A New Zealand man who bought a used MP3 player from an Oklahoma thrift store found names, cell phone numbers, and Social Security numbers of American soldiers on the device, according to news site TVNZ.

Chris Ogle, who paid $18 for the device, also found lists of soldiers based in Afghanistan, personnel who fought in Iraq, and equipment deployments, as well as private information about soldiers, including which ones are pregnant

Apple has been awarded a patent that appears to cover much of the iPhone’s multitouch user interface.

World of Apple spotted the patent, which was awarded last Tuesday to several Apple executives, including Steve Jobs, iPhone software chief Scott Forstall, and Wayne Westerman, one of the founders of a company called Fingerworks that Apple acquired in 2005.

The patent is extremely long, and covers many of the methods used by the iPhone to display data, such as pinch-to-zoom Web browsing and swipe-to-scroll.

Monster.com is advising its users to change their passwords after data including e-mail addresses, names and phone numbers were stolen from its database.

The break-in comes just as the swelling ranks of the unemployed are turning to sites like Monster.com to look for work.

The company disclosed on its Web site that it recently learned its database had been illegally accessed. Monster.com user IDs and passwords were stolen, along with names, e-mail addresses, birth dates, gender, ethnicity, and in some cases, users’ states of residence. The information does not include Social Security numbers, which Monster.com said it doesn’t collect, or resumes.

The US Senate is poised to pass a bill delaying the country’s transition to digital TV.

The digital leap is currently scheduled for February 17, but the new bill would allow stations to continue analog broadcasting until June 12, according to high-ranking Senators chatting with Dow Jones Newswires.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller, a Democrat, and the committee’s ranking Republican, Kay Bailey Hutchison, have asked staff members to tweak the bill so that stations still have the option of flipping the digital switch in February.

“If the broadcaster has invested in the equipment, they can go ahead after Feb. 17 so they don’t have to do both, because that could be very expensive,” Hutchinson told Dow Jones.

Microsoft announced Friday night that computer enthusiasts will have a while longer to get their hands on the beta version of Windows 7.

In a blog posting, Microsoft said that the test version of the operating system will be available for download through February 10. Previously, Microsoft had said that the OS would only be open through late this month.

IBM has been quietly laying off workers in its North American offices since Wednesday, according to numerous reports online.

IBM has not made any formal announcements yet, and company representatives did not respond to requests to comment for this article. But rumors of ongoing layoffs are rampant. So far, more than 2,800 employees have been laid off from IBM’s software, and sales and distribution divisions, according to Alliance@IBM, a Communications Workers of America affiliate attempting to organize IBM workers into a union.

Apple has issued a critical security update for QuickTime media player, aimed at resolving vulnerabilities that could potentially allow a malicious attacker to take control of a person’s computer, according to an Apple advisory released this week.

People running QuickTime 7 for Windows and for Mac OS X, are affected, as well as those who are using Mac OS X 10.4 or Mac OS X 10.5, according to Apple.

Microsoft confirmed on Friday that it is pushing together its Office Live and Windows Live efforts.

The company isn’t changing the development cycle or the leadership of the teams working on the products, but it is promising that consumers will be able to get to both sets of services from a common Web location.

Microsoft didn’t say exactly what that spot will be, but the Windows Live branding is expected to be the one that survives the combination

Salaries of tech professionals managed to spike up an average of 4.6 percent last year to $78,035, according to survey results released Thursday by tech career site Dice.com.

The survey results, ironically, come at a time when companies across corporate America are announcing layoffs, freezing wages, and even going so far as to temporarily institute wage cuts, like Advanced Micro Devices.

Dice, based on a survey of more than 19,000 respondents taken between August and November, found that certain sectors and job titles posted even higher percentage gains over the previous year.

The average annual salary for security analysts jumped 8.4 percent, compared with last year, while software engineers followed closely with a 7 percent gain, and applications developers rose 6.6 percent.

“The skills that are needed in technology change quickly, and employers realize they need workers with the most up-to-date skills,” said Tom Silver, Dice.com’s chief marketing officer.

Social search startup Delver is closing down in 30 days. The economy crises affected the company at the worst time. In recent months Delver was trying to secure its second round of finance, however the bad economy made things very difficult and the company could not find new investors.

Delver’s CEO Liad Agmon said that he negotiated with several venture capital firms in the past several months but the current credit crises caused VCs to stop investments in early stage startups.

Building a search engine is a very expensive business and Delver’s current investor Carmel can not finance the company operation any longer. Delver is trying to get 6-8 million dollars to keep the operation and development of is revolutionary social search engine.

The company is up for grabs and looking for a buyer. If no investments will come in the next 30 days the company will close down.

Disclosure: I used to work at Delver

Shelby SuperCars announced details of an electric version of this same car, due to be launched in the second half of this year. We hope the oil barons of Abu Dhabi took the news graciously, as Shelby’s move seems kind of like walking into a convention of cigarette makers and announcing a cure for tobacco addiction. But maybe they merely smiled at the fairly outlandish-sounding claims by Shelby SuperCars.

According to Shelby, the powertrain developed for the Ultimate Aero EV uses a lithium ion battery pack, which can be fully charged from a 110 volt AC outlet in 10 minutes. This powertrain can be scaled from 200 up to 500 horsepower, with a special, dual-motor configuration that could produce 1,200 horsepower.

On top of that, Shelby claims a 200 mile range. If this powertrain can truly meet these specifications, Shelby will revolutionalize electric cars. Fortunately, we only have to wait about 10 months to see if it happens.

The PTO rejected all 20 patent claims over Internet subdomains held by a company called Hoshiko, which were used to bully sites like LiveJournal and Freehomepage.com and pursue litigation against larger companies like Google. The idea behind how to manage subdomains–domains hosted within larger domains, such as news.cnet.com–is too obvious to patent, the PTO ruled after the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation requested the patent be re-examined.

The EFF was able to provide ample evidence that the idea of virtual subdomains had developed long before a company called IdeaFlood applied for the patent in 1999 or was granted the patent in 2004. Nevertheless, the company used its patent to threaten companies like LiveJournal, which hosts more than 3 million personalized subdomains for its users. The company also threatened Freehomepage.com and T35 Hosting.