The largest spam attack ever tracked wound down Aug. 9 after delivering enough big, fat PDF files to increase total spam size 445 percent in one day, according to Postini, a hosted e-mail filtering company that’s been tracking the attack since it started Aug. 7.

Postini tracked a 53 percent jump in spam volume from the day before the attack started to the day it launched, according to Senior Marketing Manger Adam Swidler, in San Carlos, Calif.

Google Pack, Google’s software download package, has added Sun’s office suite, StarOffice 8, to its offerings. StarOffice, which Sun normally sells for $70, is free through Google Pack. StarOffice is Sun’s answer to Microsoft Office. In 2000, Sun released StarOffice’s source code, which is the underpinning of OpenOffice.org, a Sun-sponsored open-source project.

StarOffice 8 lets users create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. It supports most Microsoft Office formats, except for the new formats in Office 2007. It can also export documents as PDFs. The Google Pack version of StarOffice integrates a Google Search toolbar in all of the StarOffice applications.

Hackers defaced the United Nations Web site early Sunday with messages accusing the U.S. and Israel of killing children. As of late afternoon, some sections, including the area devoted to Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, remained offline.

The attack, spelled out by an Italian software developer on his blog and later reported by the BBC, replaced blurbs of recent speeches by Ban with the following text, which was attributed to a trio of would-be hackers:

HACKED BY KEREM125 M0STED AND GSY THAT IS CYBERPROTEST HEY

Intel is ramping up its latest quad-core processor to 3.0GHz. Starting Aug. 13, the chip giant will begin offering a new quad-core Xeon processor, the X5365, which will have a top clock speed of 3.0GHz, a total of 8MB of Level 2 cache and 1333MHz FSB (front side bus). In addition, the new processor fits within a 120-watt thermal envelope.

Previously, Intel’s fastest quad-core processor, the Xeon X5355, topped out at 2.66GHz. The company offers a number of older, dual-core models that run at greater than 3.0GHz, including the Xeon 5080, which clocks in at 3.73GHz.

The day Linux fans have been waiting for since SCO attacked Linux on May 12, 2003 has finally arrived. U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball has ruled that Novell, not SCO, owns Unix’s IP (intellectual property) rights. This, in turn, means the end of SCO’s cases against IBM.

In his 102-page decision, Kimball went on to rule that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell’s waiver of SCO’s claims against IBM and Sequent," Thus, not only does Novell own Unix, SCO’s cases against IBM have essentially been destroyed.

Putting salt into SCO’s wounds, Kimball also ruled that while "The court… is precluded from granting a constructive trust with respect to the payments SCO received under the 2003 Sun and Microsoft Agreements because there is a question of fact as to the appropriate amount of SVRX Royalties SCO owes to Novell based on the portion of SVRX products contained in each agreement." In short, SCO owes Novell at least some of the funds it received from its Microsoft and Sun Unix licensing deals, which it used to fuel its anti-Linux lawsuits.

Permessa Corporation (formerly DYS Analytics), whose solutions manage today’s top enterprise messaging platforms, announced the immediate availability of a new version of its Email CONTROL! Enforcer software for messaging content control. The product’s new features for proactively monitoring and controlling enterprise messaging allows IT staffs to better automate the enforcement of corporate messaging policies. Enhancements also make it easier for IT staffs to reduce employee misuse, create "ethical" email firewalls as required by some industries, and avoid confidentiality breaches that could lead to the accidental dissemination of credit card or national identifier numbers.

Emails with inappropriate content and/or for excessive personal use are a potential business liability in today’s environment of regulatory compliance and eDiscovery rules. Seemingly innocuous frequent mass mailings and large messages can also consume significant resources, leading to high operational costs.

The tech industry in India is so pampered by New Delhi, and so admired by ordinary Indians, that it has been lagging behind the competition. Industry trade group Nasscom recently released a report on the necessity of Indian companies to begin to innovate to survive, and suggested an ecosystem for innovation, helped by policy initiatives.

A bug in the way Norton Antivirus software uses the ActiveX programming language could cause serious problems for users of Symantec’s products.

On Thursday, Symantec patched the flaw warning that a bug in two ActiveX controls used by Symantec’s client software could allow an attacker to run unauthorized software on a victim’s computer. Security vendor Secunia ApS rates the problem as "highly critical."

The flaw is an "input validation" error, meaning that Norton doesn’t properly check the data it’s receiving to ensure that it can’t be mistaken for malicious commands. The bug affects users of the 2006 versions of Norton AntiVirus, Norton Internet Security and Norton System Works. Norton Internet Security 2006, Anti Spyware Edition is also affected.

Microsoft’s Internet Information Services continues to narrow the gap with the open-source Apache Web server, with a survey firm suggesting that the longtime second banana could surpass Apache as early as next year.

Microsoft, which added 2.6 million Web sites in the last month, grew to 36.2 percent of all active Web sites, according to figures released by U.K.-based research firm, Netcraft Ltd. Apache lost nearly a million Web site names, as its share of active Web sites fell to 48.4 percent.

Apache now leads IIS, which is bundled with Windows Server, by 12.2 percent among active Web sites, a list which excludes registered domain names that are not yet in actual usage.

Modern IT departments typically employ one of three strategies to contain and control the proliferation of consumer technologies, or "shadow IT," within the enterprise, according to Yankee Group. First is the "Seek and Destroy" approach, in which IT altogether bans the use of consumer technologies; second comes the "Solicit and Support" tack, where IT accepts the technologies staffers introduce into the network and adjusts its infrastructure accordingly; and finally, some IT departments choose the "Acknowledge and Ignore" response to consumer technologies, letting staffers use whatever applications and services they please without tweaking infrastructure.

However, none of these strategies harnesses the true collaborative power of consumer technologies and can lead to chaos in the IT department, according to Yankee Group’s July report, "Zenand the Art of Rogue Employee Management." The research firm suggests that IT embrace consumer technologies via a "Zen-like," internal customer care cooperative model where "consumer technologies work side by side with enterprise applications and devices."