An AdMob study has concluded that Google’s Android operating system (OS) poses a major threat to the iPhone’s dominance.

Indeed, although Apple’s iPhone currently maintains a 50 percent share of the global OS smartphone market, Android has already managed to capture approximately 24 percent of the market share.
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Microsoft yesterday announced it will issue an emergency security update for Internet Explorer (IE) tomorrow to patch a zero-day vulnerability that has been used to launch drive-by attacks for at least several weeks.

Tuesday’s update will be the second out-of-band update — Microsoft’s term for one outside its normal once-each-month Patch Tuesday — in the last three months. Microsoft last shipped a rush IE update to customers in late January, to fix eight flaws, including one that had been used to attack several companies’ networks, including Google’s and Adobe’s.
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When the Apple iPad goes on sale on Saturday, most of the major questions surrounding the device will have been answered, save for one: can it live up to the hype?

Apple fans have breathlessly awaited Apple’s entry into the tablet computer market. Since the company unveiled the iPad in late January, investors have jumped on the bandwagon, too, running up Apple’s stock more than 10 percent.

Part of that rise can be attributed to the steady rise in sales of the iPhone and the company’s Mac computers. But much of it clearly has to do with tablet fever. On the day this month when Apple made the completely unsurprising announcement that the iPad would go on sale on April 3, the stock jumped nearly 4 percent.

Expectations are clearly high. Now the iPad has to meet them.
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A China-based root DNS server associated with networking problems in Chile and the U.S. has been disconnected from the Internet.

The action by the server’s operator, Netnod, appears to have resolved a problem that was causing some Internet sites to be inadvertently censored by a system set up in the People’s Republic of China.

On Wednesday, operators at NIC Chile noticed that several ISPs (Internet service providers) were providing faulty DNS information, apparently derived from China. China uses the DNS system to enforce Internet censorship on its so-called Great Firewall of China, and the ISPs were using this incorrect DNS information.
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Nokia–the world’s leading manufacturer of mobile phones–announced that it is acquiring Novarra–a privately-held Chicago-based mobile Web browser developer. The purchase moves Nokia into the increasingly contentious mobile browser battle.

In a statement about the acquisition, Nokia declares “Novarra’s mobile browser and services platform will be used by Nokia to deliver enhanced Internet experiences on Nokia mobile devices.” Novarra will enable Nokia to deliver an improved mobile Web experience to customers. However, the Novarra acquisition will probably have little effect on customers in the United States.
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The only researcher to “three-peat” at the Pwn2Own hacking contest said today that security is such a “broken record” that he won’t hand over 20 vulnerabilities he’s found in Apple’s, Adobe’s and Microsoft’s software.

Instead Charlie Miller will show the vendors how to find the bugs themselves.

Miller, who yesterday exploited Safari on a MacBook Pro notebook running Snow Leopard to win $10,000 in the hacking challenge, said he’s tired of the lack of progress in security. “We find a bug, they patch it,” said Miller. “We find another bug, they patch it. That doesn’t improve the security of the product. True, [the software] gets incrementally better, but they actually need to make big improvements. But I can’t make them do that.”
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Hackers took down Apple’s iPhone and Safari browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explore 8 (IE8) and Mozilla’s Firefox within minutes at today’s Pwn2Own contest, as expected.

The two-man team of Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann exploited the iPhone in under five minutes, said a spokeswoman for 3Com TippingPoint, the security company that sponsored the contest. The pair also walked away with $15,000 in cash, a record prize for the challenge, which is in its fourth year.
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