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One of the most insidious ways that malware scammers infect users' computers is through fake anti-virus programs. For years Internet denizens have seen pop-ups in their browsers claiming that "your computer is infected, click here to get rid of this virus." If users clicked, they would download a virus that the scammers would offer to eradicate, for a fee. This was a favorite practice of "Spam King" Sanford Wallace in the early 2000s. In recent months, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has raided the "scareware" spammers and as such, fake anti-virus malware on the Web has decreased by 60% in the last several months.

You may recognize the programs. They go by names like "Vista Security 2012," "XP Antispyware 2012" and "Mac Defender." Yet, according to Enigma Software, these scareware programs are on the decline. In June, the FBI raided malicious programmers 12 countries including the U.S. and arrested ChronoPay's CEO Pavel Vrublevsky, whose Russian payments company was believed to be behind many of the applications.

The rate at which data, or content, is being produced for the Web and being generated for businesses has outpaced the rate at which conventional databases are evolving to better manage it all. It's a fact of life that we perceive on a gradual basis every day, but that we haven't yet acknowledged to be as significant or dangerous a trend as it is: Data is getting slower. Networks are getting bigger as the cloud is getting broader, and data that was already difficult to manage is becoming impossible. Content management systems today continue to be based on the types of structured database systems about one or two steps more evolved than dBASE. We've known they would be insufficient for the task, but we've put off the problem of composing a new architecture.

It's already too late for major IT companies to start that new architecture from square one; if a company has any hope of addressing this colossal, underappreciated problem, it will need to acquire the architectural project in progress. This is what Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday that it intends to do: acquire a software firm whose core product aims to supplant everything we know about databases, both the SQL kind and the Google kind. In its place would come a clustered approach whose goal is no less than to be the central repository for meaning in the world.

And in exchange for this, HP is willing to let go of the promise of Palm.

Linux is turning 20 years old this year, and we wondered how that makes you feel?

You answered, and we culled your responses from Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook, and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Without any fanfare, Google has launched a new resource called "Google Internet Stats" which brings together industry facts and insights from across five different industries. Using a number of third party vendors as sources, the stats tool parses through online data to reveal Twitter-sized snippets and factoids like: "Over 90% of online merchants are planning to add rich media and social networking functions in 2009 -Internet Retailing" or "Runners have collectively logged over 93 million miles on nikeplus.com - BusinessWeek." While the stat center is an excellent new resource, there is one odd thing about it - it's hosted on the google.co.uk domain even though many of the sources used for stats have a global focus.

Sometimes, even HTML is just too hard.

In this postmodern world, we're all professionally fragmented jacks of all trades, and few of us have the patience (read: OCD) for learning enough CSS and Flash to allow us to keep up with the Jonses in terms of functional, sexy web design. Here are some cheat sheets, the Cliff Notes of site creation, if you will. Read on to discover four awesome, in-browser resources for creating your own beautiful corner of the web without the horror of code.

Have you ever eaten a casserole made completely with canned ingredients and a potato chip crust? It's similar to if you've ever eaten wet cat food on a dare. It's terrible. Nevertheless, for many of us, these casseroles are as much a part of childhood as Halloween and jump rope. While we can certainly eat casserole calamities and remember our youth fondly, it's probably time we contributed some new recipes to the family cookbook - ones that don't give everyone sodium-induced hypertension. Below is a quick round up of recipe resources:

Yesterday, on Digg the Blog, Digg founder Kevin Rose announced the next Townhall, scheduled for Monday, May 12th at 8 PM EDT/5 PM PDT. Like the last one (our coverage), this Townhall will also be a virtual meeting held as a live webcast and made available for download afterwards.