US government Web sites hacked

In today's podcast: Smartphone shipments jump; US government Web sites hacked; and Apple preps iPhone with Wi-Fi for China.

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Smartphone shipments have recovered strongly from a slump during the economic downturn, with Nokia delivering the most units but Motorola showing the greatest gains among top vendors, research company Canalys said Monday. There were 55.2 million smartphones shipped worldwide in the first quarter of 2010, up 67 percent from a year earlierccording to Canalys. It was the steepest increase since the end of 2007 and represented an accelerating recovery from an economic slump that held growth to single digits for most of 2009. Falling prices, increasing acceptance for corporate use, and the growing selection of applications available in various app stores all are helping to boost the market for smartphones around the world. Carriers are helping the trend along because the more capable phones encourage the kinds of mobile activities, such as multimedia and social networking, that help them sell lucrative services.

Apple appears to have tweaked its iPhone to support a Chinese security protocol for wireless networks, as companies increasingly adopt Chinese government-backed technologies to break into the country's huge market. The move suggests Apple may soon launch a new version of the iPhone in China with Wi-Fi, a feature that regulations previously barred. Chinese regulators last month approved the frequency ranges used by a new Apple mobile phone with 3G and wireless LAN support, the Web site of China's State Radio Monitoring Center shows. The device appears to be an iPhone and uses GSM and the 3G standard WCDMA, just like iPhones currently offered in China by local carrier China Unicom.

Three Web sites belonging to the U.S. Department of the Treasury have been hacked to attack visitors with malicious software, security vendor AVG says. AVG researcher Roger Thompson discovered the issue Monday on three Web domains associated with the home page of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. As of late Monday, all three Web sites were still actively serving malicious software and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing Web site should be avoided until it's clear that they've been cleaned up, Thompson said. According to Thompson, hackers had added a small snippet of iframe HTML code that redirected visitors to a Web site in the Ukraine that then launched a variety of Web-based attacks based on a commercially available attack-kit called the Eleonore Exploit pack. The Ukrainian Web site was associated with similar attacks in the past. Those attacks targeted a handful of known software bugs, including flaws in Adobe's Reader software.

Google has invested in a startup company that claims to be able to predict the future. The company's investment arm, Google Ventures, has sunk an undisclosed sum into Recorded Future, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup that "offers customers new ways to analyze the past, present and the predicted future," according Google Ventures. Recorded Future's own Web site doesn't list any products for sale, but the company appears to have developed a data analytics technology that could be used to try to predict future stock market events or even terrorist activity, according to blog posts and videos on its site. The technology looks at how frequently an entity or event is referred to in the news and around the Web over a period of time, then uses that data to project how it might behave in the future. Google is expanding the investment arm and plans to put US$100 million into startups this year.

And those are the top headlines from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. This is Marc Ferranti in the New York bureau. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.