Reuters speculates about the likelihood of the planned IBM-Sun merger raising antitrust concerns, writing that “

[t]he prospect of staid IBM merging with brilliant but troubled Sun Microsystems could spark a bout of antitrust scrutiny in the United States and abroad as customers and suppliers raise concerns about competition.  The merger would give the combined company 65 percent of the $17 billion Unix server market, according to market researcher IDC. These are the big servers that major companies, the government and others rely on for their most critical operations, according to IDC.  International Business Machines and Sun Microsystems were the top two players in 2008, with 37 percent and 28 percent of the market, respectively. Hewlett-Packard was third, with 27 percent.”

The Associated Press reports that “[a] whistle-blower organization claims a secret list of Web sites that Australian authorities are proposing to ban includes such innocuous destinations as a dentist's office.  Australia's government denied that the list — published by renegade Web site Wikileaks.org — was the same as a blacklist run by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, or ACMA. However, a manager at the dentist's office said the ACMA had confirmed her site's inclusion on the ban list.  Wikileaks' publication of the list this week reignited a debate over whether a government proposal to impose an Internet filter for all Australians could have unintended consequences for innocent businesses.”

Networkworld writes that, in an effort to find out where the Conficker worm came from, “[r]esearchers at the University of Michigan are […] using a vast network of Internet sensors to track down the so-called ‘patient zero’ of an outbreak that has infected more than 10 million computers to date.  The university uses so-called darknet sensors that were set up about six years ago in order to keep track of malicious activity. With funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, computer scientists have banded together to share data collected from sensors around the world.  ‘The goal is to get close enough so you can actually start mapping out how the spread started,’ said Jon Oberheide, a graduate student with the University of Michigan who is working on the project.  That's not an easy job. To find the minuscule clues that will identify the victim, researchers must sift through more than 50 terabytes of data, hoping to find the telltale signatures of a Conficker scan.”

BusinessWeek has an interesting discussion on whether Wall Street numerati could land in tech.

ZDNet.com links to a great Churchill Club podcast in which two VCs (Matt Murphy of Kleiner Perkins and Jay Hoag of TCV) talk with LinkedIn Chariman & CEO Reid Hoffman about changing company valuations, and threats such as corporate bankruptcies and limited partners reneging on their investment commitments.  The discussion in moderated by Geoffrey Yang of Redpoint Ventures.