According to anti-virus software provider Kaspersky Lab, a Trojan called SabPub — or more formally, Backdoor.OSX.SabPub.a — has recently been spreading via Java and could be infecting computers when people open email messages with suspicious links that direct users to malware.

“The Flashback and the SabPub Trojans are totally different,” in a statement made by Alex Gostev, chief security expert of Kaspersky Lab. “SabPub is classic backdoor Trojan, so it opens full access to a victim’s system for attackers. Flashback and its known variants is downloader and clickjacking bot, which means it conducts click fraud scam by hijacking people’s search engine results inside their web browsers.”

That said, the latest malware has the potential to reach far more computers than the Flashback Trojan.

“The latest version of the SabPub Trojan can infect more people than previous versions of this malware, which appeared earlier this year,” Gostev said. “In February, SabPub was exploiting a Microsoft Word vulnerability, which was fixed long time ago. The latest version of SabPub uses the Java exploit to spread infection in a more effective way because the Java exploit is delivered via a drive by download, which occurs when people click on URLs with malware via email.”

Gostev also noted that SabPub is also being used to attack specific targets: “It would seem that the attackers have an extremely select list of victims that is not very large.”

Although Mac users may think they are safe from viruses, Kaspersky Lab noted that before 2012 about 300 variants of Mac malware had been detected. Now, however, more than 70 have been detected in the past three months.

Last week, Apple released a security patch for Java that prevents the Flashback Trojan — called “Flashfake” — from exploiting the vulnerability to infect computers. Since then, Kaspersky Lab said it has seen a decline in the number of active bots for Flashfake, dropping from more than 650,000 infected computers to just 237,000.

However, the decrease in infected bots does not mean the botnet is on its way out. The numbers represent the active bots connected to Flashfake during the past few days – it is not the equivalent of the exact number of infected machines. Infected computers that were inactive during Easter weekend would not be communicating with Flashfake, which makes them not appear as an infected bot, Kaspersky said.

Gostev advises that all Mac users stay up to date with their Apple software: “We recommend users update their systems immediately with the latest security update from Apple.”

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner made the announcement on an analyst call, and confirmed that the company has already built the infrastructure and is ready to “start to introduce advertising in our mobile solutions” immediately (though he did not confirm when the company would). Weiner went on to say that mobile is LinkedIn’s fastest growing category in member visits,, accounting for more than 15% of unique visits. He also acknowledged that the LinkedIn apps offer superior performance over iOS than Android applications.

Weiner’s remarks come one week after reports surfaced that Facebook will begin serving ads to its 420 million-strong mobile audience. According to analysts it will be launched in early March, ahead of the company’s planned public offering in May. Those sources referred to the pending ads as “‘featured stories’ in the news feed.”

Mobile is now LinkedIn’s fastest growing area for adoption and accounts for 15 per cent of its unique member visits.

It is notoriously hard to make mobile adverts work as the screen size of most devices is very small. Both LinkedIn and Facebook, will have to tread carefully in how they implement adverts on their apps, as they could incur the wrath of users if they are too invasive.

Weiner said mobile was an area of investment focus for the company. He also revealed that LinkedIn’s app was performing better on iPhones rather than on Android devices.

Weiner has promised investors that it can grow its share of the recruitment market spend, estimated at $85bn, and sees LinkedIn’s addressable market as roughly $27bn through heavily scaling up areas such as online jobs, executive recruitment and recruitment media opportunities.

LinkedIn is the number three social networking platform in the U.S., with 33.5 million unique viewers, according to comScore. Throughout much of 2011 the company vied with Twitter for number two, but Twitter pulled away by year’s end with 37.5 million unique viewers.

The company is seeking to raise $5 billion. The company did not give details of its target price for the initial public offering but the IPO is expected to value the company at up to $100bn.  If Facebook manages to raise this capital, it will be on a shortlist of biggest tech IPOs of all time.

The stock is expected to trade under the symbol “FB,” though the exchange it will be traded on has yet to be determined. Investment bank Morgan Stanley will act as lead underwriter, with Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan and others to take secondary positions. Shares are expected to hit the market in May.

“We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television,” Zuckerberg said in a letter accompanying the SEC filing. “Yesterday, our society has reached another tipping point.”

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.”

Mr. Zuckerberg has been made wealthy by Facebook, and an I.P.O. would make him wealthier. When Facebook was valued at $23 billion, Forbes magazine estimated his wealth at $6.9 billion. At a market value of $100 billion, Mr. Zuckerberg’s 28.4 percent stake in Facebook would be worth $28.4 billion.

Google+ seems to show the fastest growth among the giants with 20 Million Unique Monthly Visitors and with the most recent Google+ figures is 90-million, which Larry Page announced earlier this month, Paull Allen believes that the Facebook rival will hit “100.8 million users in the next couple of days”.

Page also mentioned in his report that Google+ was “growing tremendously” and that the user number had “doubled” in a three month period.

Considering the statements made by the analysts, Google+ is violently chasing Facebook who is predicted to reach 1 billion users by August this year. It seems to be a real war among Social Networking sites.

Facebook is expected to offer a 10% stake, raising as much as $10 billion and value the social networking giant between $75 billion and $100 billion in a report by the WSJ. It further mentioned that a valuation of $75 billion would be below earlier expectations. If successful, that would make Facebook’s offering the sixth largest U.S. IPO and six times larger than Google’s initial offering, which is currently the record-holding tech IPO, according to Renaissance Capital.

Facebook now generated more than 800 million members and 500 million daily users within a period of not less than eight years and is set to pass the significant milestone of 1 billion users in August, has changed the way people communicate across the globe from organizing political campaigns to sharing baby pictures.

The company  could file documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission as early as this coming Wednesday  according to the WSJ. Facebook’s  Executives are also considering filing a few weeks later and the company is targeting an IPO sometime between April and June.

A $10 billion Facebook offering would rank fourth among IPOs for U.S. companies, behind Visa Inc., General Motors Co. and AT&T Wireless, according to Dealogic. It would rank Facebook as the biggest U.S. Internet offering ever, replacing Google Inc., which raised $1.9 billion in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation.

At a $100 billion valuation, Facebook would be worth about the same as McDonald’s Corp. and nearly half of Google.

Facebook’s revenue is driven by its advertising business, as big brands rush to the site to interact with consumers through display ads and fan pages. Facebook has been able to increase its world-wide advertising revenue from $738 million in 2009 to $3.8 billion in 2011, according to estimates from research firm eMarketer. It isn’t known if Facebook is profitable.

Let us get ready for the hottest IPO of 2012.

Do you want to become a better manager? Here are the managing mistakes you most want to notice, prevent, and avoid.

1. Fail to get to know employees as people: Developing a relationship with reporting employees is a key factor in managing. Knowing employees will make you a better manager, a manager who is more responsive to employee needs, moods, and life cycle events.
2. Fail to provide clear direction: Managers fail to create standards and give people clear expectations so they know what they are supposed to do, and wonder why they fail. If you make every task a priority, people will soon believe that there are no priorities.
3. Fail to trust: When managers don’t trust people to do their jobs, this lack of trust plays out in a number of injurious ways. Micromanaging is one example. Constant checking up is another.
4. Fail to listen to and help employees feel that their opinions are valued. Active listening is a critical management skill. You can train managers in listening skills but if the manager believes that listening is a way to demonstrate that he or she values people, training is usually unnecessary.
5. Make decisions and then ask people for their input as if their feedback mattered. You can fool some of the people. But your best employees soon get the nature of your game and drop out.
6. Fail to react to problems and issues that will soon fester if ignored. Managers have a habit of hoping that an uncomfortable issue, employee conflict or disagreement will just go away on its own if they don’t provoke it or try to resolve it. Trust me. It won’t. Issues, especially among people, just get worse unless something in the mix changes
7. Trying to be friends with employees who report to you. You can develop warm and supportive relationships with employees who report to you. But, you will have difficulty separating the reporting relationship in a friendship.
8. Fail to communicate effectively and withhold important information. The best communication is transparent communication. Sure, some information is company confidential. You may have been asked to keep certain information under wraps for awhile, but aside from these rare occasions, share what you know.
9. Not treating all employees equally. You don’t necessarily have to treat every employee the same, but they must feel as if they receive equal treatment.
10. Throw employees under the bus. Rather than taking responsibility for what goes wrong in the areas that you manage, blame particular employees when asked or confronted by executive leadership. When you know the responsibility is ultimately yours if you are the boss, why not act with dignity and protect your employees? When you blame employees, you look like an idiot and your employees will disrespect and hate you.

According to the company “Over the next few weeks, everyone will get timeline. When you get timeline, you’ll have 7 days to preview what’s there now. This gives you a chance to add or hide whatever you want before anyone else see’s it” Facebook blog.

You can learn more about these new features by taking the quick tour available at the top of your timeline. If you want to get timeline now, go to the Introducing Timeline page and click “Get Timeline.” Or you can wait until you see an announcement at the top of your home page.

In case you’re unfamiliar, the Facebook Timeline makes it far easier for you to travel back through your Facebook posts; posts which normally disappeared off your Wall and into oblivion. The posts from these previous months and years are now accessible through new navigational elements on the right-side of your screen that let you quickly travel back in time to the day you were born.

The features explained

Facebook explains how to hide posts you don’t want to appear on your Timeline (click the pencil to hide, delete or edit a post). You can also use the privacy drop-down to change who can see posts (e.g. “Only Me”).

In addition, the company is releasing a new tool today called Activity Log, which is where you can review all your posts and activity, from today back to when you first started using Facebook. Fortunately, only you can see your activity log.

To get timeline, simply go to the Introducing Timeline page and click “Get Timeline.” Or you can wait until you see an announcement at the top of your profile.

Timeline will also be available on Android, m.facebook.com & iOS

Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” Smith (R-Texas) told Reuters. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”

The survey shows 44.5 percent of people who bought a Smartphone in December chose an iPhone, almost twice as many as in October. Android declined from 61.6 percent in October to 46.9 percent in December, bringing Google’s mobile platform almost on a tie with Apple’s. Android, however, continues to lead among all U.S. Smartphone users with 46.3 percent.

The Nielsen study says the iPhone 4S was the choice of 57 percent of the new iPhone owners in December, as the device had “enormous impact on the proportion of Smartphone owners who chose an Apple iPhone.” The iPhone’s growth seems to be a detriment to both Android and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, which declined among new Smartphone purchases from 7.7 percent in October to 4.5 percent in December.

In terms of total market share for Q4 2011 — as opposed to just recent Smartphone acquirers –Android holds 46.3% of the mobile OS market while iOS grabbed 30%. In third place is RIM’s BlackBerry with 14.9%, followed by Windows Mobile at 4.6%, webOS and Symbian with 1.4% each, and Windows Phone 7 at 1.3%.

Experience a day without Free Knowledgeable source (WIKIPEDIA). As announced, Wikipedia’s main page is “blackened” today in protest of the controversial Stop online privacy act SOPA.

From their page – “For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia,”.

The actual articles on Wikipedia are actually accessible for a short period of time, after which they redirect the visitor to the blackened main page.

Reddit, Imgur, Boing Boing and many other sites will join the protest by shutting down or “blacking out” their homepages today.