As news of Google’s China situation dominates headlines, the company has also announced that it is turning on https access for Gmail as the default (Gmail accounts were hacked in China, in case you haven’t read about that yet).

Https, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is used to provide encryption and secure ID. Back in 2008 Google started giving users the option to use it.

Google released a stunning blog post that details a "sophisticated and targeted attack" on Gmail that "resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google".

Google notes that the attack was not just on Google infrastructure but also on more than twenty other companies from various industries. Google states that they are working with the authorities in the U.S. and will be notifying the companies of the breaches.

The rumors about Yahoo selling Zimbra have finally become fact.  Today, VMware announced that it’s acquired the open source email and collaboration specialist, and although the financial details weren’t disclosed, corporate representatives on all sides of the transaction seem pleased.

Microsoft is not the only one with some new offerings in the way of health search today. Google has added a slew of new cities to its Flu Trends product. The move is timed well, as the company acknowledges that it is National Influenza Vaccination Week.

Today, the Apache Software Foundation gained a new sponsor: Facebook.  Facebook is a gold sponsor, too, which means that the social network expressed its support for open source software by volunteering to donate $40,000 per year to the ASF.

Cynics shouldn’t waste their time looking for an ulterior motive.  Facebook won’t get much out of this deal aside from a link on the ASF’s "Thanks" page, an ASF logo to put on its own site, and a PR blurb.

Today Microsoft announced some new health search capabilities for its Bing search engine. The "decision engine" is now providing more content from new partners and instant answers with "hard-to-discover data", the company says.

Users can find instant, specialized information about illnesses, treatments, medical facilities, etc. when entering health-related queries.

U.S Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and National Safety Council President Janet Froetscher today announced the creation of FocusDriven, a national nonprofit organization designed to raise awareness about the dangers of distracted driving.

The group will be led by Jennifer Smith, who has been an advocate against distracted driving since her mother was killed by someone talking on a cell phone while driving in 2008.

An announcement related to data storage and the cloud has come out of Mountain View today, and people who’ve never heard the word "GDrive" may be very impressed by it.  It’s possible that consumers who are familiar with the term will be extremely disappointed, however.

Each month we’ve been looking at Twitter’s growth in terms of new user registration and number of Tweets. Last month we saw a decline in the number of new Twitterers in November continuing a trend that began in July.

In December, however, new Twitter user registrations leveled out. Number of tweets grew significantly, and the number of tweets from new users grew as well, possibly indicating that people aren’t just signing up for Twitter and not using it.

After a challenging 2009, the technology sector will see a recovery in 2010 as businesses and governments in the U.S. and around the globe begin spending again on information technology, according to a new report by Forrester Research.

After declining 8.2 percent in 2009, U.S. IT spending will grow 6.6 percent in 2010 to $568 billion. Global IT spending, which fell 8.9 percent last year, will increase 8.1 percent in 2010 to more than $1.6 trillion. Software and computer hardware will see the most growth.

Google has been granted a quite interesting patent for "Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising". The company filed the patent back in the summer of 2008. The abstract reads:

Late yesterday, Yahoo Southeast Asia got what may be a big leg up in the social networking arena.  Yahoo Southeast Asia established a partnership with Friendster that will see the two entities doing a great deal of cross-promotion in the near future.

Google announced that Google Friend Connect features are now available for the Drupal and Joomla content management systems. This means that content publishers using these platforms can integrate Google’s product, which basically turns your site into a mini social network.

Someone with a very interesting political background will soon be in charge of Google’s corporate communications.  The company’s hired Jill Hazelbaker, who’s worked with both John McCain and Michael Bloomberg in the past, to replace Matt Furman.

PubMatic said today it would extend its ad network optimization technology to include mobile advertising.

The company said it would use its real-time optimization technology to help publishers maximize revenue from their mobile ad inventory. PubMatic’s technology helps online publishers get the most revenue from their advertising space by determining in real-time which ad network or exchange can best monetize each impression.

If you ever set out to collect personal email addresses at a tech gathering, here’s a tip: generally speaking, you can save time by typing or writing out the "@gmail" part before approaching people.  But Compete provided a bit of a reality check today by showing that Hotmail remains in the top spot overall.

More than half (51%) of holiday shoppers across 11 countries used their mobile phones for in-store activities such as comparison shopping, getting peer feedback, product information and coupons, according to a new study by Motorola.

Back in 2008, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear announced that he wanted to shut down 141 Internet gambling sites in the state in an effort to stop unregulated online gaming. He filed a civil suit against the domain names and asked the court to force the sites to block access to Kentucky users or give up control of their domain names.

Starting in mid-March, Yahoo Shopping will no longer be a solo act.  Yahoo announced today that it’s arranged to have PriceGrabber take care of some of the technical details, and it’ll be able to make one more cutback thanks to the adjustment.

In an attempt to give our readers some real world application of all this social media theory swirling about we will be occasionally speaking with some real people who do the real work. How about that? Today we look at social media and the sports world.

We in the online world take every opportunity to turn our nose up at traditional media like newspapers because they are so 1900’s. Just take a look over the past year of posts that I have done and I at times can lead that charge. For the record, I do not relish in the fact that newspapers are going by the way side in many ways. I see that they are and it’s hard not to notice.

For many in the online space these days the words “Facebook privacy” would be called an oxymoron. Then of course there would be the usual calling others at Facebook morons and then it would get worse from there but I digress. Michael Arrington recently interviewed the poster child for the “Privacy? What privacy?” movement, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

As marketing professionals, we usually have to justify ourselves to our bosses, our clients and everyone in between—especially in the less-tested, sometimes-hit-or-miss arena of social media.

Back in November we talked about AOL’s need to trim their headcount by some 2,500 people. At the time the hope was that enough would walk away from their positions to avert the need for playing the bad guy and actually firing anyone.