Comcast Corp. plans to drop Microsoft Corp.’s television software and on-screen program guide from its digital cable boxes in the Seattle area and the rest of the software company’s home state.

The cable provider confirmed Monday that it plans to replace the Microsoft technology used in its Washington state cable system with the GuideWorks software and on-screen program guide used throughout the rest of the country.

A U.S. appeals court ended a preliminary injunction on Wednesday against Google Inc.’s. image-search service from displaying thumbnail-sized photos from a sexually explicit site.

Yet it said a lower court should reconsider the issue of whether Google was liable for allowing users to link to sites displaying unauthorized photos.

A lower court had found that Google’s thumbnail images violated the copyrights of adult magazine and Web publisher Perfect 10 Inc., but said the Internet search company was probably not responsible for displaying the underlying images from Perfect 10’s Web site.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday reversed those findings.

Broadband users spend almost half their spare time in a typical weekday online, according to Media-Screen’s “Netpop|Play” report.

A copy of the study provided to eMarketer stated that the average broadband user spent an hour and 40 minutes of her typical weekday spare time online. Over half of that time online was devoted to entertainment and communication.

AOL will introduce a new version of its popular e-mail service this summer that will include its AIM instant messaging platform, among other features, the chief executive of the online division of Time Warner Inc. said on Wednesday.

AOL is testing the new version of its e-mail service and expects to launch it widely on its Internet portal page around the end of July, Chief Executive Randy Falco told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York.

“One great feature is you’re going to be able to have AIM and your e-mail on the same page,” Falco said.

AOL also plans to refresh its Web portal and launch new portals in 14 countries in the next 18 months, he said.

Google Inc. said on Wednesday it was unifying its approach to Web search, combining its classic service with specialized searches ranging from news and images to videos.

Speaking to reporters at the company’s “Googleplex” headquarters, Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search and user experience, said “Universal Search” would be available from Wednesday and improved over time.

Universal Search means that standard Google searches will draw results from separate Google properties that target information about books, local information, images, news, and video, Mayer said.

The combined search includes any site indexed by Google’s services. For example, it will include YouTube, Google Video and an independent video site, Metacafe.com.

Mayer said other bodies of information Google is working on making searchable on the Web will be included over time.

Amazon.com Inc. said on Wednesday the company will launch a digital music store later in 2007 with millions of songs, free of copy protection technology that limits where consumers can play their music.

The Seattle-based company said music company EMI Group Plc, home to artists ranging from Coldplay to Norah Jones to Joss Stone to Pink Floyd, has licensed its digital catalog to Amazon, the second such deal in a month.

Amazon, the world’s top online retailer of music on compact discs, is poised to move into the online download market now dominated by Apple Inc.’s iTunes store.

US-CERT reports that 92 security products by different vendors, including Cisco, may have a serious security hole. Given these products’ market share, most businesses could be affected.

The U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team is reporting a network evasion technique that uses full-width and half-width unicode characters to allow malware to evade detection by an IPS or firewall.

The vulnerability affects virtually every major firewall and intrusion prevention system available, including products from Cisco Systems. Given Cisco’s major share of the market, at least for enterprise routers and VPN and firewall equipment—according to Gartner, Cisco was at the top of the heap with 66 percent of that market in 2006—that means most businesses will be affected.

The vulnerability concerns HTTP content-scanning systems that fail to properly scan full-width and half-width Unicode-encoded HTTP traffic. A remote attacker could exploit the vulnerability by sending specially crafted HTTP traffic to a vulnerable content scanning system. After sneaking malware past the firewall or IPS, the attacker can then wreak havoc on a system, scanning and attacking without being detected.

The author of a report used by Microsoft as evidence of open source patent infringement has said his report means the opposite of what Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said it means.

Ballmer told an Asian government conference that “some day…somebody will come and look for money to pay for the patent rights” which open source software supposedly infringes. The statement was taken as a threat by the open source software community.

Ballmer cited a report published last summer that he said claimed that open source Linux violates 228 patents. The author of that report, Dan Ravicher, says that is not what the report said, and that it did not claim that open source software faces legal problems.

“Open source faces no more, if not less, legal risk than proprietary software,” Ravicher told technology news site eWeek. “The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does.

“There is no reason to believe that GNU/Linux has any greater risk of infringing patents than Windows, Unix-based or any other functionally similar operating system. Why? Because patents are infringed by specific structures that accomplish specific functionality.”

Yahoo Inc.’s online mapping service in the United States will begin giving driving directions in 34 European countries Wednesday as part of an upgrade aimed at luring traffic away from rivals AOL and Google Inc.

Besides guiding U.S. motorists around Europe for the first time, Yahoo said it also will feature more landmarks and other visual cues to help people find their way around neighborhoods. By relying on new software, Yahoo believes its maps will be more accurate, too.