About 90,000 sex offenders have been identified and removed from the social networking Web site MySpace, company and law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

The number was nearly double what MySpace officials originally estimated last year, said North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, who along with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has led efforts to make social networking Web sites safer for young users.

Cooper said he wasn’t surprised by the updated numbers, and demanded that MySpace and rival online networking site Facebook - which claim to have more than 280 million users combined - do more to protect children and teenagers.

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday said it will heavily promote two main versions of the next Windows operating system in an attempt to avoid the problems it faced by marketing four tiers of the Windows Vista system.

But while the Redmond-based company said it will simplify its message, it did not give up the multitiered approach with Windows 7, which is officially expected at the end of January 2010. All told, there will be at least six different versions.

Microsoft said the primary version for consumers will be called Windows 7 Home Premium, and the one for businesses will be called Windows 7 Professional. Prices have not yet been disclosed.

In addition, it will sell two lower-end versions, Home Basic and Starter edition, to PC makers. The Home Basic edition is intended for sale in developing countries, while computer makers can install the Starter edition on PCs intended for sale anywhere in the world. Neither support the sleeker appearance introduced with Vista, which is getting a makeover in Windows 7.

The company will also sell a top-end Enterprise version for big corporate customers and a similar Ultimate version for consumers. Those versions will include security features and a few other tools not available in the two main versions.

IBM has teamed up with the US government to try and build the most powerful, most super supercomputer ever.

Boringly dubbed “Sequioa”, the aim is to get the system, which will be housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a series of 96 racks, to log performance speeds of up to 20 petaflops.

Boasting over 1.6 million processors and some 1.6TB of memory, the Sequoia system will initially be used to keep track of the US’ mountain of aging nukes and simulating nuclear explosions, er, tests to determine whether the weapons are stable and safe for use. The number of cores the supercomputer will have is, as of yet, a closely guarded secret.

Sequioa should be up and running by early 2012, but in the meanwhile, IBM is already getting stuck in on its plans to begin deployment of Dawn, a 500-teraflop system which will eventually serve as the delivery system for Sequoia operations. Both systems will be constructed at IBM’s BlueGene facilities in Minnesota.

Recent stories on Apple’s iPhone patent have focused on Cupertino’s threatened legal action against Palm, which is launching the iPhone-like Pre smartphone. But a closer examination of the Apple patent yields much more interesting news. Namely, Apple is considering adding a video record feature to the iPhone — an omission users have long complained about — and it may soon become a handheld videophone platform, with support for mobile video-conferencing calls.

Those are the inferences you can make if you believe that the claims Apple has put into its patent relates to stuff it intends to turn into products. The video-call feature is the boldest one; a potential market game changer, which could knock competitors like Palm’s Pre or Dell (Dell)’s planned smartphone back off the front pages. (The other feature, video record, is just a natural extension of the current still camera, and is probably something it could do now, if Apple so chose.)