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Every time a botnet is taken down, another is waiting in the wings to take its place. Each successive iteration of malware infected networked computers is more sophisticated than the last. Security research company Kaspersky believes it has found one that is almost indestructible.

The TDL-4 botnet is 4.5 million PCs strong. It has some unique features that make it difficult to remove such as a powerful rootlet exploitation and the ability to disable other malware that is installed on a computer. Those features make it difficult to detect and remove the malware, but that is not what makes the botnet indestructible. The way TDL-4 communicates with its command-and-control center and other infected computers is what makes it unique.

Although some people would like to blame P2P traffic for Internet piracy, that's not a completely accurate assessment. Case in point, the release today of the Australian horror film The Tunnel. The movie is being released simultaneously on TV, DVD, and yes BitTorrent - the first film to have this sort of global distribution on release day. The movie was recently screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and will be on the big screen in Sydney in June.

Although as we reported yesterday, Netflix now surpasses P2P Internet traffic - in North America at least - but this doesn't mean that this isn't a popular avenue by which many people access movie entertainment. Rather than fighting BitTorrent, the makers of The Tunnel are embracing it.

On one hand, I'm a big fan of the gift card. I never know what to buy people, so gift cards always seem like a good option. On the other hand, gift cards can be frustrating, particularly if I want to get one to a particular local business and not just a major chain. A lot of sites don't offer gift cards, and if they do, you have to actually go into the shop to purchase one - that's a pain when your family is spread all over the country. And it's a pain for recipients to have to keep track of little gift certificates or plastic cards.

Thankfully, GIftRocket has rebooted the whole process, with a really innovative solution that should please merchants, gift-givers, and recipients alike.

Less than two weeks after Visa's announcement that it was launching its own peer-to-peer digital payment system, American Express is getting in on the game as well. The credit card company today unveiled Serve, its new digital payment and commerce platform.

Users will be able to send or receive money from their Serve accounts, which can be funded by a bank account, debit or credit card, or by money from another Serve account. With the new AmEx digital payment system, consumers will be able to make payments via the Serve website, via their mobile phones, and with merchants who accept American Express cards. Accounts will be accessible via Android and iPhone apps and through Facebook.

It's an argument that the music industry likes to make: go after P2P file-sharing sites, sue them, shut them down, and as a result we'll have less music piracy. But is that really the case?

According to a study released today by the market research company NPD Group, a market research group, it is. The company contends that since a federal judge ordered that the peer-to-peer site Limewire shut its doors in the fall of last year, that the peer-to-peer filesharing of music - both the number of files downloaded and the number of users of the P2P sites - has declined.

Credit card giant Visa announced a new peer-to-peer payment service today that will soon give its U.S. customers the ability to receive and send money from their Visa accounts. The new personal payments service moves Visa's focus away from being just a handler for point-of-sale transactions and takes aim at an area that has long been dominated by PayPal.

Visa's announcement includes a partnership with CashEdge and Fiserv, two person-to-person financial transactions companies, which will now have access to VisaNet, the company's payment processing network.

Searching for file-sharing information via Google is going to take a little bit more effort now, thanks to new steps taken by the search engine to remove all sorts of references to torrents from its instant search and autocomplete features.

In December, Google said it was taking steps towards "making copyright work better online." Among other things, it promised that "terms that are closely associated with piracy" would no longer appear in autocompletes.

The social micropayment startup Flattr has rolled out a change to its service today. As we first reported last month, users of the site can now donate specific amounts of money to Flattr users.

Flattr lets users "Like" websites and content, but that action is backed with real money. Before this new donation feature was added, the money in your Flattr account was split evenly each month among all the sites you've "flattred." And while you can still use the service that way, you'll also be able to donate a specific amount - a minimum of €2, up to €50. "We think this will take the system to a whole other level beyond just tips," says Flattr's Eileen Burbidge.

The company BitTorrent announced a significant milestone today: 100 million monthly active users of its software, BitTorrent Mainline and µTorrent.

These clients use the BitTorrent protocol, a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol that's used to distribute large amounts of data. Rather than downloading a file from a single source, BitTorrent allows users to join a "swarm" of hosts that can upload and download files in pieces.

Although Skype has not been fully restored for everyone, the company has updated its blog with an indication of what's happening to cause such a widespread and lengthy outage in the VOIP service.

According to spokesperson Peter Parkes, problems with the Skype network's "supernodes" are responsible - something it may take several more hours to fix.