Joe Wilcox

That's the stunning statement made by Robert Siciliano, a security and identity theft consultant, blogging for McAfee today. The post's title is nearly as provocative: "McAfee Reports Most Malware Ever in Early 2011".

Siciliano writes based on the McAfee Threats Report: First Quarter 2011, which released on June 1 and has gotten modest coverage among bloggers and journalists.

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There is nothing that riles my ire like data taken or given without context (or out of it). That's the case with new smartphone data released today by ComScore. The chart above is more or less self-explanatory. Well, at first glance it is.

"During the three months ending in May 2011, 76.8 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones", according to a ComScore Data Mine blog post. "Among smartphone owners, Apple accounted for 26.6 percent of devices". Research in Motion ranks second.

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Early this afternoon, I trucked over to the Google search page, saw the doodle above and wondered: "Who's birthday is it? Who is Google celebrating today?" Doodles are fairly common commemorating special days. It's my birthday. What a funny coincidence it seemed, but wasn't. The Google doodle is for me.

Have you seen a personalized doodle like this before for you? It's new to me, and I'm thinking it all has to do with Google+ and new user profiles associated with it. I've been logged into Google on other birthdays but never noticed the doodle in the past.

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I should have followed Vic Gundotra, Google senior vice president of engineering, sooner on G+. Otherwise I wouldn't have missed his post about yesterday's Google+ glitch. One of the servers supporting the service ran out of disk space! He apologies for the resulting "spam".

"For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications", Gundotra writes. "Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes. We didn't expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but we should have".

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First in a series. I discovered a great way to waste a summer Saturday morning. Yesterday, I made the first steps to giving up cable -- OK, IPTV in my case -- and, whoa, it didn't go well. I planned to go completely cable-free, adopting over-the-air HD broadcasts and online streaming from Amazon, Hulu Plus and Netflix. But moving to TiVo and antenna started painfully.

More people are making the same move. Since 2008, 1 million US households cut cable's cord and switched to over-the-air broadcasts and online streaming, says Convergence Consultancy Group, which expects the number to reach 2 million by year's end. That's a small percentage of households, but it will double the number this year gained in the previous two.

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This weekend, I am embarking on a bold experiment, replacing another one started in April. I attempted to go Google-free and, as explained a few days ago, failed. What's that cliché? If you can't beat them, join them. So now I'm going all Google, or as nearly as humanly possible.

The goal is simple: Replace the majority of digital lifestyle products and services I now use with those provided by Google or enabled by them. In process, I'll be looking to answer a simple question: What is the Google lifestyle? Timing is impeccable. Google is undergoing a massive makeover that probably isn't coincidental to cofounder Larry Page becoming CEO (again). That lifestyle is changing, too.

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I'm not the first to ask that question, but there's good reason to pose it again. Media tablet shipments plummeted 28 percent sequentially during first quarter, says IDC. Even iPad missed earlier expectations.

The analyst firm released the data today, expressing some surprise for the sudden slowdown and offering little explanation. Merely 7.2 million tablets shipped in Q1. Apple shipped 4.94 million tablets, according to its quarterly earnings report, putting iPad's share at about 69 percent, by extrapolation. However, IDC's number is lower, with Android tablet share stated at 34 percent. The analyst firm described first-quarter iPad shipments as "below expectations".

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Something startling happened today. Either someone in Apple's PR department royally screwed up, or the landscape of iOS device users is dramatically different than I or many other people thought.

Last month, during the event announcing iOS 5, Scott Forstall, Apple senior vice president of iOS software, said: "For our stores we have more than 225 million accounts, all with credit cards and one-click purchasing". Forstall also said that Apple had sold 200 million iOS devices.

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"Modern" is not a word I would have ever used to describe how YouTube looks. The user interface remains dated, even after several refinements. But that may change, and quite dramatically. Google is in process of changing YouTube's look and feel in startling and refreshing ways. How this new experience comes to market depends in part on how users respond to it.

Today, as part of the ongoing TestTube project, Google opened "Cosmic Panda", which is described as "a new experimental experience for videos, playlists and channels". Hot damn, this thing is smokin'! My initial reaction is simply "Wow!"

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That's the question for you to answer after watching the video above, looking and pics from the linked tumblr blog and reading this post, of course.

According to what Mashable claims is an exclusive report, the Secret Service raided the home of artist Kyle McDonald earlier today. The video above made the tech news this week, and now the computers producing it are gone -- confiscated in the raid.

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For all the talk about Apple innovation, it's still old school in one respect. While Google product managers make major announcements in blog posts, usually accompanied by helpful videos, information control-freak Apple does it the old-fashion way by issuing a press release. Today it's 15 billion downloads from the App Store.

I'm more surprised by timing than anything else. Apple's App Store opened for business July 10, 2008, which makes the three-year anniversary good day for the announcement. But by old school PR thinking, that would be bad day, being Sunday. Some advice to Apple: Look at Microsoft taking over Baidu English search. The news was everywhere on Monday -- and that was on July 4th, America's national holiday!

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Sometimes I really can't figure out Microsoft. Does the left-side corporate brain not connect to the right?

Take this new business in Microsoft patents supposedly applied to Android. HTC already coughs up five bucks per handset in licensing fees and scuttlebutt is Microsoft wants $10-$15 per phone from Samsung. Had the Supreme Court sided with Microsoft in last month's i4i ruling, Samsung and other Android licensees could quite possibly have invalidated the patents in court -- putting an end to Microsoft's lucrative Android patent payment business.

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Early this afternoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg debuted three new personal connection service updates -- group chat, chat redesign and video calling.

Last week, Zuckerberg hinted at something "awesome" coming today. Early rumors tipped to in-browser video chat powered by Skype.

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CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the number during a live event early this afternoon.

Last week, Zuckerberg hinted at something "awesome" coming today. Early rumors tipped to in-browser video chat powered by Skype. A live event is underway now.

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Gee, and I thought they were hunched over texting like the rest of us.

Nielsen has a hot, mobile gaming study out today that reveals gaming apps as being the most popular category. Sixty-four percent of people downloading mobile apps got a game in the previous 30 days. But the second-place finisher is a hoot -- weather apps (60 percent).

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