Google Earth has announced the latest enhancement to its popular topless Dutch sunbather-spotting service in the form of a YouTube layer which “places videos in their geographical context and provides a new way of discovering and understanding the world”.

Canonical Ltd., the company that supports Ubuntu Linux, is trying to work out a deal with hardware vendors such as Dell Inc. to make Ubuntu available preinstalled on servers.

So far, Canonical has struck deals with small, white-label hardware vendors to ship Ubuntu Server Edition, said Gerry Carr, marketing manager. Another one of those deals is pending, although Carr did not name the manufacturer.

But Canonical is in discussions with “multinational” hardware vendors for a big server deal, which could boost its standing in the enterprise market among Linux giants Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc.

“We haven’t got the same deal as we have with Dell on desktop,” Carr said. “My personal belief is that it [a deal] will happen reasonably soon.”

Microsoft plans to fix a bug in the Windows operating system that has been blamed for a handful of critical vulnerabilities in Windows software.

The flaw lies in the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) handler technology that lets Windows users launch programs — e-mail or instant messaging clients, for example — through their browsers by clicking on specially crafted Web links.

In July, security researcher Thor Larholm showed how a browser could be tricked into sending malformed data to Firefox using this technology. This bug allowed an attacker to run unauthorized software on a victim’s PC.

Later, other researchers began exploring ways of misusing other programs to achieve similar results. To date, researchers have found ways to exploit this type of vulnerability in many products including Firefox, Outlook Express 6, and Adobe Reader 8.1.

The problem lies in the way the PC’s software “sanitizes” these links to make sure attackers cannot successfully insert malicious code into them. Its solution has been a matter of dispute. Some security experts have said that Windows could do a better job in checking the links to make sure they were not malicious; Microsoft had insisted that this was the job of the people who were writing the programs that were being launched.

The software vendor has now apparently reversed that position.

After a couple of experiences dipping a toe into the mobile market, Mozilla Corp. said it plans to get serious about developing a mobile browser.

Mozilla has recently hired two new developers to help work on the project and plans to release Mobile Firefox some time in the next year or two.

The iPhone, Apple Inc.’s popular new mobile phone, in part contributed to the renewed interest in mobile browsing at Mozilla. “The user demand for a full browsing experience on mobile devices is clear,” Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Mozilla Corp. wrote in his blog on Tuesday. “If you weren’t sure about this before, you should be after the launch of the iPhone.”

As Mozilla continues to develop Mozilla2, the second version of the platform on which Firefox is built, it will add mobile devices as a category. That means developers of Mozilla2, which is expected to be complete in early 2009, will keep mobile phones in mind as they build the new platform, Schroepfer wrote.

He didn’t get more specific on a release date for the mobile browser other than to say “not before 2008.” Schroepfer also said Mozilla hadn’t yet decided which mobile phones the browser would work on.

Online video search service blinkx took on Google with the Wednesday launch of a video advertising platform to challenge one released by the Internet giant a day earlier.

The blinkx AdHoc platform lets people embed ad-laced videos in their websites and then share in advertising revenues in the same way that Google’s new AdSense “video units” does.

Blinkx promises website operators half the money taken in from advertising. Google has not disclosed the percentage of revenues going to publishers.

While Google provides the advertising option only with video from YouTube, which it bought last year in a 1.65-billion-dollar stock deal, blinkx offers content from varied sources including YouTube and Paris-based DailyMotion.

Blinkx has deals with more than 200 media companies to distribute copyrighted content and boasts an index of more than 14 million hours of video and audio.

On Monday, San Francisco-based blinkx added French, German and Spanish content to its index to win viewers in Western Europe and wrest the spotlight from YouTube.

Adobe Systems Inc, whose software is used by millions of people to read documents sent over the Internet, said on Wednesday some of its programs contain yet-to-be-fixed flaws that make computers vulnerable to attack.

On October 5, Adobe posted a notice on its Web site that said it had unknowingly incorporated vulnerabilities into versions of Adobe Reader and Acrobat software that could allow malicious programs to get on to a PC without the user’s knowledge.

Such malicious software can take control of a machine and steal confidential data, send out tens of thousands of spam e-mails, or infiltrate government computer systems.

Adobe said it believes the flaws only affect computers running Microsoft Corp’s Windows XP operating system and Internet Explorer 7 Web browser. Adobe said it was working to rectify the problem but the fix might not be available until the end of October.

Police in Japan arrested a man who ran an Internet suicide site for allegedly killing a woman who paid him to do so, an official said Thursday.

Kazunari Saito, a 33-year-old electrician, was arrested Wednesday for allegedly giving Sayaka Nishizawa, 21, sleeping pills and suffocating her in April, a police official in Kanagawa said, speaking on condition of anonymity, citing policy.

Nishizawa contacted the suspect through an Internet suicide site he hosted and paid him $1,700, according to the official.

Nishizawa’s father found her body on April 16 in her apartment in Kanagawa, just south of Tokyo. Police had been investigating the case after a note suggesting suicide was found, but her cell phone and keys were missing, Kyodo News agency reported.

The suspect told police the woman had asked him to “see through” the dying process, Kyodo said.

Saito set up his site last year to give tips on how to commit suicide, the agency said. Officials didn’t immediately say if the Web site was still working.

The ultrahigh-speed Internet2 network just got 10 times faster, partly in anticipation of rising demand for capacity after the world’s largest particle collider opens near Geneva next year.

Until recently, the Internet2 had a theoretical limit of 10 gigabits per second, which is thousands of times faster than standard home broadband connections. By sending data using 10 different colors, or wavelengths, of light over a single cable, operators are boosting the network’s capacity to 100 Gbps.

That means a high-quality version of the movie “The Matrix” could be sent in a few seconds rather than half a minute over the old Internet2 and several hours over a typical home broadband line.

The new Internet2 network was largely completed in late August, and its operators this week made it possible for researchers to temporarily grab an entire 10 Gbps chunk for specific applications, so that they don’t slow down normal Internet operations.

“It’s now possible for a single computer to have a 10 gigabit connection and we needed to have a way of making sure that those kinds of demanding applications could be served at the same time as all the normal uses,” Doug Van Houweling, Internet2’s chief executive, said Wednesday.

Complaints over Apple Inc.’s use restrictions and recent software update for the iPhone have erupted in two lawsuits alleging Apple and its carrier partner, AT&T Inc., engaged in illegal monopolistic behavior.

Two separate lawsuits were filed Friday in San Jose - one in federal court and the other in state court and both seeking class-action status.

The federal case accuses the companies of unfair business practices and violations of antitrust, telecommunications and warranty laws. The state case raises some of the same allegations.