are so valuable that hacker gangs have been competing to take over machines. If one gang finds a machine running another gang’s Trojan horse program—one that appears harmless to the victim but can be used to control a machine—they’ll try to remove the software.

Dell Warns of Vista Upgrade Challenges Dell has taken the unusual step—for a PC vendor of its size—of toning down its sales pitch for Microsoft’s Vista operating system and warning businesses of the migration challenges that lie ahead for them. The step is particularly unusual because one of the issues the hardware vendor is warning business about is the extra hardware that they will need to buy. Dell’s European client services business manager, Niall Fitzgerald warned that customers need to be looking at the number of images they will be installing and the size of these images. A 2 GB image for each user will have a big impact. In the past, Microsoft had suggested that a 1GB image was fine for Vista, but Fitzgerald said image sizes of 2 GB and larger will be likely. As a result, said Fitzgerald, Dell is stepping back from telling people they must upgrade. Overall, the challenges will be significant and “should not be underestimated”. However, he still thinks that business should go ahead with the migration and not wait for Microsoft to release its first service pack. Last month, Microsoft passed 40 million sales of Vista, but most of those appear to be to consumers rather than businesses, which have been slow to upgrade. While Fitzgerald accepted that some businesses are holding back from migrating to Vista, he denied that there is a widespread feeling that it is better to wait for Service Pack 1.

Microsoft moves R&D to Canada due to immigration problem Microsoft Corp. plans to set up house in the Vancouver area with a new software development centre that would attract talent without encountering U.S. immigration issues. The location will be one of only a few development centres outside the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft said Thursday in a release. Microsoft added Vancouver to its expansion list, which already includes plans to build new sites in Boston and Bellevue, Wash. Other centres exist in North Carolina, Ireland, Denmark and Israel, while full research-and-development locations exist in the UK, India, China and California’s Silicon Valley. The company said the new location will “allow the company to continue to recruit and retain highly skilled people affected by the immigration issues in the US. Financial details for the Vancouver office were not disclosed.

Google loses Gmail trademark case A German court banned Google from using the name “Gmail” for its popular webmail service following a trademark suit filed by the founder of G-Mail. Daniel Giersch, started using the name G-Mail in 2000, four years before Google released “Gmail”. Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in its judgement said that Google infringed the young businessman’s trademark that had been previously been registered. The battle for the trademark has dragged on for three years and has been fought in a number of State jurisdictions. Google has filed lawsuits against Giersch in Spain, Portugal and Switzerland. After the Google lawsuits have ended, Giersch hopes to focus his energies into the further development of “G-mail,” which he touts as a new “standard of communication on the Internet.