A so-called "premium" service would let consumers see movies on TV without waiting as long as the typical three to four months for DVDs or cable companies' $4 or so on-demand showings.

Time Warner Inc. Chief Financial Officer John Martin told the Goldman Sachs conference in New York last week that the company's Warner Bros. studio expects to begin tests on the service later this year. He said he expected the offering to be priced at $20 to $30 per viewing.

Panda Security's third-quarter report also found that 50 percent of all spam came from 10 countries, with India, Brazil, and Russia as the top three sources.

Among the countries with the most Trojan attacks in the third quarter, Taiwan led the list, followed by Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Poland, and Spain.

Another key former Sun Microsystems engineer is leaving Oracle. This time it is Jeff Bonwick the leader of the team that created ZFS, the file system in the Solaris operating system.

Oracle has witnessed the departure of some recognizable engineering talent, including James Gosling, Tim Bray, and DTrace co-creators Adam Leventhal and Bryan Cantrill, among others.

Java creator James Gosling said a key part of his decision to leave Oracle was that his decicion making power over Java had been severely restricted.

The FBI now wants to require all encrypted communications systems to have backdoors for surveillance, according to a New York Times report.

According to the proposal, any company doing business in the States could not create an encrypted communication system without having a way for the government to order the company to decrypt it.

Despite that, the FBI is saying that its spying capabilities could be degraded unless the Congress requires companies using encryption to remake their current systems so that the companies have some way to spy on the communications.

Due to the highly targeted nature of the Stuxnet worm and a large concentration of infections in Iran, analysts speculated that it may have been launched by a major government in an effort to sabotage Iran's controversial Bushehr power plant.

The Stuxnet worm is designed to infect the programmable logic controllers in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that are manufactured by Siemens.

Iran's government has been purging the Stuxnet malware from computers at Bushehr but says that the major systems of the plant haven't been damaged.

Apple really, really, really wants exclusive rights to the word "Pod," in names for tech products, the company has argued in an 873-page legal brief filed earlier this week.

Apple is reportedly arguing that a video projector with the word "Pod" in its name would cause confusion with its own iPod products.

A lawyer representing Sector Labs tells the publication there's a growing trend of dominant tech firms trying to assume ownership of ordinary words.

Facebook went offline for the second time in two days yesterday. The Thursday outage--which lasted more than two hours for some users--is a tale of a database control gone awry and illustrates the need for effective testing and change control procedures.

Ultimately, Facebook was forced to shut the site down and take the affected database cluster offline to break the loop.

The Facebook outage was caused by implementing a configuration value on the live Web site without proper testing and validation.

Are you the victim of frequent Rickrolls? The time-honored, and now passe trend of being tricked into thinking you were seeing one video and ending up seeing a rendition of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" instead?

Install it, and it will do a quick check on the page, as it's loading, to spot Astley's video and keep it from playing.

Sony informed consumers this week that some counterfeit PlayStation 3 controllers could ignite or explode when used.

The company did recommend that consumers stick with its own wireless controllers, which are available from a number of reputable retail outlets.

A free-to-play "massively multiplayer online virtual world" themed around the King of Pop is due to launch on PC next year, publisher SEE Virtual Worlds announced today.

Planet Michael is described by SEE as "a massive social gaming experience" with "collaborative in-game activities," set in "an immersive virtual space themed after iconic visuals drawn from Michael's music, his life and the global issues that concerned him."