The amount of market share commanded by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has dropped for the seventh consecutive month.

Internet Explorer now has 67.55 percent of global browser market share, a drop of over seven percentage points in a year, according to figures from Web metrics company Net Applications, released Monday. Mozilla’s Firefox browser, meanwhile, has gained market share in the same time frame, climbing over three percentage points to 21.53 percent.

Microsoft’s browser has steadily lost ground to its competitors in the past year. Its share dropped sharply in both October and November 2008, when it lost over one percentage point in each month.

Apple’s Safari browser now stands at 8.29 percent, up from 7.13 percent in November, when IE dipped. Safari has gained share more quickly than Firefox in that period: Mozilla’s browser accounted for 20.78 percent of browser use three months ago, and now has 21.53 percent.

Google’s Chrome browser, launched in September 2008, now has 1.12 percent of the market, having overtaken Opera in November. Opera’s share of the market now stands at 0.7 percent.

Crackulous, the one-click cracking application for software purchased from Apple’s AppStore, was previously only available to a select few. Now anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch can start cracking software purchased from Apple so that they can share them with their friends, since Crackulous has just gone public.

Since Google Earth launched in 2006 ­millions of people have used its virtual globe to “travel” around the planet without leaving home, climbing a digital version of Mount Everest and even flying into space thanks to the website.

Now the internet company plans to take on one of the last bastions of the unknown: the depths of the ocean.

At a high-profile event in San Francisco, Google is expected to announce the addition of vast amounts of underwater imagery and seabed maps to the Google Earth project.

The move will take Google Earth closer to its aim of creating a complete digital representation of the planet.

A 35-year-old computer programmer pleaded not guilty on Friday to charges that he planted a computer virus designed to destroy all the data on 4,000 Fannie Mae computer servers the day he was fired from the company.

The indictment alleges that Makwana entered a malicious code on October 24, 2008, the day he was terminated and told to turn in his Fannie Mae laptop and other equipment, and it was set to propagate throughout the Fannie Mae network on January 31.

The virus — embedded in a routine program — was discovered five days later by a Fannie Mae senior engineer, and promptly removed. “The malicious code was designed to propagate throughout the Fannie Mae network of computers and destroy all data,” the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a statement.