Office 2007 users running Windows Vista may not have realized that their systems had not received several of this month’s patches, Microsoft Corp. said last week when it acknowledged that its security update services had failed to deploy the fixes.

“We have updated the detection logic for the May 8th security and non-security updates for Office 2007,” said Mark Griesi, a program manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), in an entry on the team’s blog. “In some cases, the original detection logic may not have offered the updates or the updates may not have been installed successfully on systems running Windows Vista,” Griesi added.

After gaining ground for a couple months, Microsoft’s search business lost market share in April, while Google and Yahoo posted gains, according to statistics released Monday by Nielsen/NetRatings.

Microsoft saw its share of the market slip to 9 percent, down from 10.1 percent a month earlier. Google, meanwhile, increased its lead, accounting for 55.2 percent of Web searches, up from 53.7 percent in March. Yahoo grew its share to 21.9 percent, up narrowly from the 21.8 percent share it held in March.

A government contractor that played a key role in the Internet’s birth will oversee efforts to redesign the network from scratch.

The National Science Foundation announced Monday that BBN Technologies Inc. will get up to $10 million over four years to oversee the planning and design of the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI.

Many researchers want to rethink the Internet’s underlying architecture, saying a “clean-slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet’s birth in 1969.

The NSF already has been funding several projects at universities and elsewhere through Future Internet Network Design, or FIND. It has been pushing to build GENI as a testbed for researchers to explore clean-slate ideas without damaging the current Internet.

MySpace.com will provide a number of state attorneys general with data on registered sex offenders who use the popular social networking Web site, the company said Monday.

Attorneys general from eight states demanded last week that the company provide data on how many registered sex offenders are using the site and where they live. MySpace initially refused, citing federal privacy laws.

Police have shut down an online voucher system allegedly used by Russian music download website allofmp3.com to get around the recent removal of its card processing facilities in the UK and Europe.

An unnamed 25-year-old man, allegedly the UK-based European agent for allofmp3.com, was arrested under the Fraud Act following a police raid in the east end of London earlier this month. The bust followed an investigation by global recording industry body IFPI and the BPI, the UK record companies’ association.

The arrested man is accused of advertising and selling allofmp3.com vouchers through auction sites such as eBay and the website allofmp3vouchers.co.uk. The vouchers (typically valued at around £10) contained an access code that allowed punters to download tracks from allofmp3.com. Investigators reckon the suspect transferred cash to allofmp3.com via various offshore accounts operated by the site’s Russian owners. Early estimates suggest the operation generated tens of thousands of pounds.

The website allofmp3vouchers.co.uk has been taken offline following the bust, during which Metropolitan Police officers seized computer kit and paperwork for further investigation.

Sony is indeed preparing an 80GB PlayStation 3, the company confirmed today, but so far it’s only due to go on sale in South Korea.

A posting on the consumer electronics giant’s Korean website today reveals the local version of the next-gen games console will sport the 80GB hard drive that first appeared in a US Federal Communications Commission filing a couple of months ago.

Motorola has patented a way of keeping your mobile phone charged using only sunlight.

The company was recently issued a patent for an LCD that includes solar cells capable of charging the battery in a mobile phone or other portable device.

The basic premise has been proposed before: a display screen is stacked over one or more solar cells, which are charged by the light passing through the display. But earlier designs allowed a relatively small amount of light to reach the solar cells, resulting in very little power being generated even under the best light conditions, Motorola researchers said in the patent.

To solve this problem, Motorola proposed using either cholesteric liquid crystal or polymer-disbursed liquid crystal in the display, instead of super-twisted nematic liquid crystals. This change in materials eliminates the need for both a reflective screen and polarizer in the LCD screen. As a result, Motorola claims as much as 75 percent of available light is able to reach the solar cells, providing a sufficient amount of power to charge the battery of a mobile device.

Google Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. are in talks for an alliance that could help them compete better against Microsoft Corp. the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Monday.

The companies are still working out details of a potential partnership, which is expected to be announced in the next few weeks, the paper said, citing unnamed sources.