That's right. I don't use any anti-malware apps.

Did I just hear jaws drop across the interwebs? As an IT professional, I spend a good amount of my time educating people about computer security. I strongly recommend that people use antivirus and anti-malware software. All computers on my network run McAfee Anti-Virus Corporate Edition, and I’m a regular user of various anti-malware applications when cleaning up my client’s computers.

It will be interesting to see how Apple reacts to news that Palm's Pre knows how to interact with iTunes. While not a business feature, iTunes support would make buying or switching to the Pre much easier for millions of the iTunes faithful.

Multitasking, another key feature of the Pre, may be a more difficult sell as customers may not understand what the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously gets them. Isn't task switching enough? Especially if you can already listen to music and read email at the same time?

Among the many new provisions the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), is federal funding for electronic medical records. Known as HITECH, the law gives incentives to healthcare organizations to digitize personal health information before 2020. Lost in the rush, however, are the details.

"I look forward to medical records going electronic," said Howard Schmidt, the former White House cybersecurity czar, "but I have a tremendous amount of concern about building a really, really good healthcare infrastructure … and then securing it later." Schmidt spoke with PCWorld at RSA 2009.

If I was Microsoft, and I was coming out with a new search engine, I would make all efforts to disassociate it from the name Microsoft. Let’s face it, when it comes to new tools, we all want the little guy to win. Now that Google is itself a monolith, we’re all looking for the next underdog.

What we get instead is Bing.

While the world has focused on Google Wave as a mash-up of chat, e-mail, and document sharing, it's really something else: Google Wave could be the Twitter that everyone really wants. Maybe it's the Facebook, too.

Shown for the first time on Thursday at Google's I/O developer conference, Wave is described as "equal part conversation and document" for its uses as a collaboration tool. But, the leap from what Google says Wave is today to what it can easily become is a short one.

The idea of Steve Jobs returning to Apple and delivering Christmas in July made of shiny new iPhones and iPods gained strength Wednesday, based on the "other" Steve's assessment that Jobs' sounds "healthy" and "energetic."

Steve Wozniak's health report, given to the Wall Street Journal, is the first outside assessment of Job's condition since the Apple CEO went into seclusion in mid-January after saying a hormonal imbalance would require more intensive therapy that previously expected.

For companies that compete with Microsoft, HTML5 is almost the Holy Grail, offering the ability to run applications regardless of the underlying operating system. While the browser isn't more important than operating system today, Google this week firmly suggested it is only a matter of time.

We've heard that story before. Java was supposed to raise apps above the level of the operating system, offering cross-platform "write once, run everywhere" applications that would break the coupling between an application and a specific operating system. Proponents predicted Windows would become less important with the rise of Java apps.

As the advertising ice age continues killing off media dinosaurs, GigaOm's announcement of a plan to charge $79 a year for premium blog content again raises the issue: Is anybody actually willing to pay?

Taken another way: How much media has to die before users are willing to pay for what's left?

With a fresh $200 million in the bank, Facebook is again well positioned to avoid growing up. Rather than making money the old-fashioned way, Facebook is going for the Russian bail-out plan to again stall the inevitable: A Facebook that turns a profit, or else.

With 200 million users, Facebook has yet to prove it can do anything to monetize them. It has failed in the most basic to attract large numbers of serious advertisers--how many get-rich-quick schemes and rip-off "free" offers can any service survive?

The bankruptcy filing by Apple cloner Psystar is hardly a surprise. Rather, it is hard to imagine any sensible person wanting to take on Apple's legal department and $29 billion bankroll. However, that doesn't mean business users don't need--and want--Apple clones.

One of the reasons for Apple's softness in the business market is its high prices and single source of supply. While Apple makes a strong case for lower cost of ownership, that is not what business customers see when they make PC purchases.

Microsoft appears to have decided that any netbook with more than 10.2-inch screen isn't really a netbook at all, and should pay more for a copy of Windows 7. This is Redmond's version of the question facing the hardware companies themselves: How to maximize netbook sales without cannibalizing sales of laptops.

Answer: You can't, though Microsoft's pricing could force up prices on new, larger-screen netbooks. It could also land the company back in court.

It would not be the end of a slow news week without more rumors concerning an Apple product with a large touchscreen. Some call it a netbook, others say a so-called "mediapad" is probably on the way, and now comes word of a "tablet" Mac, rumored to be headed our way in 2010. What gives?

I think the rumors all describe a single device, This is the oversized iPod touch that I'm calling the media pad, but could also be seen to be a small tablet or even a netbook without a physical keyboard, just one that appears on-screen.

The idea of Google looking into buying a newspaper and then backing off would be funny, if it weren't a case of the killer returning to the scene of the crime. And trying to marry one of the survivors.

Sure, the Internet may have doomed newspapers right from the start, but double body blows inflicted by Google and Craigslist to newspaper ad revenue certainly haven't helped.

What appears to be a deliberate plan to create an opening day shortage of Palm Pre smartphones may backfire and, in any case, makes it look like Palm and Sprint have money or production problems.

It could be a case of turning lemons into lemonade when Sprint boss Dan Hesse recently predicted shortages when the Pre hits store shelves on June 6. Maybe Sprint and Palm have been unable to produce (or pay for) the number of units the could potentially be sold. Or maybe they are just being silly.

Ask people what they like most about the Firefox browser and the answer is almost unanimous: The add-ons. Though blamed for slowing browser performance, the downloads allow users to customize the Firefox experience. Jetpack, announced yesterday, hopes to make these extensions easier to create.

The move comes as Google is pushing developers to create add-ons for its Chrome browser, which yesterday got a performance bump. Mozilla Labs hopes Jetpack, an API for applications developers, will help continue its add-on dominance.

Google's Chrome browser is now faster and has gained the ability for users to hide thumbnails on its New Tab page. The update, internally called Chrome 2, is being automatically rolled out to current users and is also available for download, according to Chrome team member Darin Fisher, writing in the Google corporate blog.

According to Fisher, JavaScript-heavy pages now load 30 percent faster while embarrassing thumbnails can be 100 percent hidden. Which improvement users best respond to remains to be seen. The update also failed to address a common user complaint: There is still no Google for Macintosh, just Windows XP and Vista.

Microsoft has withdrawn its request for an oral hearing to respond to European antitrust charges arising from its bundling of the Internet Explorer Web browser with its Windows operating system. If Microsoft indeed abused its market position, it has become fairly obvious the company's efforts were unsuccessful: Firefox now leads IE 7.0 in European market share.

While Microsoft, with its three versions (6, 7 and 8) of Internet Explorer still leads in overall browser usage, StatCounter says that so far in 2009, Firefox 3.0 is slightly ahead of Windows 7.0, each with approximately 34 percent of the market.

With Microsoft reportedly poised to introduce its new search engine, code-named "Kumo" next week, a question arises: "Why does Microsoft do what everyone else does?"

Since screenshots of Kumo leaked out in March, both Google and Yahoo have shown similar new functionality coming to their search engines. Meanwhile, Wolfram Alpha, described as a "computational knowledge engine," highlights how improving search may require something beyond a search engine.

The sky isn't falling and neither is the Global Positioning System, the U.S. Air Force said during a Twitter news conference. "No, the GPS will not go down," tweeted Col. Dave Buckman of the Air Force's Space Command. "GAO points out, there is potential risk associated with a degradation in GPS performance."

"The issue is under control. We are working hard to get out the word. The issue is not whether GPS will stop working. There's only a small risk we will not continue to exceed our performance standard," the Air Force official said.

Lately it seems I can't go anywhere without running into a gaggle of social media consultants bloviating about the wonders of social network marketing. Sure, you've seen 'em, too. Slick shake-and-bake "experts" promising to help you leverage the power of Twitter and Facebook to raise your profile and, inexplicably, boost your profits. But scratch the surface on most of these claims and they instantly crumble. Meanwhile, it seems the only people making any money in social media are the consultants themselves.

For anywhere between a few hundred and a few thousand bucks, you can hire a social media consultant to come to your office and put on a training seminar for your staff. They'll spend an hour or two pontificating about the power of social media to raise awareness of your brand and the magical benefits of building closer relationships with your customers in 140 characters or less. They'll probably even offer you a few "insider tips" based on their "deep expertise" in the field. The only problem? It's a load of bull.

There is an old computer industry adage that "software sells hardware." On June 6, the Palm Pre may again prove the truth in those words. Applications, or the lack of them, are likely to plan an important role in the Pre's relative success, or failure.

Apple, meanwhile, is expected to introduce new iPhones running its 3.0 operating system, perhaps only two days after the Pre's launch. Developers are already building applications for the new iPhone OS, diverting energy that Palm might otherwise harness.

After a government watchdog agency warned that the U.S. Global Positioning System might fail, potential customers may wonder whether buying a GPS device is still a good idea. In a word: Yes.

Any GPS outage is likely to develop over a period of years and the U.S Air Force, which manages the satellite navigation system, is under pressure to speed modernization efforts.

First Estonia. Then Georgia. Increasingly, the theoretical potential for cyberwar is becoming hard reality. One new report argues that the unchecked proliferation of cyber warfare weapons is comparable to that of nuclear warheads. At least one branch of the US military, United States Navy takes the threat seriously and monitors cyber threats on a daily basis.

To combat this growing threat Guidance Software announced on Monday a new proactive version of its classic digital forensic software, EnCase, already in use by government and law enforcement worldwide for conducting incident response investigations. By partnering with Bit9 and HBGary, Guidance Software believes EnCase CyberSecurity fills a future need for computer network defense, counterintelligence, and incident response-tasked government agencies. In adding threat and memory analytics, the Pasadena, California-based digital investigations company says government agencies will now be able to completely recover computers from malicious code attacks, proactively identify enterprise wide at-risk computers, combat evolving malware, and also conduct deep code analysis of suspicious binaries or processes.

The Palm Pre, supposed iPhone killer, is set to launch June 6 in the U.S., at post-rebate $199.99, and will only be available through Sprint, Palm said. Now the big question: Will this be enough to restore Palm's badly damaged reputation and, more importantly, give the iPhone a run for its market share?

Editor's Note: The U.S. Air Force has responded to concerns raised in this article.

The Global Positioning System faces the possibility of failures and blackouts, a federal watchdog agency has warned the U.S. Congress. Mismanagement by and underinvestment by the U.S. Air Force places the GPS at risk of failure in 2010 and beyond. The problem: Delays in launching replacement satellites, among other things.

Netbook leader Acer on Monday introduced a low-cost netbook that comes close in many aspects to matching the performance and user experience of much more expensive laptop computers. With its 11.6-inch screen, compared to the usual 10-inch or smaller netbook display, the Aspire One A0751h should be a pleasure to use.

The full-sized keyboard and LED-backlit screen may be larger than netbook users are accustomed to, but one thing about the new Acer will remain very pleasantly familiar: Price. With a list price of $350, the Aspire One A0751h near the bottom of netbook pricing.

Having read--and even written--that Wolfram Alpha is some sort of cyber wonderbrain, I must say that now that I am using it I feel a bit underwhelmed. I do not know what I was expecting, but an online Farmer's (and Geek's) Almanac isn't it.

Looking at the examples on the site, what WA seems to do best is pull up facts and try to piece them together. If you need to know about gravitational acceleration, which Wolfram Alpha tells me is "total field | 9.78936490256 m/s^2 (meters per second squared)" at my house, this is a great tool.

The Google outage confirms what everyone should already know: If it seems too good to be true, watch out! Google's failure is a lesson for everyone who is putting too many eggs in one basket, whether the basket is cloud computing or those who've ditched wired telephones for a wireless-only world.

I hate to say anything good about Apple's MobileMe service, God knows it still has problems, but Apple's approach to cloudiness is sound. I call it "Partly Cloudy."

The problem with Google is a lack of human contact. Not at the end of the process, where we humans consume a machine's idea of what we are interested in. That is too late. We need people at the beginning, where the information is gathered and developed.

Wolfram Research is trying to change that and tomorrow (May 15) you may get to see how they have done. Wolfram's new search tool, called Alpha, is a mix of human-selected and edited content mixed with more traditional search engine features.

Wouldn't it be great if, a few weeks after next month's WWDC, Apple maximum leader Steve Jobs returned--tanned, rested, healthy, and brandishing next-generation iPhones and other toys?

Dream on. As much as I would love to see this scenario play out, I have to side with my friend Robert Scoble.

In the months following the disclosure of what may be the largest data breach in US history, Robert O. Carr, chairman and CEO of Heartland, has come out swinging. Instead of going into a near-death spiral of damage control mitigating the revelation that 100 million customer records leaked during 2008, Carr has been pointing the finger at the payment industry itself for not going far enough with best practices. Heartland has taken advantage of several merchant associations to promote new initiatives that could revolutionize the payment card industry beyond PCI DSS compliance.

Carr has been quite frank when talking about the breach itself, as opposed to the relative silence from TJX after its data breach back in 2007. Heartland said early on that they believed someone placed a listener program in the stream where data in motion was not encrypted. When the Payments Processing Information Sharing Council (PPISC) met for the fist time this week in St. Pete Beach, Florida, Carr took the unusual step of handing out USBs with the malware code found on the Heartland system at the time of their breach as well as malware discovered through other data breach investigations in 2008 and 2009 so other payment processors could look for malware on their own systems. Carr said in his Q1 2009 Earnings Call on Thursday that other industries share security information like this, why can't the card processors?

Additionally, Heartland is in the process of developing a true end-to-end (E2E) encryption solution for its merchants. What's different is that Heartland wants to be the first payment processor to ensure that data remains encrypted all the way from the point of sale through the processing by the card company. Currently, processors must unencrypt customer credit card data on the last step due to legacy systems in place the card companies. Heartland hopes to offer their E2E service in the third quarter of this year.

Finally, Carr has been most outspoken against his competitors, some of whom he says tried to use the data breach against Heartland. There were serious repercussions from the breach: Both Visa and MasterCard removed Heartland from their lists of PCI DSS-certified processers, and at least MasterCard also imposed a hefty fine on banks using Heartland. The company also faces a class action lawsuit. Separately, Carr himself is under investigation from the SEC regarding a stock sale he made late in the 2008.

Last week, Heartland, which processes card data primarily from restaurants, gas stations, and hotel, was certified again as PCI DSS compliant by Visa, MasterCard, and Discover. "We hope that this will end once and for all the host of falsehoods and misleading statements that a few competitors have been using, admittedly with some success to scare merchants into leaving Heartland," Carr said in the earnings call.

Robert Vamosi is a risk, fraud, and security analyst for Javelin Strategy & Research and an independent computer security writer covering criminal hackers and malware threats.

Novatel's MiFi personal hotspot is an idea so good that I am shocked it is just now coming to market. And, for once, a cellular company has gotten the pricing right. Carry-around connectivity has taken a great leap forward.

Editor's note: In this post, blogger David Coursey offers his personal view of the ongoing Craigslist controversy. For the opposing view, see Brennon Slattery's Craigslist is No Pimp: Keep the Erotic Ads.

News that the Research In Motion BlackBerry Curve outsold iPhones in Q1 surprised many observers, but for those who follow the smartphone market closely, it makes a certain kind of sense. Push-button BlackBerry models like the Curve play well against the iPhone's most notable weakness: text entry. Among other things, this demonstrates why RIM would be wise to skip the consumer smartphone business and stick to what it does best--business handsets. And, in my opinion, that requires keypads, not touchscreens.

It is easy to understand why CEO Jim Balsillie is telling investors a sequel to RIM's touchscreen BlackBerry Storm is in the offing. Consumer handsets are a huge market, but it is not one I can imagine RIM will ever control.