IBM will spend $100 million over the next five years to make the mainframe easier to use. The program will focus on such areas as greater automation, modernizing the user interface and easing the way users manage the software on the machines.

The search engine market has metastastized into an online media market. The bar set by the world’s largest search engine now includes a heckuva lot more than fancy algorithms running in a data center. So how much is a good piece of Google-killing software worth? Even if your tech is better, you can’t compete with Google just because you have a great search engine.

Japanese electronics maker Fujitsu said it would recall 287,000 notebook PC batteries made by Sony, bringing the number of Sony batteries recalled to more than 7.5 million. Fujitsu last week joined a growing list of computer makers recalling Sony batteries, but did not say at the time how many batteries would be affected.

Two spammers could go to jail after an investigation by EarthLink found they were sending thousands of unsolicited messages from PeoplePC accounts. Jared Cosgrave and Mohammed Haque pleaded guilty last week in a U.S. District Court in Southern Florida to charges of fraud and violation of the Can-Spam Act. Sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 16, and the two could get up to three years in jail and be given a fine of up to $250,000.

McAfee will pay $60 million to acquire Citadel Security Software, a producer of security compliance products that ensure corporate employees are using assigned IT policies. The deal comes four months after McAfee paid $10 million to acquire PreventSys, also a vendor of risk management and compliance reporting software. McAfee said in March that it aimed to acquire companies in wireless security and Internet surfing.

IBM has improved the power efficiency of two models of PowerPC processors, making an effort to strengthen its position in markets from cars and printers to networking and communications equipment. The PowerPC 750CL and PowerPC 970GX are both single-core chips built with a 90-nanometer process. Both chips reduce DC electricity leakage with thicker gate oxides and reduce AC switching power with higher thresholds, the company said.

A public claim by hackers that Mozilla’s Firefox browser is vulnerable to multiple code execution vulnerabilities may be an overblown hoax. On the heels of a ToorCon presentation where two security researchers–Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi–warned that Firefox’s implementation of JavaScript was badly flawed and could allow PC takeover attacks, Mozilla’s engineers say the risk is limited to a denial-of-service issue. Spiegelmock, a developer at Six Apart, a blog software company in San Francisco, now says the ToorCon talk was meant "to be humorous" and insists the code presented at the conference cannot result in code execution.

Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Mark Hurd may have known as early as in July 2005 the company was looking into private phone records as part of its leak investigation, The Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition on Monday. A memo from the computer maker’s outside law firm suggests Hurd may have learned about the use of phone records within a few months of the start of the leak probe, though he may not have known if the phone records were obtained illegally.

Fujitsu will offer owners of some of its laptop computers replacement batteries as part of Sony’s global battery exchange program. Sony announced the program in response to growing consumer concerns about its laptop PC batteries, which are used by many companies. Since mid-August, about 6.6 million laptop batteries containing Sony-made cells have been recalled by computer makers because of a potential fire hazard.

Acer is in talks with Sony over joining its voluntary laptop PC battery recall, but said Acer users haven’t reported any problems so far. Acer has not received any complaints from users over laptops overheating or catching fire. Sony’s battery woes started in August when Dell recalled 4.1 million laptop computer batteries due to a potential fire hazard caused by Sony-made lithium-ion battery cells damaged during production. Other companies soon followed Dell’s lead, including Apple Computer, Lenovo Group and Toshiba.