Microsoft Inc is in talks with Yahoo Inc to buy the U.S. internet company’s online search business for $20 billion, according to a report in Britain’s Sunday Times.

The proposal under discussion involves a complex transaction that would see the U.S. software giant support a new management team to take control of Yahoo, but it has no intention of refreshing its bid, said the newspaper.

SanDisk is soon to announce new technology needed for its solid state drives to take on hard disk drive storage.

SSDs are appearing in netbooks and notebooks and in enterprise storage arrays where they provide accelerated I/O, either as a separate tier of flash storage or as a flash cache accelerating the array controller’s operations. But the appeal of flash SSD technology is limited because today’s NAND chips don’t have enough capacity, making them expensive. Writes take too long, being slower than reads, particularly random writes, and the write cycle endurance is too short with the flash wearing out after a set number of write cycles.

SanDisk thinks it can solve all three problems. By adding bits to a NAND cell it can increase capacity with 2-bit multi-level cell (2x MLC) technology here and higher-capacity 3- and 4-bit MLC coming. It has also come up with its Extreme Flash File System (ExtremeFFS) to accelerate random write speed by up to 100 times and so be much closer to sequential write speed.

But it is not enough. SanDisk’s Senior Director of Marketing, Don Barnetson, revealed this at a Tokyo press conference on 27th November, saying: “We need one more step of improvement besides ExtremeFFS.” He didn’t say what that was but he did say: “Please wait a little while for our announcement … We are preparing a technology to solve these issues.”

Friday, Joost released an iPhone app for its service that might be a game changer. Joost’s iPhone app lets users stream and watch any of Joost’s 46,000-plus videos for free.

Say what you will about Joost’s library of content, the concept behind this app is fantastic. The ability to stream a movie, TV show, or other piece of video content on the go is great. I know the technology is nothing revolutionary–after all the iPhone has had a YouTube app, complete with streaming video, since the device launched. Even given that, when you load up Men in Black on Joost, it just feels like a whole different ballgame. This isn’t a video of a dog on a skateboard anymore. This is real, Hollywood-produced content, delivered to your phone, for free.

I have not experienced the major hiccups that very early users, like MG Siegler did, so those issues seem to have been taken care of. I did notice some occassional stuttering of the stream over Wi-Fi. I am, however, disheartened by the lack of streaming support over EDGE or 3G. Joost requires a Wi-Fi connection to work.

Sears.com was inaccessible to U.S. shoppers for two hours on Friday in what was the most notable Web hiccup of the holiday gift-buying season’s official start.

Other sites, including Amazon.com Inc., experienced minor slowdowns, according to Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based research group.

Starting a week and a half ago, Keynote began tracking the performance of about 30 big online retailers, logging the time it took to find a product and start checking out.

Keynote’s list includes Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Macy’s Inc., Circuit City and others; the system takes measurements every 15 minutes from computers in 10 major U.S. cities.

Sears Holdings Corp.’s site started to crawl at around 9:30 a.m. Eastern time on Friday, when loading a page on the site topped one minute. From about 10:30 to 12:30, Sears posted a message asking shoppers to try again in a few minutes.

White said Sears was among the retailers that stumbled last year on Black Friday.

But while Sears’ problems returned this year, others including Neiman Marcus seem to have resolved past issues.

Amazon and Target Inc., which uses Amazon’s e-commerce technology, were slower Friday than in recent days, but not unbearably so, White said. At the slowest point, a transaction that took 25 seconds last week required about 40 seconds Friday morning.

Apple is holding a one-day sale for turkey-tired customers in the US on Black Friday, traditionally one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

Some reports have suggested that the company could be slashing prices by 15 per cent to lure cash-strapped Americans to buy their goods tomorrow.

Black Friday comes the day after Thanksgiving and marks the start of the holiday shopping season in the US. This year the sluggish economy is forcing many vendors to offer tasty discounts to customers who are increasingly shy of parting with their cash.

An Australian restaurateur left holding a hefty unpaid bill when five young diners bolted used the popular social network website Facebook to track them down.

Peter Leary from seafood restaurant Seagrass on Melbourne’s Southbank was fuming when the diners ate their way through the menu, pairing oysters, trout and red emperor with some expensive wines, slipped out for a cigarette — and never returned.

But Leary, left with an unpaid bill of A$520 ($340), remembered one of the diners asking about a former waitress, whom he then contacted and she suggested they check through some contacts on Facebook.

“We searched a few names and there in front of us his face came up,” Leary told Reuters, referring to one of the diners.

“He was pictured with his girlfriend who was the only girl in the group. We also knew where he worked, at a nearby restaurant, which was handy. It’d been clear they were in the trade.”

Leary contacted the manager of the other restaurant, where both the man and his girlfriend worked, and explained the situation.

Within hours the diner returned to apologize and paid the bill — and left a generous tip for the staff.

Leary said the fellow restaurateur called him later to inform him that both the man and his girlfriend had been sacked.

A big spam-spewing botnet shut down two weeks ago has been resurrected, security researchers said today, and is again under the control of criminals.

The “Srizbi” botnet returned from the dead late Tuesday, said Fengmin Gong, chief security content officer at FireEye Inc., when the infected PCs were able to successfully reconnect with new command-and-control servers, which are now based in Estonia.

Srizbi was knocked out more than two weeks ago when McColo Corp., a hosting company that had been accused of harboring a wide range of criminal activities, was yanked off the Internet by its upstream service providers. With McColo down, PCs infected with Srizbi and other bot Trojan horses were unable to communicate with their command servers, which had been hosted by McColo. As a result, spam levels dropped precipitously.

But as other researchers noted last week, Srizbi had a fallback strategy. In the end, that strategy paid off for the criminals who control the botnet.

According to Gong, when Srizbi bots were unable to connect with the command-and-control servers hosted by McColo, they tried to connect with new servers via domains that were generated on the fly by an internal algorithm. FireEye reverse-engineered Srizbi, rooted out that algorithm and used it to predict, then preemptively register, several hundred of the possible routing domains.

The domain names, said Gong, were generated on a three-day cycle, and for a while, FireEye was able to keep up — and effectively block Srizbi’s handlers from regaining control.

“We have registered a couple hundred domains,” Gong said, “but we made the decision that we cannot afford to spend so much money to keep registering so many [domain] names.”

Once FireEye stopped preempting Srizbi’s makers, the latter swooped in and registered the five domains in the next cycle. Those domains, in turn, pointed Srizbi bots to the new command-and-control servers, which then immediately updated the infected machines to a new version of the malware.

“Once each bot was updated, the next command was to send spam,” said Gong, who noted that the first campaign used a template targeting Russian speakers.

Since its launch in March, video-streaming site Hulu has become a popular place to catch TV shows, video clips and movies for free on the Web.

Apparently, the folks behind Hulu - which is a joint venture between General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal and News Corp. - aren’t the only ones that think this is a good idea.

This week, Sling Media, which makes the Slingbox device that lets you watch your home TV remotely, rolled out a “beta” version of its own video-streaming site, Sling.com. Owing to deals with Hulu and a number of the same partners that Hulu has, Sling.com has much of the same content. But there is one neat twist: if you have a Slingbox device, which lets you control and watch your TV from any Mac- or Windows-based computer equipped with high-speed Internet access, you can also use the site to control your Slingbox.

A suburban mother who prosecutors say drove a love-struck 13-year-old girl to suicide by tormenting her with a fake MySpace persona was acquitted on Wednesday of the most serious charges against her.

Lori Drew was found guilty of three misdemeanor counts in the high-profile case, which made worldwide headlines and prompted calls for social networking sites like MySpace to crack down on such activities.

She was cleared of three felonies by the U.S. District Court jury, which deadlocked on a fourth count of conspiracy.

Drew, who created the fake profile after her daughter and neighbor Megan Meier had a falling out, showed no reaction as the verdicts were read and declined to answer questions from reporters as she left the courtroom.

The Missouri woman will face a sentence ranging from probation to three years behind bars for the misdemeanor convictions. She could have been sent to federal prison for up to 20 years if she had been convicted on the felony charges.

If you’re into iPhone gimmicks and unsupported Apple applications, DevTeam released PwnageTool 2.2 to help you jailbreak the latest 2.2 iPhone software update available from Apple since Friday.

Two free software tools are available from the DevTeam to help you jailbreak your iPhone, namely QuickPwn and PwnageTool. However, only the latter preserves the iPhone’s baseband firmware, giving you the maximum chance for any upcoming software unlock. As usual, using just the iTunes update method will lock back any previously jailbroken iPhone.

Loss-making Lycos Europe plans to sell some of its assets and close the rest after failing to find an investor, the company said on Wednesday.

Lycos Europe — which provides Internet search, Web hosting, email, social networking and online shopping tools — said its management and supervisory boards had concluded that the best available option was to seek the sale of its domains, its Danish portal and shopping activities.

Lycos Europe, which had a staff of 694 at the end of September, almost two-thirds of whom were employed in Germany, said it will close its Web hosting and portal business.

The rest of Lycos, still one of the world’s top Internet portals, is owned by South Korean Internet company Daum Communications.

Want to optimize your looks without radically altering them? An Israeli team of computer scientists may have the answer.

They have developed a computer software model based on the innate preferences that studies show we have for human faces.

“This technology could become a product where for example there’s a web service where people upload their photographs and have them enhanced or beautified by our software,” said Professor Dani Lischinksi of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Studies show that eyes a certain shape and distance apart, nose a certain length, lips a certain curve, increase the probability that we will find one face more attractive than another.

“We were able to fit a mathematical model to this set of data that we’ve gathered, namely the images that we showed to people and their responses in terms of the beauty scores that they chose to give to each image,” said Lischinksi.

The team then applied the model to modify images so as to make them appear more attractive. They are now exploring a variety of potential commercial applications for the software, Lischinski said.