Google has finally made the Safari-friendly version of Gears available. Savvy Mac users could have downloaded and installed a rougher version of it as early as three weeks ago, however only Monday did the company announce a new version that’s been readied for mass consumption.

Like its predecessor, the Mac version of Gears requires version 3.1.1 or higher of Safari, or version 1.5 or higher of Firefox, along with a machine running the most recent build of OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5.3 (Leopard). It offers the same offline-goodness as its Windows counterpart, which is to say you’ll get limited offline file access and optimization on the handful of Web applications that support it.

Microsoft, which is officially releasing its new Zune 3.0 software on Tuesday, also is announcing a deal to give Zune owners free Wi-Fi access at McDonald’s outlets.

The McDonald’s deal is important, because although every Zune has built-in Wi-Fi, the devices can only access free Wi-Fi hotspots that also don’t have a browser interrupt. That severely limits the types of public locations from which users can download songs wirelessly.

Many of the Zune’s key new features, such as channels and “buy from FM” are most useful when Zune owners have access to a compatible Wi-Fi location. The McDonald’s deal, struck with its Wi-Fi provider Wayport, adds nearly 10,000 places where people can access the Zune Marketplace store.

Some of the biggest players in the technology industry complain that the U.S. patent system is broken — putting too many patents of dubious merit in the hands of people who can use them to drag companies and other inventors to court.

And Blaise Mouttet, a small inventor in Alexandria, Virginia, thinks he knows why. The problem, he said, is that “there are too many lawyers and not enough inventors involved with the patent system.”

So Mouttet is taking part in an experimental program launched in June 2007 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and backed by the technology industry that is intended to give the public — including inventors — more of a voice in the system.

The concept behind the program, called Peer-to-Patent, is straightforward: Publish patent applications on the Web for all to see and let anyone with relevant expertise — academics, colleagues, even potential rivals — offer input to be passed along to the Patent Office.

By using the power of the Internet to tap the wisdom of the masses, Peer-to-Patent aims to dig up hard-to-find “prior art” — evidence that an invention already exists or is obvious and therefore doesn’t deserve a patent.

The goal is to locate prior art that Patent Office examiners might not find on their own — and to produce better patents by reducing ones granted on applications that aren’t novel. The hope is that this will drive innovation by improving the patent process and reducing the patent infringement lawsuits clogging the courts.

Noveck believes Peer-to-Patent will help strike that balance. The Patent Office reports that it has issued preliminary decisions on 40 of the 74 applications that have come through the program so far. Of those, six cited prior art submitted only through Peer-to-Patent, while another eight cited art found by both the examiner and peer reviewers.

Hundreds of webpages in a section of BusinessWeek’s website which offers information about where MBA students might find future employers have been affected. According to Sophos, hackers used an SQL injection attack - where a vulnerability is exploited in order to insert malicious code into the site’s underlying database - to pepper pages with code that tries to download malware from a Russian web server.

At the time of writing, the code injected into BusinessWeek’s website points to a Russian website that is currently down and not delivering further malicious code. However, it could be revived at any time, infecting hundreds of MBA students looking for high-earning jobs. Sophos informed BusinessWeek of the infection last week, although at the time of writing the hackers’ scripts are still present and active on their site.

The object also appeared out of nowhere. It just wasn’t there before. In fact, they don’t even know where it is exactly located because it didn’t behave like anything they know. Apparently, it can’t be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away. It’s not in any known galaxy either. And they have ruled out a supernova too. It’s something that they have never encountered before. In other words: they don’t have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is.

Amazon.com said on Monday that its subsidiary, Internet Movie Database, would allow users to watch feature films and TV shows for no charge on its Web site, imdb.com.

Over 6,000 titles will be available, the company said, citing recent episodes of popular television shows like “24″ and “Heroes” or classic films like “Some Like It Hot.”

IMDB also said that the first episodes of new fall television shows like “Lipstick Jungle” and “30 Rock” will be available for free viewing before their first air date.

Napster Inc., the online music community that rose from a dorm room project to became the scourge of the global recording industry, is being purchased by Best Buy Inc. for nearly $127 million as the electronics retailer tries to boost its digital music business.

The $2.65 per share all-cash deal announced Monday is nearly double the music network’s Friday closing price but a small sum to pay for Best Buy, which gets access to Napster’s 700,000 subscribers who pay a monthly fee to access digital music catalogs.

“It’s not a huge investment, but it definitely has brand recognition,” said Morningstar analyst Brady Lemos, who said Best Buy also benefits from the acquisition of technical expertise about the digital music industry.