The Washington Post writes that “[i]n a bid to keep up with its competition, Yahoo yesterday launched a system to let marketers tailor advertising content to individual users, theoretically making the ads more effective and, therefore, more lucrative for Yahoo. Yahoo’s advertising service, SmartAds, uses behavioral, demographic and geographic information to try to connect people with marketing that caters to their interests. Yahoo said it is its largest effort to cull information about its users.”

InfoWorld reports that “Massachusetts, the U.S. state that has mandated the use of open technology formats in its government agencies, has put [Open XML] on its list of possible standards that can be used for documents, according to a document on its Web site.”

According to a different InfoWorld article, “China is proving to be a mighty force not only economically, but also as the launching point for malicious software and spam. In June, some 40 percent of malicious software worldwide originated from Beijing, nearly doubling from 21 percent in May, said Simon Heron, managing director for security vendor Network Box. […] Beijing kept the number one spot for malware, followed by Wattleup, Australia, at 3.7 percent, and Madrid, Spain, at 2.5 percent, according to Network Box.”

CNetNews today asks an interesting question: “Could the iPhone have been invented anywhere but Silicon Valley?” CNet invites its readers to contribute their thoughts to the discussion.

In more iPhone news, the Register points out that “[f]raudsters have been busy at work exploiting the hype surrounding last week’s launch of the Apple iPhone. One strain of scam email makes the bogus claim that recipients have won one of the much sought after devices in a bid to trick prospective marks into visiting a malware loaded site. […] Another scam relies on infecting PCs with a new custom Trojan.”