Week in review: Pirates and pupils

Microsoft is trying to lure users of bogus copies of Windows XP with an enticing offer: a free, licensed version of the operating system.

There's just one catch: Customers will have to fill out a counterfeit report with Microsoft and be able to provide the Windows disk they have, as well as some kind of receipt for their purchase. Those who don't have the disk or the receipt are eligible to buy a licensed copy online for $149.

The move is the latest in a series of expansions for the Windows Genuine Advantage program, which Microsoft quietly launched last September. The program, which runs software that verifies whether a particular copy of Windows is legitimately licensed, is the linchpin of a campaign by Microsoft to boost the number of paying customers among the millions of people that use Windows.

The Windows Genuine effort started as a purely voluntary program, but Microsoft has since been requiring validation for more and more customers who want to download software from the company.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is not letting U.S. schools off so lightly. Speaking to a group of journalists, Gates prefaced his remarks on technology trends with a warning that the United States is in grave danger of losing its economic advantages to fast-growing nations such as China, unless the country restores its lead in education and implements policies supporting growth.

Images: Bill Gates
with U2's Bono

"If you look at the trend 10 years ago, the U.S. and China were not that different in terms of the number of engineers graduated," Gates said. "Now we have one-quarter the number of engineers, and the trend is continuing, with the U.S. number going down, and China going up quite a bit...We need to improve our own game, to make sure own slice of the pie stays very large."

Gates is among a handful of technology executives who have issued periodic warnings that the United States is in danger of losing its mantle as high-tech center of the world as the skills of other countries catch up or even surpass those of American workers.

In other Microsoft news, the software maker is gearing up for next week's release of Windows Mobile 5, the next version of its operating system for cell phones and handhelds. The OS, code-named Magneto, is the latest in a string of software releases that highlight Microsoft's attempts to take on rivals including PalmSource and Nokia.

Viruses, phishes and flubs--oh my!
The prospect of finding a safe haven on the Net continues to be remote. The latest Sober worm spread rapidly earlier this week, making up about two-thirds of virus traffic on the Internet.

As of Tuesday, Sober.P accounted for 77 percent of all viruses detected by Sophos' threat-monitoring stations worldwide, the British security company said. At the same time, Kaspersky Lab, a Russian maker of antivirus software designed to combat such threats, described the worm's spread in Western Europe as an "epidemic."

Variants of Sober have been circulated since 2003, hitting corporate and home systems. The mass-mailing worm has continued to spread because people still open attachments in infected e-mail, despite warnings not to do so.

Meanwhile, phishers are increasingly using new methods to steal sensitive information from Internet users, according to data from Websense Security Labs. In recent months, Websense researchers detected a rise in schemes involving malicious programs known as keyloggers, according to a report released this week.

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The technology, which records the keystrokes of people using infected machines, could be designed to help phishers stay one step ahead of honest folk. In the past, attackers have relied mainly on e-mail messages that lure victims to malicious Web sites, where they are duped into disclosing the login information they use at banking sites and for other sensitive online accounts. The keylogger programs are built specifically to capture this login data and send them to the attackers.

Sensitive information can also be leaked by people you might think would know more about protecting it. Experts are warning people to be careful with electronic documents that contain sensitive data, after a breach in which classified U.S. military information thought to be blacked out in a PDF document was made visible.

The document in question was a report written after an investigation into the death of Italian citizen Nicola Calipari at a checkpoint in Iraq. It