Companies who have not appropriately applied Research In Motion’s security protections for its BlackBerry communications system are vulnerable to outside attacks based on malware code released mid-August by researchers, and the threat illustrates a wider issue with always-on wireless applications, analysts say. Jesse D’Aguanno, director of professional services and research at consultant Praetorian Global, Placerville, Calif., published his BlackBerry Attack Toolkit on Aug. 16 after first showing off the software at the DefCon reverse engineering convention held in Las Vegas earlier in August.

A judge has ordered EchoStar Communications to disable the digital video recorders used by several million subscribers to its Dish Network satellite TV service because they infringe on patents held by TiVo. Thursday’s ruling from U.S. District Judge David Folsom in Marshall, Texas, demands that within 30 days, EchoStar must basically render useless all but 192,708 of the DVR units it has deployed. The decision comes four months after a jury ruled that EchoStar should pay TiVo $73.9 million because it willfully infringed TiVo patents that allow the digital storage of TV programming.

To make sure that nothing gets left inside a patient, surgeons’ assistants count and recount surgical supplies before and after surgery. Soon workers at the Veterans’ Administration West Los Angeles Health Care Center will have a computer count with them. The hospital will use bar-coded sponges and other equipment from SurgiCount Medical, a wholly owned subsidiary of Los Angeles-based Patient Safety Technologies. The technology should be shipped to the hospital before the end of August, SurgiCount Medical said.

PhatWare has released the PhatSketch game for Windows Mobile powered smartphones. The game lets users to create sketches using either the numeric keypad or full keyboard to draw diagonal lines, lines with arrows, curves and circles by connecting “markers” that can be set as users draw lines or move the cursor. PhatSketch offers numerous features that allow for the creation of colorful and engaging drawings, including 42 text and background colors and the ability to insert background images. The sketches can be saved as JPEG, BMP or PNG files when completed.

David Zatz (believe it or not, he’s not affiliated with either ZATZ nor our founder David) has a great Web site where he tracks DVRs and all things Tivo. In this posting, he details how Echostar has been ordered to disable DVR functionality in all their DVRs within 30 days. Now, if you currently have an installed Dish DVR (and if you do, you’re one of 192,708 people), you’re not going to lose your DVR service. But if you’re about to get a Dish DVR, think again.

It’s unlikely your laptop will catch fire, as a Dell notebook did in Japan earlier this summer. But nearly one-fifth of all notebook PCs will break down during their lifetime, needing a new hardware component to fix the failure, according to a Gartner study. Motherboards and hard drives fail most frequently. Desktops suffer from the same weaknesses, but they break less often. Five percent of new desktops will break within 12 months, and 12 percent will break within four years, Gartner estimates. In comparison, 15 percent of laptops will break within a year, and 22 percent within four years.

The U.S. government has misplaced the original recording of the first moon landing, including astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” a NASA spokesman said. Armstrong’s famous space walk, seen by millions of viewers on July 20, 1969, is among transmissions that NASA has failed to turn up in a year of searching, spokesman Grey Hautaloma said. The tapes also contain data about the health of the astronauts and the condition of the spacecraft. In all, some 700 boxes of transmissions from the Apollo lunar missions are missing, he said.

The maker of the Segway scooter unveiled the second generation of its self-balancing electric one-person vehicle. The redesigned scooter allows the rider to steer by leaning to the right or left, rather than by turning the handlebars. It also features a wireless electric key and alarm system. The scooters feature two side-by-side wheels, and are ridden in a standing position, with the rider grasping handlebars. A gyroscope provides balance, making it fairly easy to remain in the upright position.

Google plans to offer free, high-speed Internet access to everyone in its Silicon Valley home town–a hospitable gesture that the online search leader hopes to see spread to other parts of the country. The new Wi-Fi network is believed to establish Mountain View, California, as the largest U.S. city with totally free Internet access available throughout the entire community, according to both Google and city officials.

U.S. consumer safety officials said on Tuesday that they are reviewing all Sony-made lithium ion batteries in laptop computers for fire hazards after Dell announced the largest electronics recall in the United States. Dell, the No. 1 maker of personal computers, on Monday said it is recalling 4.1 million notebook batteries made by Sony because they could overheat and catch fire. A battery of the type involved in the recall was in a Dell laptop that erupted in flames in Japan earlier this year. The Sony batteries are also used in laptops from Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer and Lenovo.