In a study released by Secure Computing on Friday, the amount of spam citing Gov. Sarah Palin topped her opponent, Sen. Joe Biden, by a ratio of 5 to 4 during the month of September. But in a top-of-the-ticket comparison, spam using the name of Sen. Barack Obama easily topped the use of his opponent, Sen. John McCain, by 6 to 1.

What does this say? That spammers are continuing to use the most provocative names and subjects as possible, to lure users into opening the source email. A "surge" of Obama spam was apparently timed for around Sept. 3, about the time of the Republican National Convention.

Among the promotional videos to watch are an overall recap of what the new features will include (hosted by none other than Xbox Live GM Marc Whitten and Xbox Live corporate vice president John Schappert), as well as videos specifically showing off the new friends features, and how the Avatars work. That Avatar video, by the way, has the tag-line "Dress yourself up, or go a little wil

The most nefarious and crafty criminals are the ones who operate completely under the radar. In the computing world security breaches happen all the time, and in the best cases the offenders get tracked down by the FBI or some other law enforcement agency.

But it's the ones who go uncaught and unidentified (those who we didn't highlight in our Cyber Crime Hall Fame that are actually the best. Attempting to cover your tracks is Law-Breaking 101; being able to effectively do so, that's another story altogether.

When a major cyber crime remains unsolved, though, it probably also means that those of us outside the world of tech crime solving may never even know the crime occurred.

These are some of the top headline-worthy highlights in the world of

With the latest edition of its security suite, Trend Micro aims to increase protection, reduce bother for the user, and do it all using fewer system resources. Trend Micro Internet Security Pro v2 (Trend Pro) is a significant improvement over last year's edition. Its features hang together better, some user-interface oddities are fixed, and it recovered from installation problems much more handily than version 1.