Microsoft is getting ready to build a picture and video sharing site that it hopes will rival Flickr. While the tech press is probably too guilty of over-interpreting corporate moves as all being about grand battles, cloning, and product-killers (Microsoft versus Google, iPhone-killers, etc.), this time it’s Microsoft itself engaging in the clonespeak, as it were.

The company on Friday posted a new job opening with a very telling description. The listing for a “Program Manager” speaks of a heading up “next-generation photo and video sharing service that will compete with Flickr, SmugMug and other photo web solutions today,” reads the entry. “This is a ‘v1′ opportunity.”

Microsoft knows it is playing catch-up, tipping its hat to services that already have strong brand identities (something that I don’t think can be said for Windows Live): “Come make Windows Live the best place to share your digital memories! Heard of Flickr? YouTube? How about. Mac? [sic] This role will work across the new Windows Live division with teams like Spaces, SkyDrive, Messenger and Hotmail to construct a winning strategy for Microsoft in photo and video sharing.”

Long Zheng, who first blogged about the job offering, asked whether or not the world needed another Flickr. But he answers his own question when he notes that many of Flickr’s best features require a $25 subscription. Competition could erase that or push Yahoo into turning it up a notch. Ain’t competition grand?

DRM-free music sells at a much higher rate online than protected music, according to UK-based digital music store 7 Digital. In fact, customers buy it four times as often as they do DRMed music. As a result, almost 80 percent of the store’s sales are of DRM-free content. 7 Digital may not sound familiar to some, but it carries over 3 million songs and has many selections from major artists in addition to independent labels.

“MP3 is the only truly interoperable format that works with the iPod, most mobile phones (including the iPhone) and all MP3 players,” said 7 Digital’s Ben Drury in a statement. “Consumers are a lot savvier than some people think.”

The availability of DRM-free music is not only good for track sales, it’s doing favors for full album sales too. 7 Digital said that customers buying unprotected music are more likely to buy albums than those buying music with DRM, with some 70 percent of MP3 sales being part of full album downloads.

Yahoo Inc said on Monday it would launch an open source program for developing software for distributed computing, with Carnegie Mellon University as its first academic partner in the venture.

Yahoo has been a main supporter of Hadoop, an open source distributed file system that lets users process massive amounts of data. The company said it would make Hadoop available to academic research in a supercomputing-class data center.

About 1,800 brand new 300-GB or 500-GB external hard drives made for Maxtor in Thailand were found to have trojan horse malwares pre-installed (autorun.inf and ghost.pif).

When the HD is in use, these forward information on the disk to two websites in Beijing, China: www.nice8.org or www.we168.org. The article implies that authorities believe the Chinese government is behind the trojans.

A later article pins down the point of infection to a subcontractor company in China. A couple of months back the Register was reporting on pre-installed malware detected on Maxtor disks sold in the Netherlands.

Intel Corp. plans to roll out its newest generation of processors Monday, flexing its manufacturing muscle with a sophisticated new process that crams up to 40 percent more transistors onto the company’s chips.

The world’s largest semiconductor company expects to start shipping 16 new microprocessors — which also boast inventive new materials to stanch electricity loss — for use in servers and high-end gaming PCs .

The most complex chips being launched Monday have 820 million transistors, compared with the 582 million transistors on the same chips built using the current standard technology. Intel’s first chips, introduced in the early 1970s, had just 2,300 transistors.

Advances in chip technology occur as smaller and smaller lines are etched onto the chips. Intel’s new chips shrink the width of those lines to an average of 45 nanometers, or 45 billionths of a meter, compared to 65 nanometers on the previous generation of chips .

Intel’s launch Monday includes server chips with frequencies of 2 gigahertz to 3.20 gigahertz for the quad-core models, which have four processing engines. The clock speed for dual-core models, which have two processing engines, goes up to 3.40 gigahertz. The measurements refer to the chips’ processing cycles, or how fast they can process information.

The server chips will sell for $177 to $1279 in quantities of 1,000. The gaming chip will cost $999 in quantities of 1,000. Intel said all the processors would be available within 45 days.

Google Inc faces a federal patent infringement lawsuit by Northeastern University over technology used in its core Web search system, according to legal papers filed last week.

The complaint was filed on November 6 in Marshall, in the Eastern District of Texas — the U.S. court with a history of decisions that are highly favorable to plaintiffs in patent cases — but the case only came to light over the weekend.

The plaintiffs are Boston-based Northeastern University and Jarg Corp, a start-up founded by a Northeastern University professor that is the exclusive licensee of search technology patented in 1997, a year before Google was incorporated.

A spokesman for Mountain View, California-based Google said it believed the suit was without merit.

The quivering images and militant writings are frightening: an exploding Humvee blankets passing cars with dust; a lab technician makes explosives, step by step; hatred oozes from “A guide to kill Americans in Saudi Arabia.”

Tens of thousands of Web pages are now devoted to terrorist propaganda designed to attract followers. On the surface, the messages and videos reveal little about their creators. But programmers and writers leave digital clues: the greetings and other words they choose, their punctuation and syntax, and the way they code multimedia attachments and Web links.

Researchers at the University of Arizona are developing a tool that uses these clues to automate the analysis of online jihadism. The Dark Web project aims to scour Web sites, forums and chat rooms to find the Internet’s most prolific and influential jihadists and learn how they reel in adherents.