Reader's Choice: iPhone, Google, Security & More - Page 2

Page 2 of 2

Malware comes to Facebook

Facebook retained its usual hot spot in the news all year. But once it mixed with security news, reader interest about the social networking darling glowed white hot.

When Facebookers realized they had unwittingly sent spam to their friends on the site, they started to pay attention to security issues in social networking and security.

As we noted, security researchers discovered that, similarly to previous worms in Facebook, a growing number of users had unknowingly begun downloading malware that sent out messages to their Facebook friends. Those messages urged them to click on videos uploaded to either Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) Picasa photo-sharing site or to a shared video in the Google Reader RSS feed aggregation site. But instead of videos, they received more malware.

That news, along with tips to avoid the Koobface virus on Facebook, became one of InternetNews.com's most passed-around stories this year.

iPhone mania

Enterprises also wondered if Apple's iPhone would eventually make it into the enterprise -- then noted how quickly support had gravitated to the phone, albeit unofficially in many companies.

Small wonder that Apple would jump to a 17 percent share of the U.S. smartphone market in August, up from an 11 percent slice only two months before, according to NPD Group. (Did we mention it was the year of smartphone stories?)

Other major topics in the realm of hardware kept readers commenting and coming back. You were especially interested in AMD's travails -- and its successes, such as its Cinema 2.0 super fast chip.

The political Web

In addition to Apple's 3G debut, which had fans salivating over its arrival this year, the political Web and coverage of candidates dominated with readers.

That interest spiked even further when security woes reared their ugly heads yet again. There was the big revelation that both the Obama and McCain presidential campaigns suffered network breaches, as well as the Pentagon, which was followed by new calls for President-elect Obama to elevate cybersecurity in the nation's homeland defenses.

Mike Elgan, a contributing columnist, wrote a piece wondering what might happen if China's attempts at censorship during the summer Olympics might succeed. Readers responded in like words when Elgan wrote that "China is employing an unprecedented level of state-of-the-art digital technology to suppress media freedom. For the sake of humanity, let's hope Beijing's Orwellian IT experiment fails."

And then there was Microsoft

The world's largest software company will always see a lot of interest, given how widespread its products are within the industry.

But could a little schadenfreude have been at work when one of our stories -- covering a lawsuit over the troubled Vista operating system -- became one of our readers' favorites this year?

[cob:In_Focus]As Stuart Johnston reported for InternetNews.com, Intel officials may have been pleased that Microsoft lowered standards for obtaining the company's Windows Vista Capable logo program sticker, but the same couldn't be said for HP's execs.

According to previously unseen e-mails in the ongoing class-action lawsuit against Microsoft, executives at HP were hopping mad about Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) decision to certify that computers running Intel's 915 graphics chipset were capable of running Vista.

HP's beef with Microsoft? "The chipset was not capable of supporting Windows Vista's new device driver model," Stuart wrote.

Readers showed they were just as interested in Vista's upcoming successor, Windows 7, which got its coming out party in 2008 at two major Microsoft developer conferences.

InternetNews.com would later report, exclusively, that Windows would likely get its debut in June 2009.

Stay tuned in 2009 as that page-turner unfolds in court and tech's next round of stories hit the transom.