Microsoft Corp. today announced support for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in the next version of the Microsoft(R) Windows(R) operating system, code-named “Longhorn.” The RSS functionality in “Longhorn” is being designed to make it simple for end users to discover, view and subscribe to RSS feeds, as well as make it easier for developers to incorporate the rich capabilities of RSS into their applications. In addition, Microsoft announced Simple List Extensions, a set of extensions to RSS that can be used to enable Web sites to publish lists such as of photo albums, music playlists and top 10 lists as RSS feeds.

Microsoft is making the specification freely available via the Creative Commons license, the same license under which the RSS 2.0 specification was released. The announcement was made in Seattle during Gnomedex 5.0, an annual conference for technology enthusiasts and industry influentials that focuses on RSS, blogging, podcasting and other new media models.

NEW YORK Yahoo has begun testing a program to show text listings on Web pages based on user behavior.

In a pilot program with Revenue Science, a Bellevue, Wash., behavioral-targeting company, Yahoo’s cost-per-click text ads are shown on Web pages using data collected by Revenue Science.

Google’s far-flung AdSense network, which displays ads on thousands of sites based on the content on the Web page. Revenue Science, in contrast, targets ads to consumer behavior.

Omar Tawakol, Revenue Science’s svp of marketing, said prior site behavior often yields better results than page content. “There’s a big portion of the Web that’s a contextual desert,” he said. “There’s a ton of sites on the Web like entertainment, blogging and social networking sites—all those sites are better served by focusing on the user, not what’s on the page.”

Tawakol declined to provide more information on the test or how Revenue Science collected the visitor data used to target the ads. He said early results of the program, which began in the spring, were “very encouraging.”

A Yahoo representative confirmed the test but declined further comment.

Source: ADWEEK

US tech giant IBM plans to increase its payroll in India this year by 14,000 workers, even as it cuts 13,000 jobs in Europe and the United States.

The shift was first reported by the New York Times, and highlights the transfer of some skilled jobs to low-wage countries such as India by a number of companies including IBM, the world’s largest information technology company.

The moves in India were indicated in what was claimed to be an internal company document posted on the website of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, of Washtech, which seeks to unionize high-tech workers.

Source: AFP (via Yahoo)

Attention all you (legal) music downloaders out there: Very soon the songs you purchase from iTunes could help pave the roads you drive on, pay for an artistic fellowship or buy books for kids in the school around the corner. Because in a number of

states, budget proposals are targeting digital downloads, looking to make them taxable items, and therefore subject to state sales tax.

In New Jersey, Governor Richard J. Codey has called for an amendment to the state’s sales-tax laws that makes downloads — including songs, movies and books — taxable items and subject to the Garden State’s 6 percent sales tax. So in the future, every 99-cent song purchase from iTunes could now cost you $1.05.

Codey hopes the move will “level the playing field” for record stores in New Jersey that have to charge a sales tax for each CD sold, as opposed to digital music stores, which do not.

Source: MTV

If your e-mail does not have a Sender ID, Microsoft wants to junk your message.

Sometime around November, Hotmail and MSN will flag as potential spam those messages that do not have the tag to verify the sender, Craig Spiezle, a director in the technology care and safety group at the software maker said Wednesday. The move is meant to spur adoption of Sender ID, he said.

Critics say Sender ID, which includes technology developed by Microsoft, is not an accepted standard and has many shortcomings. Also, there are technologies that compete with Sender ID, such as Yahoo’s DomainKeys.

Microsoft’s move increases pressure on e-mail senders to adopt Sender ID. The technology requires Internet service providers, companies and other Internet domain holders to publish so-called SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records to identify their mail servers.

About 1 million domains currently publish SPF records, Microsoft said. That’s far from the 71.4 million registered domains worldwide at the end of last year. Still, because some large e-mail senders such as AOL support Sender ID, about 30 percent of e-mail today carries Sender ID information, according to e-mail filtering company MessageLabs.

Source: News.com

Four vulnerabilities in RealPlayer have been discovered, the most serious of which could allow an intruder to gain control of a computer, RealNetworks said in a security advisory posted Thursday. Software updates are now available to plug the holes, the company said.

Source: News.com

“Could Apple’s decision to move to Intel processors be motivated by something more than IBM’s inability to meet the company’s processor demands? Kelly McNeill submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews, which analyzes the earlier intentions of Apple’s NeXT accusation in an a rumored project known as Red Box. It was said that this project was to give OS X users full Windows compatibility nativly inside of Apple’s OS. When Apple chose to stick with PPC, the Red Box project needed to be shelved, but now that Apple has chosen to go x86, the rumored Red Box project would inevitably be back on.”