News Corp’s MySpace, the world’s largest social networking site, on Wednesday unveiled a long-expected joint venture with all four major music companies in a bid to compete with Apple Inc’s market-leading iTunes store.

MySpace Music is designed to win fans with a mix of unlimited free music, comprehensive music catalogs, concert tickets, merchandising and other entertainment features.

The launch of the new service had been dogged by speculation on the start date and the ongoing search for a chief executive.

But the biggest challenge for the new venture was signing a deal with the fourth-largest music company EMI Music, which had held out until just hours before the announcement of the service’s launch.

MySpace Music also signed late licensing deals with The Orchard, a large distributor of independent music from hundreds of small labels and music publisher Sony/ATV, a joint venture between Sony Corp and pop star Michael Jackson.

In April, MySpace confirmed it agreed to create a joint venture with Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group

Yahoo Inc. launched a much-anticipated upgrade to its online advertising system Wednesday as it tries to bring to graphical display ads some of the innovations that powered Google Inc.’s rapid rise in search marketing.

Playing to Yahoo’s strengths in display ads and technology targeting pitches to users’ interests, the new “Apt from Yahoo” platform will initially involve just the newspaper companies in a 2-year-old consortium led by Yahoo. Many of the papers joined that effort hoping for relief from the decline in their industry.

The platform, renamed from Amp because of a trademark conflict, is intended to make it easier for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell display ads, borrowing self-service techniques that have made text-based search ads lucrative for Internet companies, especially Google.

By tapping data Yahoo already collects on users’ locations, demographics and surfing habits, Apt aims to help advertisers narrow their pitches to specific groups of customers because sharper targeting will let Web sites charge more for ads.

Mozilla published a new version of its Firefox web browser on Tuesday that fixes five security vulnerabilities, two of which it rates as critical.

Firefox version 3.0.2 fixes a memory corruption bug and a separate critical bug involving privilege escalation and the XPCnativeWrapper component of the browser. Both create possible mechanisms for hackers to inject hostile code into vulnerable systems using rigged websites, or perform similar tricks.

The same two critical bugs are fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.17, for those still using the earlier version of the browser. There’s no evidence that either critical flaw has been exploited by hackers but prudence would steer towards early patching. Judging from past experience automatic updates from Mozilla will appear in about a day or so.

Mobile phone company Sony Ericsson announced Tuesday that it will launch a new music service called PlayNow Plus, which will feature unlimited music downloads.

As first reported by CNET News, the new service will be powered by British music-download firm Omnifone, and will feature music from all four of the largest recording labels, the company said in a press release.

PlayNow Plus will compete with Comes with Music, the music service launched by Sony Ericsson rival Nokia earlier this year. And out of the gate, PlayNow can offer a more complete music library than Nokia’s offering. EMI has yet to join Comes with Music.

But Sony Ericsson may not give away as much music as Nokia. According to the press release, Sony Ericsson will eventually offer users 5 million songs, which will be wrapped in digital rights management software, and keep them for the length of their contract. After their contract ends, the company will allow them to keep “a number” of DRM-free songs.

According to a report from Dow Jones, Martin Blomkvist, Sony Ericsson’s manager of content acquisition said PlayNow Plus users can keep 100 DRM-free songs for each six months of their PlayNow contract. In comparison, Nokia allows users to download as much music as they want for the 12 months and keep those songs forever. The music is indeed swaddled in copy-protection schemes.

Why would people want to buy DRM infected music when they can have a DRM free one I don’t know.

Yahoo Messenger 9.0 became available on Tuesday–a week after Yahoo’s target launch date and interestingly, a week after Microsoft released its beta update of Windows Live Messenger. Yahoo Messenger 9.0 as dramatic an update of its instant messenger as Windows Live beta is of Windows Live Messenger 8.5, and it introduces some pleasant improvements over version 8.1 that will satisfy Yahoo loyalists. Among them are a redesigned interface with more skins, more space, and the excellent ability to see scaled public images and videos in the chat window.

Sending a text message home to boast about a beach vacation should cost less than half of what it does now, EU regulators said Tuesday.

The European Commission wants to set a price cap for text messages of 11 euro cents (16 U.S. cents), far below the current EU average of 29 euro cents (43 cents).

The EU’s top telecom official, Viviane Reding, said she was putting the new rules forward because telecommunications companies had not responded to her call for them to lower the roaming charges for sending or receiving mobile phone text messages outside a user’s home nation.

“There is no reason or justification in a normal functioning market for so excessive prices,” she said.

The effort builds on an EU campaign last year to slash the cost of voice calls made and received outside a user’s home nation. And it comes as the cost of text messages also has come under scrutiny in the U.S., where a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee has asked the nation’s top four wireless carriers to justify why prices for individual text messages have doubled since 2005.

The European action was met with disapproval from companies that say the EU is interfering in the market without proving its claim that lowering prices would drive up text-message usage. The companies said their lost revenue could harm their plans to invest in future technology.

The EU regulators will also ask for a stricter cap on voice calls. The plan would bring prices from the current level of 46 euro cents (68 cents) per minute to 34 euro cents (50 cents) per minute for a cell phone call made abroad. Receiving a call on a mobile phone internationally would incur charges of 10 euro cents (15 cents) by July 2012, down from 22 euro cents (32 cents) now.

From cyborg housemaids and waterpowered cars to dog translators and rocket boots, Japanese boffins have racked up plenty of near-misses in the quest to turn science fiction into reality.

Now the finest scientific minds of Japan are devoting themselves to cracking the greatest sci-fi vision of all: the space elevator. Man has so far conquered space by painfully and inefficiently blasting himself out of the atmosphere but the 21st century should bring a more leisurely ride to the final frontier.

Japan is increasingly confident that its sprawling academic and industrial base can solve those issues, and has even put the astonishingly low price tag of a trillion yen (£5 billion) on building the elevator. Japan is renowned as a global leader in the precision engineering and high-quality material production without which the idea could never be possible.”

Sony Video Store on the Playstation Network is running some rather restrictive DRM. When purchasing movies, users are allowed just one download — even if they delete the movie to make space and want to download it again on the same machine.

A Sony representative told Ars that users could be issued an extra download as a “one-time courtesy” with help from customer support. Quoting: “When we’re discussing a system that seems to release new hardware configurations every few months and a company that actively encourages you to swap hard drives yourself, it appears users are going to run into problems if they ever decide they want to switch out their hard drive or even upgrade into a larger system; the information on the back-up utility makes it clear that video content can’t be moved over to new system, although new hard drives should be safe.

Sony claims that the PS3 is operating on a 10-year timeline: is one extra download, which you need to contact customer service to apply for, good enough for the next decade?”

Adobe released details Monday about Creative Suite 4, its first update to more than a dozen design and editing tools since Adobe CS3 some 17 months ago.

The costs of the applications, set to reach consumers in October, haven’t changed since CS3, but remain hefty. Should longtime users upgrade?

Of course that depends on the specific tools you need. However, we suspect that only the most well-heeled will jump at the chance, as CS4 shares the majority of tools with its predecessor. Perhaps more dramatic, life-changing alterations will come with the next Creative Suite. That said, time-saving tweaks to Illustrator and Flash in particular could lure professionals immersed in them to upgrade.

With CS4, Adobe aimed to unify the interfaces of more than a dozen applications, including Flash and other former properties of Macromedia. You’ll see similar pull down menus for toggling among workspaces that you can customize, as well as Flash-based panels that nicely snap open and shut. Corporate design departments will find plenty of enhancements for their teams to share work more quickly.

Adobe continues to improve integration among the applications. After Effects, as only one example, can import Photoshop 3D layers and export content directly into Flash.

Options for working with high-definition video and mobile content expand too, with support for the latest formats as well as for making Adobe AIR applications. Among other highlights:

Photoshop CS4 will use your computer’s graphics chip for the first time, while offering support for 64-bit Windows.

At long last, you can handle more than one project at a time in Illustrator, thanks to the new multiple Artboards feature.

Flash CS4 has a rebuilt animation model, so you can make objects move on the stage in two quick steps. And Flash introduces a new, XML-based file format.

Dreamweaver provides plenty of shortcuts to CSS coding, including within the Properties panel.

The FBI searched the residence of the son of a Democratic state lawmaker in Tennessee over the weekend looking for evidence linking the young man to the hacking of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account, two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press on Monday.

“The Kernell family wants to do the right thing, and they want what is best for their son,” said attorney Wade V. Davies of Knoxville. “We are confident that the truth will emerge as we go through the process. David is a decent and intelligent young man, and I look forward to assisting him during this difficult period.”

Kernell is the son of state Rep. Mike Kernell, a Memphis Democrat and chairman of Tennessee’s House Government Operations Committee. The father declined last week to discuss the possibility his son might be involved in the case.

“I had nothing to do with it, I had no knowledge or anything,” Mike Kernell told the AP last week.

“I was not a party to anything of this nature at all,” he added. “I wasn’t in on this - and I wouldn’t know how to do anything like that.”

No one answered the door at Mike Kernell’s home in Memphis on Monday, and he did not return repeated phone calls Monday from the AP.

The apartment the FBI searched is in a complex about five blocks from the University of Tennessee campus in a neighborhood popular with students. No one around the complex Monday knew David Kernell or saw the FBI agents over the weekend.

The ever-shrinking record album–its latest iteration being the compact disc–just got a lot more compact, or shall we say, micro.

Backed by four major music labels, SanDisk on Monday announced a new physical music format dubbed SlotMusic that s essentially an entire album on a MicroSD compact memory card. Wal-Mart and Best Buy are among the retailers that have already signed on to start selling the cards for the upcoming holiday season.

With CD sales continuing to flounder, this latest effort to boost physical media sales is aimed at users of the millions of cell phones and MP3 players with MicroSD slots. They can insert the card right into the slot and immediately hear the music. The card will also come with a USB sleeve so it can be plugged in directly to any USB-enabled computer.

SlotMusic cards will be sold without digital rights management restrictions and in the form of MP3 files from EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group.

Faced with growing criticism about the way its newly released game Spore is activated on computers, gaming publishing giant Electronic Arts did a little retooling of its own.

EA has increased the number of computers that can be loaded with the game to five from three, despite earlier precautions with its digital rights management (DRM) policy intended to reduce piracy of its copyrighted software.

Spore, released two weeks ago featuring unlikely creatures that can be tailored to the user’s liking, has altered other DRM limitations embedded in the software, the company announced.

Frank Gibeau, EA Games Label president, said in a statement:

We’ve received complaints from a lot of customers who we recognize and respect. And while it’s easy to discount the noise from those who only want to post or transfer thousands of copies of the game on the Internet, I believe we need to adapt our policy to accommodate our legitimate consumers.

EA announced it will not only increase the number of computers that users can load one copy of Spore onto, but will also offer ways in which users can receive additional activations of the gaming software if warranted.

The game publisher also plans to fast-track its development efforts on creating a system that will allow consumers to de-authorize machines and transfer authorizations to new computers.