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The firmware within your Mac computer battery can be compromised, says a security researcher who discovered the default passwords left out in the clear. Next week in Las Vegas, Accuvant's security researcher Charlie Miller plans to reveal the full details (and a solution) at his talk at Black Hat USA. When you stop and think about it attacking the firmware on a battery pack makes perfect sense.

The number of top-level domains on the Internet is set to increase dramatically over the next few years. Today's familiar .com, .org and .info addresses are going to be supplemented with dozens or hundreds of new extensions such as .blog, .sport, .london, .music and .gay. This rapid expansion will happen under the new generic top-level domain (gTLD) program launched by ICANN, the non-profit organization that oversees the Domain Name System (DNS).

For decades, Internet scams have been as numerous as they've been easy to spot -- but fraudsters' tools and tricks are now becoming more sophisticated.

Those poorly written spam e-mails often seem more annoying than threatening, but they can wreak financial havoc on their victims. Precise statistics are hard to pin down, but experts believe global Internet fraud scams people out of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars each year.

With hackers running riot on the Internet, here's how you can get paid to stop them.