FCC: Some DTV transition hiccups still anticipated

The digital TV transition is less than two weeks away, and even though most Americans are prepared for the big switch, the Federal Communications Commission still expects a few hiccups.

The FCC on Tuesday held a public hearing where representatives from different FCC bureaus and leaders from various groups involved in educating and preparing the public for the switch to digital TV broadcast updated commissioners on their progress. The FCC and Commerce Department have partnered with community organizations, churches, public safety departments, civil rights groups, consumer groups and broadcasters around the country to get people ready for the transition. These education and outreach programs were thrown into high gear after Congress voted to postpone the transition from February 17 to June 12.

FCC staff members as well as other experts agreed that the nation is much better prepared now for the DTV transition than it was in February. But they testified there will be some individuals and groups of people who will still experience problems when all full-powered TV stations in the country flip the switch to digital transmission.

One major issue cited by Eloise Gore, associate bureau chief of the FCC's media bureau, is that some 35 TV stations around the country are expected to go dark after the switch. Eighteen of these stations are having financial problems, she said. The other 17 stations are experiencing technical issues that are preventing them from switching to digital, Gore said during her testimony. These TV stations may be able to get their signals back online by the end of the year, she said.

Some of the TV stations that are expected to stop transmitting signals are affiliates of a major TV network, such as ABC, NBC, CBS, or Fox. But Gore added that viewers who lose these channels can scan for that network on a subchannel of another TV station and may be able to access that network.

Another potential problem cited by Julius Knapp, chief of the Office of Engineering and Technology for the FCC, is that even people who have gotten their new digital converter boxes or who have digital-ready TVs are having difficulty with their antennas. He said consumers need to make sure that they have antennas that can receive UHF and VHF signals. He also said some viewers may have to adjust their antennas to get the digital TV signals. And he noted that viewers who have already been using converter boxes and antennas to get over the-air-digital TV should still rescan their boxes to find the new digital signals, since some signals may have shifted after the cut-over to all-digital transmission.

Knapp also noted that his office has been updating information on its Web site about antennas and these other issues to help provide more information to consumers. The office has also been working with retailers so that they can provide better advice to consumers about which antenna will work best for them.

Even though disruptions are expected after the June 12 deadline, the reality is that about half of the 1,800 full-power TV stations required to transition to digital transmission have already done so. Many of these stations have been transmitting in digital since the original February 17 deadline.

Education and outreach programs appear to be working. The most recent polling data from Nielsen suggests that only about 3 million households that rely on over-the-air TV are unprepared for the transition. This figure is down from about 6 million households that were unprepared leading up to the February 17 deadline. The people who are still left out appear to be procrastinators and some in at-risk groups, such as elderly, low-income, or rural viewers, said Cathy Seidel, chief of the FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. And the agency is continuing to target those groups.

The Commerce Department has been offering $40 coupons to help offset the cost of digital converter boxes to allow older TVs to receive digital signals. And government officials say there is enough money and vouchers available to continue the program until its deadline of July 31. But officials did warn that people applying for coupons now may not get them in time for the June 12 deadline.

Despite that good news, some of the commissioners still have concerns. Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell, who President Obama renominated for his current post, said he was concerned about what would happen after the transition was completed. Specifically, he wanted to know how the FCC would pay for the 4,000 telephone operators it planned to have in place to answer calls from consumers having problems. The FCC needs about $10 million to pay for these operators.

Bernadette McGuire-Rivera, associate administrator at the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said these funds could be allocated from the Commerce Department, which received $650 million from the economic stimulus package to help fund the DTV coupon program. The agency has the authority to distribute about $90 million of that money to the FCC for digital TV education efforts. The FCC has already received about $65 million of the funding, but the Commerce Department has been holding about $25 million in case more is needed for the coupon program.

McGuire-Rivera said she didn't see any major problems in getting the $10 million transferred from the Commerce Department to the FCC. But the transfer must still be approved by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, which she anticipates will happen.

Democratic Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein expressed his concern that roughly 31 percent of TV households in various markets will not have access to "analog nightlight" services. The "nightlight" program is a voluntary program in which TV stations agree to keep an analog signal turned on in addition to their digital signals to provide information about the DTV transition and to notify unprepared TV viewers of emergencies, such as hurricanes.

Only about 100 stations plan to maintain "analog nightlight" notifications after the switch. More than half of those nightlights will remain on air for 30 days. And the rest will be on for at least two weeks. In total, these stations will reach 69 percent of TV households.

Representatives from the FCC and the National Association of Broadcasters said they are still trying to recruit more TV stations to provide nightlight broadcasts, and they expect to add more to the list.

Marguerite Reardon has been a CNET News reporter since 2004, covering cell phone services, broadband, citywide Wi-Fi, the Net neutrality debate, as well as the ongoing consolidation of the phone companies. E-mail Maggie.

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EchoStar says appeals court stays ruling on DVR workaround

Less than 24 hours after a federal judge found EchoStar in contempt in its long-running patent dispute with TiVo, another judge issued a temporary stay Wednesday, according to EchoStar.

"We are pleased that the Federal Appeals Court in Washington temporarily stayed the district court's order in the TiVo litigation. Dish Network customers can continue using their DVRs. We believe that we have strong grounds for appeal," the company said in a statement.

The temporary stay drags out even further a legal contest that is now five years old. It seemed like it had come close to reaching its conclusion on Tuesday evening when U.S. District Judge David Folsom found EchoStar, which is now part of Dish Network, in contempt of court for violating a permanent injunction by reprogramming millions of DVRs with a new "workaround." He then ordered EchoStar to pay $103 million to TiVo.

"The harm caused to TiVo by EchoStar's contempt is substantial," Folsom wrote. "EchoStar has gained millions of customers since this court's injunction was issued, customers that are now potentially unreachable by TiVo."

TiVo first sued EchoStar in 2004 for violating a patent on a "multimedia time-warping system," which involved recording a program on one channel while watching another.

A jury in 2006 found that Dish Network's DVRs infringed upon a patent held by TiVo and ordered it to pay TiVo $73.9 million in damages. A federal appeals court upheld the ruling in January 2008, as did a second U.S. appeals court in April 2008.

CNET News' Steven Musil contributed to this report.

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Almost 20 years ago exactly, on June 4, 1989, the Chinese military opened fire on prodemocracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, resulting in the loss of hundreds--if not thousands--of innocent lives. Most of the slain were students. However, the Chinese government would like the younger generations in China and the rest of the world to know very little about that.

The most iconic image from the Tiananmen Square protest and subsequent massacre.

(Credit: Wikipedia)

Many media reports say that in the recent days leading up to the anniversary, China has been blocking Web sites like Twitter, Yahoo's Flickr, YouTube, Microsoft Hotmail, Live.com, Wordpress, Blogger, and many other social-networking sites and news outlets in an effort to keep the event an internal issue. Several of my friends in China have confirmed the inaccessibility of these sites. China currently has the most Internet users in the world.

According to the San Fransisco Chronicle, Microsoft's new search engine Bing is also blocked. In response to this, Kevin Kutz, a Microsoft spokesman, said his company "is committed to helping advance the free flow of information, and is committed to encouraging transparency, due process and rule of law when it comes to Internet governance."

The Associated Press reported that other Chinese blogs and file-sharing sites are also disabled. VeryCD, a popular Chinese video-sharing portal, has put a note on its site saying it will be offline until Saturday for "maintenance reasons." The popular miniblogging site Fanfou has done the same thing.

Foreign journalists are currently barred from entering Tiananmen Square and have not been given any specific reason as to why.

On June 4, 1989, student protesters gathered at Tiananmen Square in the capital city of China and called for a democratic system and clean government. Troops moved in with tanks and were ordered to open fire at the crowd. Unofficial figures indicate that somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 people were killed.

Since then, the Chinese government has carefully guarded information on the event--and even refused an independent investigation into the matter--which is believed by many to be one of the bloodiest examples of human rights suppression in the 20th century.________________________________________________________________

DOJ hiring probe includes many big names

Updated 4:05 p.m., with comment from Yahoo.

A Department of Justice probe into hiring practices among high-tech firms appears to have stretched out to include some of the best-known names in the industry.

The Washington Post first reported the story on Tuesday evening, listing Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Genentech as among the companies that were being looked at. Microsoft and Intel are also believed to have received requests for information, according to sources as well as to a New York Times report.

to The issue is believed to center on whether certain companies agreed not to hire from one another.

Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Intel all declined comment. Late on Wednesday, Yahoo confirmed it had received an inquiry from the government "a while ago."

"We have been contacted (by the DOJ), and we are cooperating," A Yahoo representative said.

Word of the probe took some in the tech industry by surprise, given several prominent cases of tech firms suing one another over worker poaching. Two of the companies said to be involved in the probe--Microsoft and Google--waged a fierce, multistate court battle after Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee was hired by Google. (The two sides eventually settled.)

More recently, Apple and IBM duked it out after Apple hired IBM executive Mark Papermaster. He eventually took up work at Apple, but only after a lawsuit and eventual settlement. IBM also sued over a recent Dell hire, David Johnson.

CNET News' Tom Krazit contributed to this report.________________________________________________________________

Google Squared goes live with mixed results

Google Squared developers are quite welcome to join my fantasy baseball team next year.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Google turned on Google Squared Wednesday, letting the public test out its attempt to present search results in grid format.

Google Squared was first demonstrated at Google's Searchology event in May, when the company showed off how a query for a category such as "U.S. Presidents" would return a number of results for the gentlemen who have held that office sorted by categories, such as political party, number of terms in office, years in office, as well as any number of customized categories.

This is very much a Google Labs project, far from a complete part of the Google search experience, and early experiments left a lot to be desired. Google Squared finds Web pages that have been indexed, just like with a regular search, but presents them in a spreadsheet format that, if the data was relevant, could potentially be more useful to someone doing research on a particular topic.

For example, take a subject where reams of statistical and historical data can be found on the Internet: baseball.

Google Squared was unable to return any results for "New York Mets third basemen," which was admittedly a joke query on my part based on the fact that the Mets are notorious for having a revolving door at the third base position over their 47-year history; I thought that would produce a long list of names. When I widened the query to just "third basemen," Google Squared came up with the names of seven baseball players who have occupied that position, several of whom are or were prominent players (Matt Williams, Terry Pendleton, and current Mets third baseman David Wright), and one who none of the baseball fans in the office could recall (Ken Reitz).

The search produced results for several relevant categories, such as a description of the player, date of birth, and whether they batted left or right. But when I tried to suggest additional categories, such as "All-Star," it was only able to find one appearance in the All-Star game by David Wright, missing appearances by Terry Pendleton and Robin Ventura.

Likewise, Google Squared suggested "Batting Average" as an additional category, but failed to return any results. That's a statistic that can be easily found on the Web for any player, living or dead, with a regular Google search.

A simpler search for just "baseball teams" produced several current Major League Baseball teams, but also helpfully provided the schedule for this year's Williamette University Bearcats squad, which finished the regular season with a 21-17 record.

But when a product was entered into Google Squared, the technology showed its promise, such as in this list of search results for "Nikon" that lists several different models of Nikon digital cameras along with specifications and features. Search Engine Land also noted helpful results for a search on "U2 albums."

Google's not trying to pretend this technology is ready for prime time, and with good reason: lots of refinements will be needed to turn it into a useful tool. Let us know how your experiments with Google Squared turn out.

Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom.

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CNET News Daily Podcast: How Symbian can stop the bleeding

Just about everyone knows about the iPhone--and maybe even that it runs on Apple's mobile operating system--even though the phone only makes up about 10 percent of the smartphone market. Far fewer people know the name of the most widely used mobile operating system, Symbian, which holds nearly 50 percent of the market. But Symbian has been losing market share at a very rapid rate, largely due to the popularity of the iPhone and Blackberry. CNET News' Mats Levan joins today's podcast to talk about what Symbian plans to take back some of that share.

Listen now:

Download today's podcast

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Six months later, no ISPs joining RIAA piracy fight

Last December, the music industry's message to song writers, publishers, and musicians was that antipiracy help was on the way. Hopes soared after the major labels announced that they had convinced a group of telecoms to work with them.

Filing lawsuits against individuals accused of illegal file sharing was, for the most part, a thing of the past, said the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group representing the top music companies. The new strategy was to enlist Internet service providers, the gatekeepers of the Web, which would issue a series of warnings designed to increase pressure on alleged pirates in what the RIAA called a "graduated response." Under the plan, those subscribers who refused to heed warnings could eventually see their Web connection suspended.

Six months later, the music industry is still waiting to hear from the RIAA which ISPs have explicitly agreed to work with the association. When the RIAA first announced its new antipiracy project, it didn't name partners. Behind the scenes, industry insiders assured the media that the group would disclose the names of partner ISPs "within weeks." Six months later, however, not one ISP has publicly acknowledged working with the RIAA on a "graduated response."

RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol

(Credit: Declan McCullagh)

That there are still no announced deals--and there's no guarantee the RIAA can sign any of the major broadband companies--indicates that at best the big recording companies may have spoken too soon when they said broadband providers would help, says one ISP executive. Ironically, at a time when many figured the RIAA had finally hit upon a compelling way to go after music piracy, the association's copyright protection efforts may be more toothless than ever.

"(The RIAA) has tried various ways to turn ISPs and other intermediaries into their own Internet cops," said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for Internet users. "What the ISPs appear to be saying is that this isn't our job."

To be sure, the RIAA continues to pitch its plan to ISPs, numerous sources have told CNET News. AT&T has launched tests of a graduated response--everything, that is, but service interruption. The telecom said it would never shut off a customer's service without a court order. The recording companies may soon announce some kind of agreement with one of the ISP trade groups. But this won't bind the group's members and the RIAA will still need to strike deals with individual companies.

"We have been working slowly but surely, directly and through the offices of (New York Attorney General Andrew) Cuomo, with virtually every major ISP on common approaches," said Jonathan Lamy, an RIAA spokesman in an e-mail. "During the past six months, a number of different ISPs have forwarded nearly half a million RIAA notices to P2P infringers. They had not done that before last winter. A number of individual ISPs now argue that notices alone are proving to have a sufficient deterrent impact."

What the RIAA seems to be suggesting here is that it doesn't need a threat of service termination for a graduated response to be effective. This, however, conflicts with what music executives say in private. They want a carrot and stick approach. They know they have to offer the public inexpensive and easy-to-use alternatives to illegal peer-to-peer sites. They also believe chronic abusers won't stop without the threat of a serious punitive consequence.

So, why did the RIAA announce the ISP-based program without any ISPs on board so many months ago?

Some RIAA critics have speculated that the December announcement was a smokescreen to cover the music industry's retreat from the 5-year-old and highly controversial strategy of filing copyright lawsuits against individuals accused of copyright violations. The theory goes something like this: the RIAA needed a face-saving way to walk away from the litigation, which resulted in more than 30,000 people being sued, a fortune in legal fees, a huge public relations black eye, and didn't do all that much to stop piracy.

"Every other month these Hollywood lobbyists pitch their antipiracy efforts to the public...this doesn't mean, however, that something is about to change."

--Ernesto, TorrentFreak founder

Ernesto, founder of the blog TorrentFreak, which focuses on file sharing, was always skeptical of the RIAA's announcement. He noted that some telecoms have voluntarily sent warning notices to subscribers accused of illegally downloading songs for years, while other companies refused. He says he sees nothing new.

"Yes, the RIAA, MPAA and other outfits do plan to send copyright infringement warnings to ISPs," Ernesto wrote in March, "but they've been doing so for at least half a decade. Every other month these Hollywood lobbyists pitch their antipiracy efforts to the public...this doesn't mean, however, that something is about to change."

According to the ISP executive who asked for anonymity because he's involved in negotiations with the music sector, the RIAA's tactics in dealing with the ISPs have been too heavy handed.

The executive complained that the RIAA has tried to use Andrew Cuomo to push the ISPs into helping. But Cuomo doesn't have the kind of political muscle to sway the major ISPs when they are acting well within the law, the executive said. There's nothing in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that requires ISPs to send their own warning letters to subscribers.

And some ISPs say the DMCA is unclear about when they must terminate service of repeat offenders. AT&T executives say they won't cut off someone's Web access based solely on evidence supplied by the recording industry and will only do so after receiving a court order.

"We keeping hearing about how (Cuomo) is supposed to make this happen," said the executive. "You don't see much changing, do you?

So if Cuomo isn't enough, why don't the music labels appeal to Congress to legislate the ISPs into submission? That's easy. The ISPs have much more influence in Washington than the music sector. There's also little public sympathy for recording stars, who are often perceived to be rolling in money--even if this is a reality for a tiny fraction of working musicians.

In an interview with CNET last week, Paul McGuinness, manager of the rock band U2, says that ISPs have for a long time profited from selling broadband to file sharers and have little interest in taking action without seeing financial reward. But he sees some progress around the globe.

"Perhaps broadband subscription sales are saturated in many territories and the ISPs are belatedly but realistically now turning to building revenue collection businesses with the content owners," McGuinness said. "I just hope it's not too late."

Cohn, from EFF, sees it differently. To her, cutting off someone's Internet connection for file sharing is like refusing to sell shoes to someone accused of jaywalking.

"Every day that passes we realize how important Internet connectivity is to people's lives," Cohn said. "The RIAA looks so out of step with what most people think is a reasonable response to (copyright) infringing behavior. Even to the people that believe we're locked into this 19th century view of copyright law, the RIAA looks hysterical."

Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET.

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My new favorite concert-finding site: Livekick

The recording industry is increasingly looking at live-music revenue as one way to make up for falling sales of recorded music, and as a consequence, concert-listing sites are sprouting like mushrooms. I've been a longtime customer of Jambase, and have been impressed with Bandloop's iPhone application enough to keep it installed long past my usual testing time, but Wednesday I added a new one to my bookmarks: Livekick.

Founded last year by Aviv Eyal, who helped found video-sharing site Grouper and sell it to Sony in 2006, and his partner Yarden Tadmor, Livekick's been in public beta testing since last fall. The process is familiar from other concert-finding sites: enter your favorite artists, and it'll return a list of concerts by those artists in your area, complete with links to buy tickets.

But there's one huge difference: instead of forcing you to enter artist names manually, Livekick lets you import them directly from iTunes, as well as online music services such as iLike, Pandora, and Last.fm. (Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News.) This not only saves hours of time--the import took about 10 seconds for more than 600 artists--but it also helps you remember artists you wouldn't have thought to follow. In my case, I seldom listen to Lyle Lovett (except when driving my daughter around--she loves "the song about the hat") or the Reverend Horton Heat, but I know that both are fantastic in concert. And thanks to the iTunes import feature in Livekick, I just found out that both are stopping near Seattle in the next month.

The Orb? I haven't thought about them since 1991. They're playing Seattle on June 15.

Livekick goes deeper than the "Artist" column, reading other song data to help refine its suggestions. For instance, I don't have any solo music from John Doe, but Livekick saw all my X songs, recognized Doe as a songwriter and member of the band, and recommended a nearby show. It also recommended Merle Haggard based on the fact that I have a Dick's Pick selection of the Grateful Dead doing "Mama Tried," written by the Okie from Muskogee. And once you've got your list of artists, you can click any of them to find related artists--and Livekick does an excellent job with the suggestions.

Finally, if you see anything you're interested in, Livekick shows you ticket prices from Ticketmaster and other outlets, then lets you click through to buy. And Wednesday's a perfect day to try it out: concert promoter Live Nation is running a promotion called No Service Fee Wednesdays where it's waiving some of its customary fees for some seats at some shows. (You knew the name was too good to be true, didn't you?)

The site's not perfect--I got excited when I saw that The The had a show in my area, imagining a small club gig, only to find out that the band is actually The Them. The concert listing for art-rock band The Church showed a video of guitar shredder Steve Vai playing "Entering The Church" live. Livekick also focuses on well-known acts, whereas Bandloop is better for finding obscure local acts or answering the question, "Is there any live music happening in this neighborhood right now?" But for keeping track of old favorites on tour, Livekick beats any other site I've seen so far.

Follow Matt on Twitter

Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure.

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Scammers using search optimization on Twitter, Google

Online scammers are targeting people looking for popular topics on Twitter and Google to lure them to Web sites that display fake security warnings and try to sell them antivirus products, PandaLabs said on Wednesday.

This technique isn't new, but seems to be widening on Google and is particularly successful on Twitter where links are spread fast and furiously and people often don't think before they click.

Scammers pushed "PhishTube Broadcast" to a spot on the list of trending topics on Twitter inorder to spread links to sites with fake antivirus malware.

(Credit: PandaLabs)

In the Twitter scam, hundreds of fake Twitter accounts have been posting tweets that reference the band Phish, which has a cult-like following, according to a PandaLabs blog.

There were so many of the tweets, which say "PhishTube Broadcast," that the term showed up in the Trending Topics list. The tweets contain links that eventually lead to spoof porn pages that infect victims with the fake antivirus malware if they click anywhere on the page, PandaLabs said.

PandaLabs researchers also discovered links to malicious Web sites high up in searches on Google for "Microsoft" and its "Project Natal" gaming technology. The malicious sites display fake messages saying the computer is infected with viruses and offer to sell antivirus software.

The researchers then tried other popular searches and found 16,000 malicious links targeting "YouTube," 10,500 targeting "France" and "airline crash" and thousands of others targeting people searching on "E3," "Sony," and "Eminem" with "MTV Awards" or "Bruno," according to another PandaLabs blog post.

By: Elinor Mills

Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor.

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Cc:Betty simplifies, sets sights on automation

Starting Wednesday, e-mail helper Cc:Betty has a new look. It now puts cc'd e-mail conversations in a threaded view, so you can look at past correspondence and catch up quickly. You're also able to sort out messages in each of those threads by person, attachment, and included links using filters that remain on the side of the screen.

The service has taken a similarly simplified approach to viewing both links and e-mail attachments by presenting them as thumbnails. This lets you very quickly parse through attached content without visiting your mail client. And using the aforementioned filters, you can choose to only see things like images, videos, or links from an entire conversation thread.

The simplified view lets you sort by attachment, as well as see items like photos and links with thumbnail previews.

(Credit: Cc:Betty)

In a phone interview on Tuesday, Cc:Betty CEO and co-founder Michael Cerda told me the next big step for the service is to make it easier for its users to go through the motions of cc-ing Cc:Betty. Right now you have to do it manually every time you send an e-mail--a move that arguably gives users far more control over which conversations they choose to organize and aggregate, but can be a pain for heavy users.

To alleviate that, Cerda says some automation tools are in the works, such as browser and e-mail client add-ons that should give users the ability to make the cc-ing a part of the usual routine, or to choose which bits they want the service to keep track of.

Cerda also told me that he's looking forward to Google's Wave product since it's putting conversation management in the spotlight. "The Wave is a monster initiative," he said, "but I see us as being a simple, relevant, and invaluable version of what some of that wants to deliver. With the right mashup integration, there's a tremendous opportunity."

Cc:Betty continues to be a free service, although Cerda says that it will eventually get advertising. "We have instincts around (making money). How can we leverage the fact that Betty has a persistent view of all the data that is coming in and out. How do we not screw up the user experience?" he said. "When Gmail came out, and they put ads in it, people kind of freaked out at first, and all the ads aren't that great. There's an opportunity because of all the widespread range of all the data sources. It's not just about text, so we can present things that are potentially valuable for users."

Cerda says that long before ads make their way to the service, he wants to make sure his company gets it just right. And even when ads do arrive, he's not going to use the service to spam people with offers.

"Betty is this trusted persona," Cerda says, "so the last thing we want to do is violate that trust."

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Microsoft Outlook users targeted in phishing attempt

Trend Micro is warning about a phishing attempt that targets users of Microsoft Outlook.

The phishing e-mail arrives in Outlook e-mail inboxes and looks like it comes from Microsoft. It prompts recipients to reconfigure their Outlook by clicking on a link that leads to a Web site that asks for account name and password, as well as mail server information, according to the TrendLabs Malware Blog.

By getting the mail server information, the phishers would get total access to the Outlook user's account and be able to read emails and use it to spam others, TrendLabs said.

This is a screenshot of the e-mail being circulated in the phishing attempt targeting Microsoft Outlook users.

(Credit: Trend Micro)

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