EarthLink said Garry Betty, its president and chief executive officer, died Tuesday due to complications from a serious form of cancer at age 49. Betty had been with the leading independent Internet service provider since 1996. Betty began his career at IBM and received the company’s most prestigious President’s Excellence Award in 1982 for his work associated with the IBM Personal Computer.

SanDisk has launched a 32GB solid-state drive using flash memory chips, intended as a replacement for conventional hard disk drives. Notebooks equipped with the new drive, which is expected to add around US$600 to the cost of a machine, could be available in the first half of 2007, SanDisk said Thursday.

People who blog and use social-networking and video sites such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and other online sites are realizing just how public those spaces can be. That realization, in turn, is causing many of them to reconsider what they post–or at the very least, to do more to protect their privacy.

With 41 new attacks carried out during the month of December alone, 2006 proved to be a significant growth year for threats distributed over instant messaging systems. According to a new research report produced by security software maker Akonix Systems, in San Diego, experts at the company unearthed some 406 new IM-borne threats over the last 12 months, compared with 347 attacks tracked by the company in 2005.

The Washington Research Foundation has sued mobile phone makers Nokia, Samsung Electronics and Matsushita-owned Panasonic for infringing on a patent for wireless Bluetooth technology. “Defendants have manufactured, used, imported into the United States, sold and offered for sale devices which, or the use of which, infringes at least the ‘963’ patent,” Washington Research Foundation said in a complaint filed at the United States Western District Court of Washington State at Seattle.

The anti-digital rights management bandwagon is getting more crowded by the day. Even some major-label executives are pushing for the right to sell digital downloads as unprotected MP3s. In 2007, the majors will get the message, and the digital-right management wall will begin to crumble. Why? Because they’ll no longer be able to point to a growing digital marketplace as justification that DRM works. Revenue from digital downloads and mobile content is expected to be flat or, in some cases, decline next year. If the digital market does in fact stall, alternatives to DRM will look much more attractive.

Google has fixed a flaw that would have allowed Web sites to harvest email addresses from Gmail contact lists. For an attack to work, a user would have to log into a Gmail account and then visit a Web site that incorporates specially designed JavaScript code. This could have allowed spammers to collect reams of new email addresses. Proof-of-concept code was publicly posted, and Google appears to have fixed the problem within 30 hours of being notified, wrote Haochi Chen, a blogger who tracks the company. A Google spokeswoman in London confirmed today that the problem was fixed.

Forget windows, folders and boxes that pop up with text. When students in Thailand, Libya, and other developing countries get their $150 computers from the One Laptop Per Child project in 2007, their experience will be unlike anything on standard PCs. For most of these children the XO machine, as it’s called, likely will be the first computer they’ve ever used. Because the students have no expectations for what PCs should be like, the laptop’s creators started from scratch in designing a user interface they figured would be intuitive for children. The result is as unusual as–but possibly even riskier than–other much-debated aspects of the machine, such as its economics and distinctive hand-pulled mechanism for charging its battery. For example, students who turn on the small green-and-white computers will be greeted by a basic home screen with a stick-figure icon at the center, surrounded by a white ring. The entire desktop has a black frame with more icons. This runic setup signifies the student at the middle. The ring contains programs the student is running, which can be launched by clicking the appropriate icon in the black frame.

Microsoft’s latest attempt to curry public favor began on its community-site The Hive. Microsoft is doing it this time by giving bloggers free, expensive laptops. The Hive was launched by Microsoft in the summer of 2005. At the time, Microsoft said the Hive was aimed at online leaders who specialize in consumer-oriented applications of Windows and other Microsoft technologies, such as digital photography, gaming, multimedia, home-finance and the like. Microsoft officials also said they want The Hive to be a community that is run by the third parties, not by Microsoft.

IBM enjoyed 30 years of dominance. Microsoft 14 years. That suggests that the half-life of the value of market dominance is falling by more than 50 percent in each “age” of computing. Extrapolating from that trend, if we can call it that based on only two ages of computing, Google in 2007 has a year or two of dominance left.