A spam botnet brought down four months ago, which was once capable of pumping out almost four billion spam messages a day, remains very much dead, two of the companies behind the takedown said.

That determination, announced late Friday by Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab representatives, contradicted published reports, including one from Ars, that claimed the network of infected computers had been resurrected. There's no evidence that control of Kelihos, which also went by the name Hlux, has returned to the control of its creators, the companies said.

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A group of former FDA scientists who spoke out against the agency's allegedly flawed device-approval process are suing the feds for intercepting Gmail and Yahoo Mail messages by installing spy programs on their work computers. Although the computers were owned by the government, the plaintiffs say they were explicitly granted the right to use them for personal purposes.

Back in January 2009, nine scientists known as the "FDA Nine" anonymously wrote to the leader of then President-elect Barack Obama's transition team "pleading with him to restructure the agency," the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. Among other things, the Food and Drug Administration scientists complained that the agency approved devices in a flawed process that ignored science, and was driven by political lobbying.

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Apple updated iBooks Author to version 1.0.1 on Friday afternoon, the only change being an update to the software's controversial end user license agreement. The updated EULA now specifically only applies distribution restrictions to the interactive .ibooks format files generated by the app.

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The 2009 flu pandemic, although not especially deadly, revealed just how quickly a new influenza virus could elude surveillance and spread internationally. It also left health experts eying the disease that many fear could cause the next pandemic: H5N1, the avian flu. According to World Health Organization standards, that virus is phenomenally deadly, killing about half the people that contract it. So far, however, almost all the known cases came from people who were in direct contact with poultry; the flu doesn't seem to spread among mammals.  

The great unanswered question was whether we could continue to rely on H5N1's limited transmission. Recently, some researchers set out to answer that question, and came up with a disturbing answer: it was relatively easy to evolve a form of H5N1 that spread in ferrets, another mammalian species, without it losing any of its virulence. Two labs identified the exact mutations that enabled this new host range, and were preparing to publish their results in Science and/or Nature. At that point, the US government's National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) responded by requesting that the journals delay publication and limit the content released. That, in turn, prompted the viral research community to put a two-month hold on further research.

That's where things stood on February 2, when the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a panel discussion on H5N1 and other dual-use research (research that has both public benefit and weapons applications). The panel included two members of the NSABB, representatives from both Science and Nature, a number of virus researchers, a public health expert, and a member of the Defense Department, and they spent two hours in a lively and sometimes contentious discussion of how to handle our current situation.

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Megaupload boss Kim Dotcom (read our in-depth profile) was denied bail on Thursday by a New Zealand court. Dotcom insisted that he had no desire to flee the country and merely wanted to be with his pregnant wife and their three young children. But US attorneys argued the Dotcom posed a severe flight risk, and the court rejected Dotcom's bail request.

In court testimony, Dotcom described the dramatic raid on his home by law enforcement. Dotcom told the court that he didn't know the people invading his home were police officers, so he fled to a secure "panic room." Once he realized they were police officers, he decided to stay where he was rather than risk surprising officers and getting shot.

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Anger at last month's decision by the European Union and 22 of its member states to sign the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has led to widespread protests, hacked Web sites, and legislators backing away from the treaty.

The anti-ACTA protests that saw Polish politicians don Guy Fawkes masks in parliament have borne fruit. After experiencing a considerable backlash in Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk has suspended ratification of the controversial agreement, acknowledging that the consultation surrounding it was inadequate and that he approached it from a "20th century perspective."

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Back in the long-ago days of the 2010 holiday season, it looked like THQ had a hit on its hands with its out-of-left-field uDraw Game Tablet, a slate-like controller that used a stylus to let players draw on the TV. The company sold 1.7 million of them to Wii owners by early 2011, beating expectations and leading some to speculate that the uDraw might be the biggest game control revolution this side of the Kinect.

Buoyed by the initial success, THQ quickly cranked out uDraw tablets for the Xbox 360 and PS3, and got to work licensing new compatible software from big, family-friendly brands like Kung Fu Panda, Spongebob Squarepants, and Disney Princesses. But that expansion now looks like a colossal mistake, as excess uDraw inventory was a major factor in the huge financial loss reported for the company's recent 2011 holiday quarter.

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Apple will be able to sell its iPad 2 with 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4 via its online store in Germany after all, thanks to a temporary extension courtesy of a German court. As noted by the BBC, an appeals court lifted the ban on certain iOS devices just after Apple was forced to remove them from its German online store earlier on Friday. Still, not all is going Apple's way, as a Mannheim Regional Court also ruled on Friday that Apple had infringed upon a patent owned by Motorola that allows devices to sync e-mail across devices wirelessly, which may spell out changes for iCloud users in Germany.

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Anonymous has begun taunting its police pursuers in ever-more aggressive ways, upping the ante today by releasing an internal FBI conference call in which agents from across the country and police in the UK share status updates on their investigations of the group—and reveal that major new action is coming soon.

Much of the call is taken up by a UK investigator from the Metropolitan Police who comes across as eager to curry favor with the FBI. The biggest way this is being done? UK investigators are intentionally trying to delay the court cases against Ryan Cleary and Jake "Topiary" Davis, two UK Anons arrested last year, for up to eight weeks as a favor to the FBI's New York field office.

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For the first time, the NFL is providing live streaming video of the Super Bowl, both on Web browsers and through a smartphone application. Now you'll have any number of viewing options and combinations: sit in front of an HDTV with a laptop or tablet to gain DVR controls and extra camera angles not available on the main NBC feed. If you can't get to a TV or browser (or if someone is blocking your view at the local watering hole) just whip out your smartphone and watch the game in miniature—assuming you're a Verizon customer and have a network connection that's fast enough.

As a Massachusetts resident and Patriots fan, I will likely be too nervous and anxiety-ridden to operate any type of technology once the Super Bowl starts around 6:30 PM ET Sunday. But if you're a huuuugggeeee fan who can't get enough coverage, your best bet is probably sitting on the couch with a laptop or tablet, as the NFL says the live stream will be available in tablet browsers, which likely means both the iPad and Android tablets.

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ActiveState has released a major new version of the Komodo integrated development environment (IDE). The update, which is called Komodo 7, introduces several useful new features and support for additional programming languages.

Komodo is a high-end commercial development tool for programmers who work with scripting languages such as Python and Ruby. It's especially well-suited for developing large-scale Web applications. It supports code completion and breakpoint debugging for a relatively broad number of programming languages.

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Mozilla is developing a push notification system for the Firefox Web browser. It will allow users to receive notifications from websites without having to keep those sites open in their browser. The system will also be able to relay push notifications to mobile devices.

The project is part of Mozilla's broader effort to ensure that the Web is a competitive platform that can match the capabilities of native applications. Introducing support for push notifications will help to close the gap, because the feature is one of the major advantages that native mobile clients have historically offered over the browser for accessing Web services.

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AMD today laid out its plans for the next couple of years at its Financial Analyst Day. The plans are a mix of familiar and logical extensions of the company's current products, but contained some more surprising elements: specifically, AMD opened the door to future processors that include ARM CPUs.

The underlying themes to AMD's plans are faster iteration—a GPU-like 18-24 months between CPU designs, compared to the current 3 or more years—achieved by moving away from custom designs and depending more heavily on synthesized chip layouts, and lower power usage. This in turn will give AMD more flexibility to integrate CPUs and GPUs—and potentially other co-processors too—into what the company calls APUs (accelerated processing units).

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The Infinity Puzzle sounds like one of those wooden gadgets that you can play with for a few minutes before wanting to hurl it across the room in frustration, but the infinity puzzle of this book's title actually refers to a mathematical quandary that stumped particle physicists for the first half of last century. The story of how physics moved beyond this roadblock has now been told by Frank Close, a distinguished theoretical physicist as well as a very apt storyteller.

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Windows Phone 8 will be based on the same kernel as Windows 8, and will support multicore processors, NFC, and full device encryption according to a leaked video seen by PocketNow. This in turn inspired Paul Thurrott to reveal a little more about the software too. In the video intended only for internal consumption by Microsoft and its partners, Joe Belfiore, director of the Windows Phone program, describes the extensive features that Windows Phone 8, codenamed "Apollo," will contain.

Addressing widespread concerns about Windows Phone's mid-range hardware specification, Apollo will support processors with up to four cores, four different (and unspecified) screen resolutions, NFC for contactless payment, and removable microSD storage.

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Federal authorities said Thursday they had seized and shuttered 307 domains, 16 allegedly engaged in unauthorized live sports streaming and the remainder accused of selling fake professional sports merchandise, including National Football League paraphernalia.

The seizure, the biggest to date under the Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown known as Operation in Our Sites, (PDF) brings the total to more than 650 domains shuttered since the program began in June of 2010. The latest seizures, which quietly began in October, were announced days ahead of Super Sunday, when the New England Patriots play the New York Giants in the NFL Super Bowl, one of the world’s most popular sporting events.

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When the US Supreme Court decided last year to extend full First Amendment protections to video games, many likely thought that was the last word on potential legal assaults on the medium. That's not the case though, as an Oklahoma lawmaker has now proposed a special tax to be focused on "violent video games."

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