Does it feel like everyone around you has a cold? Turns out that might be true, and Google has the data to prove it.

The search engine giant on Tuesday launched Google Flu Trends, which will provide up-to-date flu-related activity estimate for all 50 states in the U.S.

Google will combine flu-related queries entered into its search engine with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to track cases of the flu throughout the country.

"We found that there's a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week," Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebbi, Google software engineers, wrote in a blog post. "As a result, if we tally each day's flu-related search quer

The new drives round out a similar offering from Seagate on Monday, which teamed up with Dell and McAfee.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies on Tuesday introduced the Travelstar 5K500.B, a 500-Gbyte mobile drive that uses an encryption that the company believes will meet a forthcoming standard proposed by the Trusted Computing Group. Fujitsu, meanwhile, announced a pair of low-power drives, the MJA2 BH and MJA2 CH series; only the CH series ships with FDE capabilities.

On paper, all of the new drives from Fujitsu and Hitachi consume the same amount of power when writing to the disk, or 1.4 watts. (Fujitsu did not release a power specification fo

Emsi Software teamed up with German antivirus vendor Ikarus Software to put more protective power into its a-squared Anti-Malware 4.0 antivirus/antispyware utility ($39.95 direct). The product does a superb job of keeping malware from infesting a clean system. Unfortunately it also identifies some valid programs as malware, and its ability to clean malware from an infested system is below average.

He's not even in office yet, but President-Elect Barack Obama may already be in the throws of tech conflict. Our first Internet President, as he's being called, is a strong proponent of Net Neutrality and the openness of the Internet. In fact, this Internet presidency promises unheard of administrative transparency and the possibility that scads of data will be available online. That's good, right?

Not so fast. Some, like CNet's Michael Horowitz, think that there's already too much information out there. He's thinks some systems should simply cut the wires and take systems with sensitive data offline, clearly a position diametrically opposed to what our cyber president promises.

The recent disclosure that both the Obama and McCain camps' PCs were breached and th