The Washington state attorney general’s office has sued a New York company and individuals in New York, New Hampshire, Oregon, and India under state and federal anti-spam and spyware laws, saying they induced computer users to download software that weakened their computers’ security. The lead defendant in the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court, is Secure Computer LLC of White Plains, N.Y. The company’s president, Paul E. Burke, who lives in the Bronx, and Gary T. Preston, of Jamaica, N.Y., have made more than $100,000 since summer 2004 selling software known as "spyware cleaner" over the Internet–software they advertised using mass, misleading emails, and pop-ups, the lawsuit said.

IBM announced it has acquired CIMS Lab, a privately held software company based in Roseville, California. Financial details were not disclosed. CIMS Lab is a leading provider of software that helps businesses track the usage of computing resources across virtualized technology environments–such as servers, storage, email, networks, databases, applications and operating systems.

More Americans anticipate falling victim to a cyber attack rather than a physical crime, reports a recent IBM survey of U.S. adults. And, despite the convenience and flexibility that online transactions offer, 37 percent of Americans will not provide credit card information online. Surveying almost 700 participants that have Internet access at work or home, IBM reveals that, in the next twelve months, more than three times the number of respondents think it is more likely they will be the victim of a cybercrime (i.e. attacked through networked devices such as computers, ATMs, mobile phones, PDAs, etc.) than a physical crime.

IBM announced a voice technology breakthrough that can allow automobile drivers and handheld device users to speak commands naturally without memorizing specific predetermined commands. Released as part of the IBM Embedded ViaVoice 4.4 software package, it is a significant technology advance for embedded speech technology in devices and automobile navigation systems. The new offering is designed to provide users with new flexibility and accuracy in embedded speech devices.

XM Satellite Radio is going hands-free thanks to IBM and VoiceBox Technologies, allowing drivers to talk to their radio–and it will respond. IBM and VoiceBox today announced that VoiceBox will integrate IBM’s speech recognition engine, IBM Embedded ViaVoice into its VoiceBox Navigator, the world’s first conversational voice search platform.

IBM announced that Openstream will embed IBM WebSphere Everyplace Multimodal software into its mobile solutions platform so users can access information on demand using multiple modes of input and output, including talking to a device or typing and tapping buttons on phones, PDAs, and other devices.

Apache Geronimo is a hot new alternative for deploying Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications. IBM DB2 is a mature relational database product well suited for J2EE environments. IBM Software Engineer Emilio Zegarra details how to integrate both products into a J2EE application. Learn how to develop and deploy an application that connects to a DB2 database, and get the required configuration files needed to set up the environment. Find out how to use Eclipse and the Web Tools Platform (WTP) plug-in project to assemble the different components required for the application. Finally, learn how to deploy an application and a DB2 configuration.

Almost a quarter of the world’s spam in the last three months of 2005 was sent from computers in the United States, according to U.K. antivirus company Sophos. The U.S. is closely followed by China, with 22.3 percent. South Korea rounds out the top three with 9.7 percent, according to Sophos, which said the level of non-English language spam is rising. The company bases its numbers on a scan of all junk mail caught by its spam traps.

Google said Tuesday it would launch versions of its search and news Web sites in China that censor material deemed objectionable to authorities there, reasoning that users getting limited access to content was better than none. The new local Google site, expected to be launched on Wednesday at Google.cn, will include notes at the bottom of results pages that disclose when content has been removed.

Covalent said on Tuesday that it now supports Apache Geronimo, recently released open-source Java application server software. Covalent distributes a set of open-source server software that runs on a corporation’s Web servers. It sells support services to customers on a subscription basis. Covalent tools manage the Apache Web server in addition to the Tomcat application server and Apache Axis, a Web services server.