OzCrunch

A CLEANING business owner used Facebook to threaten to ''kill all Christians and Jews'' and bomb Sydney, police allege.

ONLINE music videos featuring ''adult-oriented behaviour'' by performers such as Lady Gaga or Rihanna should have a MA15+ rating or even refused classification and deemed illegal, says the Australian Family Association.

As promised, members of the Anonymous hacking movement have released hundreds of megabytes of documents that they say were stolen from government security contractor ManTech.

Google Friday unveiled a simplified search interface for Apple iPad and Android 3.1 tablets. The changes, which are being rolling out over the next several days at www.google.com, including a streamlined layout better suited to touchscreen users.

Among the thousands of security experts at the Black Hat, Defcon and Security BSides conferences next week in Las Vegas, some will surely test whether they can break into nearby laptops, phones, networks -- even RFID-enabled room keys and credit cards.

As the world's largest social network, Facebook accumulates more data in a single day than many good size companies generate in a year.

IT is in a time of disruptive transition, caused by the rise of cloud computing. CIOs are in the midst of a maelstrom, and -- like Ulysses, the fabled hero from Homer's Odyssey -- are torn between the Scylla of established IT practices and the Charybdis of the future, both of which loom dangerously and portend trouble. Also like Ulysses, many CIOs must inure themselves to the din of tempting Sirens: the vendors who sing a sweet song of painless cloud transformation, made possible by the purchase of some software, or hardware, or a set of cloud services.

Showered with intense praise and criticism during its first month out in a limited beta trial, Google+ has eluded the failures of other Google social networking efforts, but it's too early to tell if it will fulfill its ultimate mission as a Facebook slayer.

Facebook's move today to follow Google, Mozilla and Hewlett-Packard in offering bounties for bugs got a unanimous thumbs up from security researchers.

H&R Block's (HRB) virtualization project -- a CIO 100 Award winner this year -- is putting thin clients in the tax preparer's thousands of retail stores in an effort to simplify its operating environment and cut expenses. The change should also help it to better compete with chains such as Jackson Hewitt, as well as with independent tax preparers and software-only rivals such as TurboTax and Intuit (INTU).