Phishing attacks that affected customers of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Hotmail Monday have compromised more than 30,000 email accounts, including those of Gmail, Yahoo (YHOO) Mail and other services.

Microsoft blamed phishing, in which cybercriminals try to trick consumers into revealing personal information through fraudulent emails, for a list of Hotmail account passwords that appeared online. The company recommended Hotmail customers change their passwords and said it’s helping phishing victims fix compromised accounts.

But security firms and the BBC said Tuesday that the attack extended to other services, including those run by Google (GOOG) and Yahoo as well as AOL, EarthLink (ELNK) and Comcast (CMCSA).

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SpinVox criticized reports that its voicemail-transcription service is done by humans, saying that workers don’t touch messages unless the technology can’t recognize a word.

“This information is wrong and dated,” said Christina Domecq, SpinVox’s chief executive, of the BBC’s article. The report, which was published Thursday, accuses the British firm of using call-center employees–not the speech-recognition technology that it markets–to transcribe voicemail recordings.

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SpinVox, a British company that converts voicemails into text with speech recognition technology, has been accused by the BBC of using humans at call centers to manually conduct the majority of the translations.

The U.K.-based company, which boasts 30 million users across five continents, says that voicemails are translated into text via conversion technology known as “D2,” or “the Brain.” Customers can read the messages and post them on blogs, social networking sites, or send them to their email inboxes.

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Is it possible that the music industry has finally spotted the light at the end of the tunnel–and it’s not the flashing light on the oncoming Pirate Express locomotive?

This week a big piece of research has come up with two startling conclusions–that illegal downloading amongst young music fans has actually gone into a decline, and that the CD is still the most popular format, even amongst teenagers, and is not ready to be sent to the digital graveyard just yet.

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By any measure, he is among the most important figures in technology of the last decade, a major influence on the way we use and interact with computers and mobile phones, a British designer who ranks with the Conrans and the Dysons. But have you ever heard Jonathan Ive, the Apple (AAPL) designer behind the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, talk about his work?

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My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day. He had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.

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The strategies of companies ranging from Google (GOOG) to Microsoft (MSFT) and from Apple (AAPL) to Yahoo (YHOO) suggest they believe the future of the internet lies in mobile phones – but many in the industry believe the mobile web is still a long way from realising its potential.

EBay’s (EBAY) senior director of platforms and mobile Max Mancini told the BBC: “The first hype cycle on mobile failed because people wanted to recreate the desktop on the phone.

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There was a fair bit of chatter in the blogosphere yesterday about an analysis by Ross Sandler at RBC showing the remarkable growth of Facebook and the traffic the site “drives” to Google (GOOG).

The punch line that a bunch of folks took away from the analysis was that Facebook drives 19 percent of Google’s sessions. Henry Blodget made this conclusion as did a lot of others.

But I think this stat is completely misleading, and significantly overstates the importance of Facebook to Google. Let’s look at the key numbers that Ross discusses:

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A whole bunch of folks have sent in the “debate” that was held on the BBC Web site last week, starting with regular columnist Bill Thompson trashing Virgin Media, a U.K.-based broadband provider, for agreeing to send out warning “notices” to folks that the entertainment industry claims are file sharing. Thompson explains that he’s been known to use BitTorrent to get a copy of a TV show he missed on TV and forgot to record on his DVR, wondering why this should be a problem.

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How worried are you about the amount of private and personal stuff you have posted on social-networking sites? I’ve always been pretty relaxed–both because I’m very careful about how much information I give away, and because I think I know my way around privacy settings.

But an investigation by my colleagues at Click has made me think again. They set out to explore just how much data is accessible to developers who make applications for Facebook. What they found was that it was relatively simple to write an application that would give the developer access to lots of personal data–not just from those who’ve installed that application, but also from their list of Facebook friends.

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