As the Obama administration grapples with the thorny issue of beefing up the United States’ cybersecurity infrastructure, and as security experts warn of impending cyberwarfare, a debate is raging over how much surveillance is enough. One of the biggest problems about implementing cybersecurity is that it involves a measure of surveillance, and the line between surveillance and snooping is razor thin. Thin enough, in fact, that Einstein 3 has aroused privacy concerns because it can examine the content of email.

Although its operating system and apps are so buggy that new vulnerabilities are discovered with frightening regularity, Microsoft now wants Internet users to pony up to cover the cost of cybersecurity. The idea was put forth by Scott Charney, Redmond’s vice president for trustworthy computing, during a speech at the RSA Conference 2010 security convention earlier this week. His argument is that PC users who don’t run antivirus apps or back up their computers or patch their systems regularly are like cigarette smokers who poison other people with second-hand smoke.

YouTube on Thursday opened its previously restricted automated captioning beta program to the public, saying it will help the hearing-impaired. Currently, the feature is only available for videos that contain speech in the English language, although YouTube plans to add other languages. In the interim, video uploaders can use a feature that translates captions in English into any of 50 languages. Ultimately, the auto-captioning feature might help YouTube monetize its videos.

Gaming companies like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft ask a lot of their customers. Every few years, they are encouraged by the companies to spend a few hundred bucks to upgrade to a fancy new console. But as far as I can recall, only Sony has ever asked its fans to not play those consoles. It happened Monday, thanks to a bug that kept those with older PlayStation 3s from accessing the PlayStation Network. An item on a company blog described the glitch as a problem with the console’s internal clock, which apparently thought it was a leap year.

Sony says a glitch that caused a global gaming lockdown for PlayStation 3 owners is due to a bug in the clock functionality of older PS3s. The lockdown affects owners of older PS3s as well as those who try to play newer games, which use trophies, such as “Heavy Rain” and “Final Fantasy XIII.” It also prevents users from connecting to Sony’s PlayStation Network. At press time, Sony was still working on the problem. The glitch struck Sunday when users powered on their PS3s, whether or not the devices were connected to the Internet.

Facebook last week won the right to call the news feed its very own. Patent 7,699,123 was issued by the U.S. Patent Office last Tuesday to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and seven other Facebook executives. It’s described as a method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment. The method includes, in essence, generating information about a social networking site’s users; attaching links about the activities to the news items; restricting access to the user’s friends or social networking group; and arranging the news items in order.

Microsoft did its best Woody Harrelson impression this week and set out to bag some zombies. The zombies we’re talking about here are PCs infected with malware. The bad guys spread the malware around and then remotely control victims’ computers as part of a botnet that can do stuff like send out spam email or carry out DDoS attacks. In the real world, of course, you have to aim for the head to kill zombies, and that’s basically the new strategy Microsoft used. In order to take down Waledac, which was one really bad botnet, it was granted a temporary restraining order.

In a ruling that could have profound implications for the future of the Internet, three Google executives were convicted of privacy violations on Wednesday over a video that aired briefly in 2006 on the now-defunct Google Video site. David Drummond, Google’s SVP and chief legal officer, Peter Fleischer, the company’s chief privacy counsel, and George Reyes, its CFO, were all given six-month prison sentences by Judge Oscar Magi for allowing the posting of a video depicting the bullying of a disabled teen by classmates in a Turin technical school.

Without Apple headlining, MacWorld 2010 was proclaimed a snoozefest before it even started. Now it’s over and we’re all left to sift through the various blog posts and news articles coming from reporters on the scene — which are decidedly fewer in number and weaker in excitement than in previous years. One item that did catch my eye was about Joby’s new accessories. Joby makes Gorillapods — those clingy little portable camera tripods that you can pose in various ways to get a steady photo almost anywhere.

Tired of “dead spots” in your WiFi coverage? How about a wireless Internet connection with crawling performance? hField Technologies has a solution it calls “Wi-Fire,” and the Mac version of its software has recently been overhauled. Wi-Fire is a gadget that plugs into the USB port of a computer and, according to hField, increases the range and speed of WiFi connections. Although the gizmo works with other platforms, like Window and Linux, it has proven to be very popular in the Mac market, maintained hField Marketing Manager Blake Kleintop.

Innovation was certainly on display at this week’s Google Buzz press conference, but there was only one moment that truly registered an 9.5 on my personal Coolness Quotient meter. That was during the mobile segment of the demonstration. Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra spoke into his Android phone, and the magic of Google Voice, combined with GPS-tagging and location-based services, allowed him to post his “buzz.” I know that reads like something Jeff Spicoli of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” might have said.

What will developers and users do with Google’s planned ultra high-speed broadband network? Google’s answer can be summed up in four words: We don’t know yet. “If the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that the most important innovations are often those we least expect,” Google spokesperson Dan Martin told TechNewsWorld. “In the same way that the transition from dial-up to broadband made possible the emergence of online video and countless other applications, ultra high-speed bandwidth will lead to new innovations …”

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