Stuxnet. Acanthamoeba. Giant Virus May Be Ocean's Largest. Spotify hits milestone with 1 million subscribers. 8 March 2011Last updated at 11:20 Spotify's founders Martin Lorentzon (left) and Daniel Ek are in the middle of a $100m fund-raising Online music service Spotify has announced that it now has one million paying subscribers across Europe.
News of the milestone comes as Spotify continues a fund-raising from investors in advance of a launch in the US. The Anglo-Swedish company has 6.67 million users, the majority of whom use a free service subsidised by adverts. Spotify's profitability depends on users switching to premium services that remove adverts and allow listeners to use smartphones. The company announced on its website's blog: "It seems like only yesterday we were hatching ideas for a new music service in a tiny office-cum-apartment with a broken coffee machine. "So it's with a sense of real pride and excitement that we can announce a new milestone today, having welcomed our millionth paying subscriber to the service Spotify pays royalties each time a song is played on its service.
Security researchers discover 'indestructible' botnet. 30 June 2011Last updated at 11:34 Cracking the TDL-4 botnet is going to be hard, say security experts.
More than four million PCs have been enrolled in a botnet security experts say is almost "indestructible". The botnet, known as TDL, targets Windows PCs and is difficult to detect and shut down. Code that hijacks a PC hides in places security software rarely looks and the botnet is controlled using custom-made encryption.
Security researchers said recent botnet shutdowns had made TDL's controllers harden it against investigation. The 4.5 million PCs have become victims over the last three months following the appearance of the fourth version of the TDL virus. The changes introduced in TDL-4 made it the "most sophisticated threat today," wrote Kaspersky Labs security researchers Sergey Golovanov and Igor Soumenkov in a detailed analysis of the virus. A botnet is a network of computers that have been infected by a virus that allows a hi-tech criminal to use them remotely. Ancient Virus Found Hiding Out in Finch Genome.
The hepatitis B virus and its ilk have been around for a long, long time.
A newly uncovered "viral fossil" buried deep in the genome of the zebra finch indicates that the hepatitis B family of viruses—known as hepadnaviruses—originated at least 19 million years ago. Together with recent findings on other viruses, the work suggests that all viruses may be much older than thought. No one knows exactly where or when viruses originated. They don't leave fossils, so scientists have begun scouring the DNA of various organisms, looking for evidence of ancient infections. Based on fragments of viral genes found in the DNA of bats and wallabies, for example, researchers have deduced that relatives of the Ebola and Marburg viruses began infecting mammals tens of millions of years ago. The hepadnavirus discovery came about almost by chance. Feschotte and his postdoc, Clément Gilbert, set about trying to figure out how long ago the virus entered the finch genome.