News to know: Virtual worlds; Green data centers; Black Hat; IT failures

Notable headlines:

Dan Farber: The future of virtual worlds.
The third Web wave–two degrees of separation. Denise Howell: AlwaysOn Stanford Summit: lawyers for Google, IBM, and Apple ponder the patent system.

Complexity and the greening of the datacenter.

Harry Fuller: Green: tech and VC money converge.

Michael Krigsman: Wisconsin’s Apologist for IT Failure. Transparent Failure.

David Berlind: Tech Shakedown #3: McAfee’s ‘Block/Allow this change’ dialog is a useless warning. Proof that there are two types of computer users: Dumb and Dumber.

Ryan Naraine: Hacker movements: Murphy joins Apple; Caceres to Matasano. Remembering five years of vulnerability markets. Russell Shaw: VoIP security vulnerabilities demonstrated at Black Hat conference.

Larry Dignan: How will Yahoo address social networking?

FAQ: A concentrated power boost for solar energy. Gallery (right).

Mary Jo Foley: Ad-funded Microsoft Works pilot starting soon. Works 9.0 to come in both free and paid flavors. Microsoft delivers new test build of SQL Server 2008.

House panel approves legal shield for bloggers.

TechCrunch: Amazon To Launch Payments Services; Will Compete With PayPal and Google Checkout.

NYPost: Discovery buys Treehugger.com. MarketWatch: Disney reports higher earnings, buys ClubPenquin.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes: Beginning of the end for PATA.

Ryan Stewart: The debacle of the BBC’s iPlayer.

Christopher Dawson: Supercomputing for a mere $800k.

Dan Kusnetzky: Virtualization Mission Creep?

Are people more polite in virtual worlds?

Computerworld: HP makes 90% of unhealthy laser printers tested by researchers.

Joe McKendrick: ‘Whole-brained’ enterprises need SOA: here are the numbers to prove it.

Kenya wants to grab piece of outsourcing pie.

EA reports loss.

Dan Farber: HP’s expanding software portfolio.

Roland Piquepaille: Nanotechnology-based flexible hydrogen sensors.

VMware starts road show ahead of planned IPO.

Gallery: Photos: Motorbikes go green.

Russell Shaw: ShoreTel files infringement counterclaim against Mitel.

AP: CA ups its 2008 outlook.

365 Main details SF outage problems.

eWeek: SAP enhances ERP 6.0.