Comcast just became the wireless Internet vendor to beat by offering 4G wireless Internet in Portland, Oregon. Leveraging Clearwire’s WiMax network, this move leaves LTE (Long-Term Evolution), the competing technology, a step behind.

The new service, called Comcast High-Speed 2go, offers speeds of up to 4Mbps. The Fast Pack Metro package is aggressively sold at an introductory rate of $49.99 a month, which also includes a 12Mbps home Internet service and a free Wi-Fi router. After the first year, the rate jumps to a still-competitive $73 per month. An additional $20 adds nationwide 3G data service to the package, provided by Sprint Nextel (the majority owner of Clearwire). Existing Comcast broadband customers can pick up the service for an additional $30 for local and $50 for nationwide.

If you haven’t heard about Google Voice, you will. If you’re not excited about it, you should be. This new Internet phone service offers a number of features that will change how both businesses and consumers view voice communications.

In a nutshell, Google Voice a front-end for all of your phones. It assigns you a new phone number which you can then use as your primary number. You then get to decide who gets routed to which of your phones, either individually or by using groups. Next, you can personalize voicemail greetings depending on the caller.

Not all botnets are organized in the same way. That's the conclusion of a report from Damballa which seeks to categorize the dominate structures. It attempts to explain why certain types of blocking and filtering will work against some botnets, and not for others.

"The 'hybrid' threat banner is often cast about," says Gunter Ollmann, VP of Research, Damballa, an enterprise security company specializing in botnet mitigation "But that label means nothing to teams tasked with defending the enterprise. By explaining the topologies (and their strengths and weaknesses) these teams can better visualize the threat."

The Star structure is the most basic and offers individual bots a direct communication with the Command and Control (CnC) server. It can be visualized in a star-like pattern. However, by providing direct communications with one CnC server the botnet creates a single point of failure. Take out the CnC server and the botnet expires. Ollmann says the Zeus DIY botnet kit, out of the box, is a star pattern, but that botmasters often upgrade, making it multiserver.

"In most cases, particular botnets can be classed as a member of just one CnC topology--but it s often down to the botnet master which one they choose."

Multi- Server is the logical extension of the Star structure using multiple CnC servers to feed instructions to the individual bots. This design, says Ollmann, offers resiliency should any one CnC server go down. It also requires sophisticated planning in order to execute. Srizbi is a classic example of a multi-server CnC topology botnet.

The Hierarchical botnet structure is highly centralized and are often associated with multi-stage botnets--for example botnets who’s bot agents have worm propagation capabilities--and utilize super-node-based peer-to-peer CnC. That means no one bot is aware of the location of any other bots, often making it hard for security researchers to gage the overall size of the botnet. This structure, says Damballa, is best suited for leasing or selling parts of the botnet to others. The downside is that instructions take longer to reach their targets so some kinds of attacks impossible to coordinate.

Random is the reverse of the Hierarchical structure. This botnet is decentralized and using multiple communication paths. The downside is that each bot can enumerate others in the neighborhood, and often communication lags between clusters of bots, again making some attacks impossible to coordinate. Storm would fit Damballa's Random model, as would botnets based off the Conficker malware

The report, Botnet Communication Topologies: Understanding the intricacies of botnet Command-and-Control, also ranked different methods of fast flux, the method by which a CnC server changes its domains on the fly. Damballa found that Domain Flux, a process changing and allocating of multiple Fully Qualified Domain Names to a single IP address or CnC infrastructure, is the most resilient to discovery and mitigation.

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.

The HTC Hero opens up a whole world of multimedia content with support for Flash 9, intensifying the spotlight on Apple’s lack of cooperation with Adobe in bringing Flash to the iPhone.

Things are getting exciting in the mobile phone arena. First we get the beefed-up iPhone 3GS, and now we have a new Android phone. Up until now Android had no killer app to challenge the iPhone with. The newest HTC phone has Flash 9 capability with Flash 10 coming later this year, giving it a competitive edge.

People often turn to me for advice regarding what anti-virus package to get. Usually I recommend McAfee or AVG, but Security Essentials will be my go-to anti-malware package once it’s released from beta. For small-business and home users, the price, performance, and ease-of-use of MSE can’t be beat.

This little app has everything a malware app should. It’s virtually free of bloat, has a small memory footprint and a clear simple interface with just the right amount of control.

The new iPhone 3GS is a conservative, yet intelligent addition to the iPhone family. Its faster processor and greater operating memory are exactly what the doctor ordered. However, the lack of a keyboard, UMA and better battery features allows the competition an edge with business users.

If Apple could tolerate one more SKU, the iPhone 3GS-B, it would sharply cut into RIM’s remaining share of the smartphone pie. The "B" would stand for business, of course, and Apple stands to benefit considerably from more aggressively pursuing business users. Apple’s profits could improve, not only from greater market share, but also because business users are less concerned with initial purchase price.

Talk about a turnaround. It's always hard to recognize the larger, slow-moving paradigm shifts as they happen. But after a decade of bad press regarding its commitment to software security, Microsoft seems to have turned the tide. Redmond is getting consistent security accolades these days, often from the very critics who used to call it out. Many of the world's most knowledgeable security experts are urging their favorite software vendors to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft.

Haters will always continue hating, but the technical press is giving a lot of favorable coverage to Microsoft's successful efforts to make itself a computer software security leader. Here are some recent examples:

Opera has launched a new Web browser in an attempt to gain market share. Dubbed Unite, the new browser offers some game-changing features, but tries a little too hard to compete with existing social networks.

Adobe’s Acrobat.com suite of collaborative applications is just out of Beta and features word processing, web-conferencing, PDF Creation, and File Storage apps. A quick test-drive shows promise, but reveals a lack a cohesiveness and key applications still in Beta.

Acrobat.com consists of five applications: Buzzword, Connect-Now, Create PDF, Share, and My Files, which are word processing, Web conferencing, PDF conversion, file sharing and file storage applications, respectively. Spreadsheet and presentation applications are also available, but not yet officially released.

While current netbooks are already rapidly capturing the attention and credit cards of savvy travelers, the addition of multi-touch support in Windows 7 could be the spark that sets off a firestorm of netbook purchases later this year.

Touch is one of the most exciting, yet least discussed features of Windows 7. Although most people associate multi-touch features with Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch products, the idea has existed for years and Microsoft conceptualized multi-touch for the Microsoft Surface tabletop computer as far back as 2001. If you use an iPhone, then you already know how to use multi-touch. If you already own a netbook, you’ll want to hock it on Craigslist when the Windows 7 netbooks featuring multi-touch displays hit the market.

This article was updated at 12:16 on Friday, June 12, to correct the Windows 7 Professional version information.

People love to pick on Microsoft, and often rightly so. The software giant is directly responsible for numerous security holes, endless patching, Bob, Clippy, and Windows Vista. It is so easy and fun to pick on Microsoft that people often simply parrot whatever criticisms seem to be in vogue. But one criticism I'm just plain tired of hearing is how Microsoft should pare down Windows to just one edition.

I know I'm cruisin' for some abusin' at the hands of the Mac fanatics today, because twice in one morning I've felt compelled to bring a little skepticism to the exuberant reporting surrounding the latest developments from Apple. This time, all the major tech outlets are credulously reporting on this morning's press release from Apple, which heralds the runaway success of Safari 4 on the basis of 11 million downloads in three days.

Now, I'm not doubting Apple's numbers. Why would I? But as someone with three Macs at home, I couldn't help but notice that Apple pushed Safari 4 out as an automatic update to all of its users this week. Yesterday, all three of the Macs in my household received the update, and we don't even use Safari. (We prefer Firefox.)

In the wake of this week's WWDC keynote, in which Apple announced that new MacBook Pro laptops will finally include an SD slot, the tech press is all aflutter about what they seem to think is a new possibility: booting from SD. Sorry to break it to you all, but this isn't a new idea, and many PCs have been doing it for years.

First, full disclosure: I'm not a Windows fanboy; In fact, I use a Mac as my primary PC. And I'm just as glad as the next guy to see that, should I decide to buy another MacBook Pro in the future, it will actually be able to read the card that comes out of my digital camera without the aid of a USB card reader.

Got a four-year-old Mac? Forget the newest version of OS X; Apple’s Snow Leopard will only be supported on Intel CPUs. Got a PC from 2001? Windows 7 just might run on it. I tested a below-spec PC with the latest version of Windows and saw surprising results.

If you have a PC and you want the upcoming Microsoft OS, but don’t want to buy a new computer, Microsoft has your back. The minimum specifications listed on the Windows 7 RC download page are a 1 GHz Processor, 1 GB RAM, and 16GB of free hard disk space. This means if you have a computer that is more than a few years old, you can still get some functionality from the latest OS rolling out of Redmond. Intel hit the 1 GHz processor mark on March 8 2000, which means theoretically Windows 7 could run on computers over 9 years old! Since Microsoft is known for understating their hardware requirements, I grabbed an old PC out of retirement and put it to test.

Macs are often criticized for the high price of their hardware. This so-called Apple tax is the premium that Apple computers usually cost over comparably equipped PCs. But since the company dropped prices on its laptop line yesterday, that difference is now smaller than ever.

Of course, Mac enthusiasts might even say the Apple tax never existed, since no MacBook Pro competitor has the aluminum unibody construction or multi-touch track pad that the MacBook Pro does.

Today at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple announced a variety of improvements to its OS X operating system. In the new version, Snow Leopard, users will at last be able to use Microsoft Exchange without requiring the aid of outside software such as Microsoft Entourage.

In a demo of the new features, Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Bertrand Serlet explained that the three built-in contact, scheduling, and e-mail apps will now feature Exchange configuration as a standard option. Users can simply enter their Exchange e-mail address and password, and Snow Leopard will automatically configure all three apps at once.

It doesn't seem like it, but 20 years ago today, the dot-com era was born. On June 8, 1989, Brad Templeton, started Clarinet.com, an online newspaper business that many consider to be the company that started it all.

"ClariNet was the first company created to use the internet as its platform for business, and as such this event has a claim at being the birth of the 'dot-com' concept which so affected the world in the two intervening decades.," said Templeton, who for many years has been president and chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I feel like a non-Ivy League version of Prof. Paul Krugman whenever I complain about the absence of a national plan for securing the Internet. I don't have the doctorate, but I have plenty of ideas that I want to share with the White House. And like Krugman, I often think the White House hasn't gone far enough or I resign myself to the fact that, without some terrible disaster to spur us into action, we'll never get the level of Internet security we need.

But this time I am impressed. If you haven't read Obama's Cyberspace Policy Review [pdf], then you probably don't know what I'm talking about. Regardless of your politics, this is easily the best mission statement on the subject I've ever seen. Kudos to the Office of the White House and all of the people involved in creating this document. I thought the U.S. government would never get it, but they do!

One of the more surreal moments at this week's Computex show in Taipei must have been a chat during which Microsoft's OEM boss laid down the law. Steve Guggenheimer, a friend of long standing, told the crowd that netbooks don’t really exist.

If anybody can pull this off, he's the guy. A much-traveled and well-liked Microsoft exec, Guggs now has the job of protecting Microsoft's longest-lived cash cow, the revenue it gets from selling operating systems to hardware vendors for delivery with new PCs.

Even as they write glowing first reviews of the Palm Pre smartphone, industry pundits are privately saying Palm faces a huge uphill battle to win market share. So, while exciting the excitable will bring big Pre sales this weekend, what happens next?

The Apple rumor mill is foaming with loose talk that Steve Jobs will return to the fray as early as Monday to introduce next-generation iPhones. If they appear that early--I'd been expecting early July--it will tell us several things:

New Harvard Business research data seems to prove something many had already figured out: Twitter is a broadcast medium, not a conversation. So how is an essentially one-way conversation considered to be a social network? Does that standard also make television and radio into social networks, too?

Across the 300,000 users studied, the median number of lifetime Tweets is one. That means half of Twitter users tweet once every 74 days. Which is also about the churn rate for new Twitter users, many of whom quickly leave the service. Seemingly after tweeting only once.

The first thing I learned from Google Squared is that I don't exist. The second, that Secobarbital is really a type of fish, not a sedative drug, as I've long understood it to be. Thirdly, I learned how hard it can be to communicate to users the best use for a new search technology. Especially when it's not ready for prime time.

What Google Squared, which the company has just placed into live beta, does best is present a list of facts, product names, tropical fish, and other grade school stuff.

Someone at Palm should probably be kicking themselves: The first reviews of its much-hyped Palm Pre aren't bad, but they are not incredibly good, either. This sets a pretty low bar for what coming competitors must achieve to appear more advanced than Palm’s newest device.

I'd expected the Pre to make me at least a little envious. But our week of testing with the Palm Pre actually makes me glad I'm an iPhone user. I have twice the memory, limited multitasking (plays music while I do something else), and gobs of useful applications to choose from. I've learned to live without a teensy keyboard.

Is Larry Ellison planning to get into the netbook business? The Oracle boss is hinting in that direction and, while it makes little sense, with Ellison anything is possible, at least to talk about. Delivering is another story.

Getting into the netbook business would finally allow Ellison to offer the "$500 PC" he promised his mom more than a decade ago. Today, such a device would more likely be a $350 unit and, if Ellison gets his way, would be built around Java, which becomes an Oracle technology through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

Browser proliferation presents a big challenge for web developers, who need to know how their pages and sites perform across multiple browsers and operating systems.

Adobe Labs is offering a free preview of its BrowserLab, an online service capable of rendering web pages as they will appear in a variety of browser environments, allowing developers to make compatibility changes where necessary.

There's good news from Taiwan's Computex trade show this week: The future has not been suspended because of the weak economy. Google's Android OS precipitated a flood of news and new Intel chips commanded the spotlight.

Intel made several announcements including low power chips intended to drive a new generation of (pick three) super-thin notebooks, super-powerful netbooks, or Apple MacBook Air-killers.

Suppose someone lifted up the body of your car and slid a whole new automobile, minus the body, underneath. Would it still be the same car? Similarly, is it fair to compare today's Palm to the Palm of old in predicting the Palm Pre's future?

I don't think so. If anything, Palm's glorious past clouds our ability to predict its future--to the "new" Palm's benefit, I should add.

One thing I've noticed since I started playing with Microsoft's Bing "decision engine" is that there isn't very much "there" there. And the only decision Bing seems to care about helping me make is a pretty simple one: Buy it here or buy it there, but again there isn't a lot of, well, you know.

Even if Bing knows about the product I am interested in, which so far it most often does not, Bing then makes a fool of itself. It's "cashback" feature is most often, again in my experience, associated with laughably high prices. Great, the product costs 20 percent more and Microsoft will give me 5 percent back. What sort of deal is that? Call it getting Binged.

While it’s true that Apple has significantly grown its share of the desktop operating system market since the release of Windows Vista in November of 2006, the company's market share remains below 10 percent, and it actually dropped in Q1 2009, according to Gartner’s Worldwide PC Shipment report.

To most observers, it’s fairly clear that Vista’s failings gave people a reason to take a fresh look at the Mac. And in its own right, OS X has become a robust, reliable, and feature-rich OS. It appeals both to the techie who is attracted to its UNIX underpinnings and the neophyte who wants a computer that just works. Additionally, Apple has always appealed to professionals in audio, video, graphic arts, and publishing. Basically, the Mac appeals to people who are willing to pay for something that is a cut above.