As the claims go, through sources at Google, that a desktop client for Google Voice is being tested internally. That’s an exciting step toward making and receiving calls at your computer, on the same number that rings all your other numbers.

It’s a move that’s been expected since Google acquired Gizmo5, a voice-over-IP calling service that offered Skype-like connectivity between regular phones and people on computer connections. Google closed down Gizmo5’s service to new sign-ups, and much has been quiet on the Gizmo front of late. So it would all seem to add up, and it adds a real value to Google Voice for a growing number of folks who only have a single cellphone number.

Google developed an extension for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer that lets you send feedback about Google services. For now, the extension can only be used if you get an invitation from Google and it’s limited to Gmail.

Google Feedback lets you highlight the parts of the page corresponding to your feedback, hide personal information, describe the issue and send your feedback. The extension is useful because you can send Google an annotated screenshot that illustrates your problem without using an image editing software.

Adobe’s new partnership with Google will keep Internet users safer because Chrome will automatically update Flash Player without first asking users.

Google will include Adobe’s Flash Player in downloads of Chrome, starting with the rough-around-the-edges builds of the browser’s “dev” channel. Google will also employ Chrome’s auto-updater to push Flash fixes to users without notifying them or asking them to approve the download.The integration, particularly the automatic updating of Adobe’s plug-in, is a first for a browser maker.

Unlike other browsers, Chrome updates itself automatically in the background without asking for permission or prompting users when security fixes or new features are available. The practice, which Google debuted alongside Chrome in September 2008, riled some users initially, but the criticism soon faded.

Other browsers, however, did not follow suit.

Adobe will build customized binaries of Flash Player for Google to include with Chrome downloads; the browser will install the plug-ins as part of its own installation process. Adobe will also hand binaries of Flash updates — major upgrades as well as the more frequent security updates to patch vulnerabilities — to Google, which will feed them into its update mechanism.

Keeping plug-ins, especially Flash, up to date is not only a problem for many users, but also important in warding off attackers. Adobe issued Flash patch updates five times in 2009 and has done so twice so far this year.

In fact, when Mozilla introduced a tool last year that checks for outdated Firefox plug-ins, it started with Flash Player, citing statistics that said eight out of 10 users were running a vulnerable version.

Novell is offering Novell Cloud Security Service (NCSS), a Web-based identity and access management solution for cloud service providers in India. NCSS will allow SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS providers to offer their enterprise customers the ability to deploy their existing identity infrastructure in the cloud.

With NCSS, currently in private beta but scheduled for release in mid 2010, the company is targeting cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Verizon and many some Indian cloud service providers such as Ramco Systems.

The development for NCSS began about 6 months ago and Novell R&D centre in Bangalore has developed a significant share of this product on the cloud platform along with other R&D centres.

Novell says security can be operated at a number of levels in cloud computing. The first level of security would be how and where data is deployed in a typical workload, data typically being the most sensitive element of any workload.

From Novell’s view, a security policy can be embedded into the workload, and through using orchestration management tools, ensures that the workload is only deployed on hardware or in locations that meet the security policy.

At another level, the company sees a federated-style user access being the key to reducing complexity.  The application or service owner can use the same authentication and authorization as the client uses today, thereby not having to maintain a separate set of identities. It also allows the client to make changes to a security policy, and it will adhere to the changes, regardless of where the workload might be running in the cloud.

Security experts at eSacn have warned against opening emails or their attachments with subject lines such as “You have received A Hallmark E-Card!”, “Your friend invited you to twitter!”, “Thank you from Google!”, “Jessica would like to be your friend on hi5!” and “Shipping update for your Amazon.com order 254-71546325-658732″. These emails also carry zipped attachments which have been found to contain new variants of the malware in the wild.

The “You have received A Hallmark E-Card!”, spam email comes with postcard.zip or similarly named attachment. The payload in the zip file contains malware that has the capability to mass mail message(s) with the built-in SMTP client engine to the email addresses harvested from the local computer. The payload also contains a malware with the characteristics of Vundo (aka VirtuMonde/VirtuMundo), a trojan horse that cause popups and advertises rogue antispyware programs.

Vundo can infect a system when a browser just visits a Web site link contained in a spammed email. It is known to add itself to the startup registry, create a DLL file in the Windows system32 directory and inject it into system processes winlogon.exe and explorer.exe. The malware can also send downloads/requests to get other files from Internet and spread quickly by itself in a network.

Another email doing the rounds is taking advantage of the popularity of the social networking sites such as “Twitter” and “Hi5″ to spread itself. These spam emails carry a deadly payload of a variant of the Buzus worm that is network aware bot creating trojan. On infection, it creates a startup registry entry and modifies the host files to prevent access to security websites. It can also send spam mail to the email addresses harvested from the local infected system and try to spread itself.

The malware spreading spam also had subject lines such as “Thank you from Google!” and  “Shipping update for your Amazon.com order 254-71546325-658732″ and were found to be with  attachments that had typical names such as Invitation Card.zip or Postcard.zip or Shipping documents.zip or CV-20100120-112.zip. Any unsuspecting user who opens the files gets infected immediately and the malware then tries to infect other systems in the network by sending the same malicious emails to addresses harvested from local address books on the infected computers.

Google and Microsoft at loggerheads again…Last year, Google announced a new plug-in that syncs Google’s enterprise versions of Apps, including Gmail, contacts, and calendar, with Microsoft’s Outlook. And Google just acquired Docverse, an application lets users collaborate directly on Microsoft Office documents.Strike two and Google is taking another swipe at Microsoft with a new tool that makes it significantly easier to make the switch over to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange.

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange is a new server-side tool that migrates a company’s email, calendar and contact data from Microsoft Exchange, an email server software product from Microsoft, to Google Apps. Google promises ease with the tool, allowing IT administrators the ability to select the mail, calendar and contact data to move in phases and migrate hundreds of users at the same time.

Also, employees can use Exchange during the migration without any interruption. The tool works with Exchange 2003 and 2007 for both on-premise and hosted applications and is available to the enterprise and education versions of Google Apps.

Google Apps has been steadily growing; already 25 million people are using the Apps product,which also includes over 2 million businesses ranging from startups, to small businesses, to Fortune 500 companies. And Google is developing a compelling ecosystem around Google Apps, recently launching the Google Apps Marketplace, which is an an app store for enterprise apps in the cloud.

The Mountain View Chocolate Factory has unveiled an extensions gallery for Google Wave, the browser-based application that mixes email with IM and document sharing.

First unveiled at a Google developer conference last May, Wave offers APIs for developing extensions to the platform and embedding its conversations in websites and blogs. The new extensions gallery – announced recently – appears as a link in the navigation panel that runs down the lefthand side of the Wave UI.

The gallery displays extensions as a list of “waves” – the multifaceted conversation threads that serve as the platform’s basic building blocks. These waves include installers that then add the extension as an option on the toolbar that appears when you open a wave. The gallery is pre-populated with about 15 extensions.

Earlier this month, Google introduced version 2.0 of the Wave “robot” API, which lets can create an a kind of automated user capable of participating in the platform’s online conversation in much the same way real users participate. The new API lets robots active push information into a thread – rather than simply responding to the actions of real users.

You can submit your own extensions to Google for review.Wave is still in “preview” mode, and it can’t be used without a private invitation.

To ensure small businesses have access to the best tools, while still having the flexibility to choose the platform that best meets their needs,Intuit has unveiled its online payroll for Google Apps. Intuit Online Payroll, available on the Google Apps Marketplace, which gives businesses the ability to manage payroll with the online convenience of Google Apps.

From within Google Apps, businesses can use the application to check their paystubs or create paychecks in minutes. Also companies can continue to work on other office tasks such as e-mail or word processing without needing to log into another site or launch another program. For example, a employer can check Intuit Online Payroll to see when they need to run payroll or pay their payroll taxes, while employees can easily view their paycheck from Google Calendar.

Intuit Online Payroll for Google Apps is available on the Google Apps Marketplace starting at $39.00 per month.

Obopay, a mobile banking and payment provider, was recently chosen by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the top 50 innovative companies in the world across sectors such as energy, computing, the Web, biomedicine, and materials. Obopay was conferred this honor under ‘Private Web Company’ category for bringing innovation in mobile payment services through its pioneering mobile payment service which is ubiquitous and highly secure.

With technology developed at its Bangalore based R&D centre, Obopay products are platform agnostic and global in nature. Other companies in ‘the Web’ category included names like Google, Twitter, IBM, Adobe amongst others.

The companies on MIT’s Technology Review list have been assessed on basis of their business model, deployment strategies, scalability of technologies as well as success rate. The editors of Technology Review analyzed companies over the last year that has demonstrated their superiority at inventing technology and using it for business growth as well as for transforming the lives of people. The companies identified were the ones with most promising technologies, whether they were giant corporations or fledgling startups with initial venture capital investments.

Google has opened the door to iPhone-like 3D games on certain Android handsets, offering support for the OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics standard with its latest Android Native Development Kit (NDK).

Mountain View announced the third release of its Android NDK  and the chief addition is Open GL for Embedded Systems 2.0 native libraries, thus bringing the platform inline with Apple’s iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre.

Android applications run inside Google’s very own Java virtual machine, known as Dalvik, but since June, the company has offered a kit that lets you embed components written in native code languages such as C and C++. The kit as a whole can be used to target devices running Android 1.5 or higher, but OpenGL ES 2.0 is only available for Android 2.0 or higher. The latest version of Google’s (partially)open source mobile stack is Android 2.1, which debuted with the company’s very own Nexus One Phone.

Mozilla is using the Android NDK to bring Firefox to Google’s platform, and the open sourcers plan on switching development to OpenGL.

The latest Android NDK for Windows, Mac, or Linux includes a sample application that uses OpenGL ES 2.0 vertex and fragment shaders. In doing so, Google makes it easier for developers to move their existing ES 2.0 games to the platform.