Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich and Microsoft’s Chris Wilson are trading heated rhetoric over the proposed next version of ECMAScript, better known as JavaScript.

Microsoft is quibbling with the ECMAScript Edition 4 effort, which is supported by Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser. "As I’ve frequently spoken about publicly, compatibility with the current web ecosystem–not ‘breaking the Web’–is something we take very seriously," Wilson wrote on the Internet Explorer team blog this week. "In our opinion, a revolution in ECMAScript would be best done with an entirely new language, so we could continue supporting existing users as well as freeing the new language from constraints."

Eich is the creator of JavaScript, a programming language that has become a bedrock Internet technology, helping drive much of the rich content and information now common on the Web. Microsoft’s implementation of it is known as JScript.

IBM touched off a major push for security that will include spending $1.5 billion on security-related efforts in 2008 to help businesses protect data and manage risk.

Company officials said the money will be spent on developing security products and services as part of a strategy to make IBM a more prominent player in the estimated $100 billion global security market. The company has carved security into five domains: Information Security; Threat and Vulnerability, Application Security; Identity and Access Management and Physical Security.

According to Kaspersky’s Senior Virus Analyst Alexander Gostev, in an unusual turn of events, October’s online threat list shows stability that Kaspersky has not seen before. Three malicious programs managed to retain the same positions as they had last month, and only five malicious programs are new to the rankings; something that Gostev notes is "an unprecedentedly low figure for our most volatile statistics."

On the side of email threats, two mass mailings reared their heads at the end of October. According to Kaspersky, these threats, a Fraud.ay phishing attack and a PDF-based threat known as Exploit.Win32.PDF-URI.k, turned out to be among the biggest mass mailings seen in the last few months, especially on the Russian Internet. The reports are available now on Kaspersky Lab’s Viruslist site.

Pandora Recovery,the data recovery tool, has been upgraded to version 1.3.7, doubling the list of file types supported by the surface/cluster scan, as well as a few other upgrades and improvements that maximize the program’s recovery and running efficiency. Panda Recovery has also gone "Mobile" and made the Recovery available on a 1GB jump drive, so you won’t corrupt further data during a program installation. The Recovery tool remains as a free download; the Pandora Mobile Recovery costs $39.95 and is great for businesses. The software has also been localized for the Spanish and Russian markets.

The Federal Trade Commission, which has declared war on Internet scams, warned consumers on Monday not to open a bogus email that appears to come from its fraud department because it carries an attachment that can download a virus.

The email says it is from "frauddep@ftc.gov" and has the FTC’s government seal. But it was not issued by the agency and has attachments and links that will download a virus that could steal passwords and account numbers, the agency said.

Nine privacy groups asked the Federal Trade Commission on Oct. 31 to implement a Do Not Track list to prevent consumers from having their online activities unknowingly tracked, stored and used by marketers and advertising networks. Based on the FTC’s popular Do Not Call list, the Do Not Track list would require advertising firms that place persistent tracking technologies on consumers’ computers to register with the FTC all domain names of the servers involved in such activities. Developers of browser applications would be encouraged to create plug-ins allowing users to download the list onto their computers.

The groups’ call for the Do Not Track list comes on the eve of a two-day FTC conference on "Ehavioral Advertising: Tracking, Targeting and Technology."

Malware posing as cute holiday greetings sent by email is as old as the concept of email itself. And yet today, Halloween 2007, a Storm Worm variant is spreading under the auspices of an animated Halloween greeting card that features skeletons cutting a rug to the Venga Boys’ "Boom Boom Boom." According to several vendors announcing the new scam, emails arrive with subject lines including: Happy Halloween; Dancing Bones; The most amazing dancing skeleton; Show this to the kids; Send this to your friends; Man this rocks.

By downloading the Janglin’ Bones Show, users will be mildly amused, or simply distracted, for approximately eleven seconds. During this time, their PCs will be infected with a variant of the Storm Worm, a persistent and resilient bot that allows remote control of the PC and has been used largely to mass-distribute spam. In fact, it’s likely that Storm was used to distribute the e-mail, which was timed perfectly, according to Graham Cluley, a vice president at Sophos anti-virus.

Symantec introduced the latest version of its Symantec Database Security, adding an intruder identification feature and integration with its Security Information Manager. Version 3.0 of Symantec Database Security adds real-time transaction policy alerts. A new feature that tracks and automatically recommends SQL behavior patterns and IT policies has also been introduced.

McAfee said Tuesday it is buying ScanAlert for $51 million (EU35.4 million), adding to its Internet security Relevant Products/Services offerings a service intended to help consumers feel safer shopping online. Santa Clara-based McAfee will pay $51 million (EU35.4 million) in cash for ScanAlert, which runs daily scans on its more than 75,000 customer Web sites hunting and fixing vulnerabilities to qualify for the company’s Hacker Safe seal of approval.

Acer filed patent counterclaims against Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday as both companies continue to tussle for a larger share of the global PC market. Acer filed counterclaims in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin and with the U.S. International Trade Commission, alleging that HP infringed on patents related to personal computers servers and peripheral devices.

Acer will take all necessary steps to protect and enforce its patented technologies, with or without a legal proceeding, Acer said in a statement. An HP spokeswoman said the company has no comment.