Microsoft Corp. has agreed to continue to license important Windows technical data to competitors for up to five years beyond 2007, the year the settlement is scheduled to expire, the department said.

Source: Reuters

In the annals of missed opportunities by tech CEOs, Yahoo Chief Terry Semel has a doozy.

In a talk with The New Yorker writer Ken Auletta as part of a Newhouse School lecture series, Semel was asked what his dumbest decision was after taking the job at the Net media company in 2001.

“I couldn’t and didn’t buy this [Google] company and the rest is history,” Semel said, adding that it was also fortuitous because that harkened the birth of the search-advertising business.

Source: News.com

Having received an invitation to join a group of companies working to improve the AJAX development experience, Microsoft is mulling over how it might work with the collaboration of companies known as the OpenAJAX initiative.

In an interview with eWEEK on May 11, Brian Goldfarb, lead product manager for Web Platform and Tools at Microsoft, said the software giant is open to having a dialogue with the group of companies pursuing an open-standards approach to AJAX.

Source: eWeek

Gmail’s “What’s New” page has changed and tells us of a new feature that will be launched shortly — Gmail Pictures. The new feature basically lets you see who has emailed you — almost like an avatar in instant messengers.

Source: ZDNet

TikTech, which apparently is a regular reader of Aviran’s Place has an article which proves that Digg Moderatores Manipulate Stories.

The article talks about how a story that he submitted (which is by the way taken from Aviran’s Place) got buried by digg moderators although digg users loved the story and gave it over 20 diggs in less than an hour before the moderator buried the story.

According to TikTech’s blog, he thinks that they simply didn’t like the story, however based on the type of stories that do get to the front page, it might be also possible that digg killed the story just because it originated from Aviran’s Place, which as you know is banned from digg for no valid reason.

So again this proves my point that digg is not really controlled by the users, but it has an editorial intervention in contrary to digg’s statement.

The AOL Music Now Web Services provide the tools for feeding artist, album, play list and other dynamic music information to other Web sites, blogs or AOL’s recently launched AIM Pages.

Source: InformationWeek

Researchers from Microsoft’s anti-malware engineering team are working on an automated way to sort through the thousands of malware families and variants attacking Windows computers.

The company unveiled its plans at the EICAR (European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research) conference in Hamburg, Germany, proposing the use of distance measure and machine learning technologies to come up with automatic classification of viruses, Trojans, spyware, rootkits and other malicious software programs.

Source: eWeek

A poll has spotlighted the folly of current copyright law in the UK.

Fifty-nine per cent of respondents in the National Consumer Council (NCC) commissioned poll thought copying their own CDs was perfectly legal, and 55 per cent said they have done so.

However, current law states that it is illegal to rip CDs to any other media.

Source: TheRegister

Although sex is a taboo in Muslim countries, according to Google Trends, users from Muslim countries are searching Google for sex, more than any other country.

A quick view in Google trends reveals that Pakistan is leading the world with sex related sex, and Egypt and Iran are to follow.

Regardless of strict censorship in these countries, people find a way to get what they want.

In search for Gay Sex the Philippines are leading the chart, while Saudi Arabia and India tailing in second and third place

And by the way, if you are looking for porn then according to Google you are most likely to be from South Africa.

Yahoo CEO Terry Semel has revealed he recently rebuffed Microsoft’s attempt to bag a stake in the company.

Although the Yahoo boss didn’t confirm what form the speculated overtures took, he slapped down the idea Yahoo would be willing to let Microsoft take a stake in the company.

The newspaper said the discussions took place during negotiations over MSN’s use of Yahoo’s search technology. Microsoft has since switched to Google as its new supplier.

Source: News.com

U.S. consumers are not as enamored with online banking as they once were and are citing online security as their top concern, according to a report.

“The result is a slowing rate of adoption, with online banking households increasing by only 3.1 percent in the last quarter of 2005 — the lowest increase in three years,�? according to Lisa Phillips, senior analyst at eMarketer and the report’s author. “The number of online banking households as a percentage of total online households is pretty stagnant, too. It is expected to grow by just 4 percentage points between 2006 and 2010, from 45.4 million in 2006 to 56.2 million in 2010.�?

Web site security tops the list of consumers’ concerns about online banking, she said.

Source: Macworld

If the National Security Agency is indeed amassing a colossal database of Americans’ phone records, one way to use all that information is in “social network analysis,” a data-mining method that aims to expose previously invisible connections among people.

Social network analysis has gained prominence in business and intelligence circles under the belief that it can yield extraordinary insights, such as the fact that people in disparate organizations have common acquaintances. Companies can buy social networking software to help determine who has the best connections for a particular sales pitch.

So it did not surprise many security analysts to learn Thursday from USA Today that the NSA is applying the technology to billions of phone records.

Source: AP