MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps. Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month. Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis.

This user data is intended for crunching by everyone from academic researchers to music industry information scientists. Will people buy the data and make interesting use of it? Will MySpace users be ok with that?

Potentially toughening the competitive landscape for its own Silverlight rich Internet application platform, Microsoft will expand support for the HTML5 specification in its Internet Explorer 9 browser, under a plan revealed Tuesday.

In an announcement at the Mix10 conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft unveiled the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, which features expanded support for the World Wide Web Consortium HTML5 specification as well as hardware-accelerated graphics and text and a new JavaScript engine, known as “chakra.” These efforts will enable developers to use the same markup and deliver graphically and functionally rich Web applications, Microsoft said. The preview is available at Microsoft’s IE test-drive Web site.

Maxi Sopo was having so much fun “living in paradise” in Mexico that he posted about it on Facebook so all his friends could follow his adventures. Others were watching, too: A federal prosecutor in Seattle, where Sopo was wanted on bank fraud charges.

Tracking Sopo through his public “friends” list, the prosecutor found his address and had Mexican authorities arrest him. Instead of sipping pina coladas, Sopo is awaiting extradition to the U.S.

Sopo learned the hard way: The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too.

Mozilla has pushed out a Firefox developer preview that runs Adobe Flash and other plug-ins as a separate process, hoping to prevent crashing plug-ins from crashing the browser proper.

Mozilla’s new developer preview is the second “pre-release” version of the open source outfit’s Gecko 1.9.3 rendering engine. Today’s official Firefox offering - version 3.6 - uses Gecko 1.9.2.

Sex.com, arguably the web’s most valuable address, is up for sale after its owner went bust.

Escom LLC, which bought Sex.com in 2006 from Match.com founder Gary Kremen for a reported $14m, is in foreclosure. The coveted address currently hosts text links to porn websites.

It will change hands again at auction in New York on March 18, but it seems unlikely it will match its pre-recession price. To participate bidders must deposit $1m in escrow, however.

Google Inc plans to build a super-fast Internet network for up to half a million people, a project that could pressure telecommunications companies to loosen their control of Web access in the United States.

The Internet company has locked horns with the likes of AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc over the issue of net neutrality: Google wants telephone companies to permit consumers to run any Web application they want, while carriers do not want to lose control of networks they have invested billions of dollars to build.

In building the test network, Google wants to demonstrate a carrier could easily manage complex applications that use a lot of bandwidth without sacrificing performance.

Google said on Wednesday it does not plan to build a nationwide network and its goal is only to develop a trial service at a “competitive price” to 50,000 to 500,000 people, offering Web speeds of up to 100 times faster than most consumers get today.

The Iranian government plans to permanently suspend Google Inc’s email service in the country, the Wall Street Journal reported on its website on Wednesday.

Google said it experienced a sharp drop in email traffic in Iran, and that some users in the country were having trouble accessing Gmail, but said its networks were working properly.

The report comes as Iran braces for new opposition protests on Thursday during rallies marking the 1979 Islamic revolution. Protesters made use of modern networking tools such as Twitter and Gmail instant messaging last June after a disputed election plunged Iran into crisis.

Google is already at loggerheads with China’s government after it threatened to withdraw from the country last month over claims of online attacks and issues over censorship.

Iran’s telecommunications agency announced the suspension and said a national email service for Iranian citizens would soon be rolled out, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Sweden took the number one spot from the United States to top the annual rankings on the usage of telecommunications technologies such as networks, cellphones and computers, a report released on Thursday shows.

The Connectivity Scorecard, created by London Business School professor Leonard Waverman in 2008, measured 50 countries on dozens of indicators, including technological skills and usage of communications technology.

“Sweden not only has the best current mix of attributes, but it also shows few signs of losing its lead,” said Waverman.

“By contrast, there is the beginning of a gap in what was once the essence of U.S. leadership in most industrial and service sectors - education and skills.”

Sweden was second in the last survey behind the United States. Norway placed third, up from fifth spot last year.

Google has updated its browser toolbar after the application was caught tracking urls even when specifically “disabled” by the user.

In a Monday blog post, Harvard professor and noted Google critic Ben Edelmen provided video evidence of the Google toolbar transmitting data back to the Mountain View Chocolate Factory after he chose to disable the application in the browser window he was currently using.

The Google toolbar offers two disable options: one is meant to disable the toolbar “permanently,” and the other is meant to disable the app “only for this window.”

In a statement passed to The Reg, Google has acknowledged the bug. According to the statement, the bug affects Google Toolbar versions 6.3.911.1819 through 6.4.1311.42 for Internet Explorer. An update that fixes the bug is now available here, and the company intends to automatically update users’ toolbars sometime today.

The EFF has launched a research project called Panopticlick, to determine whether seemingly innocuous browser configuration information (like User Agent strings, plugin versions and, fonts) may create unique fingerprints that allow web users to be tracked, even if they limit or delete cookies.

Preliminary results indicate that the User Agent string alone has 10.5 bits of entropy, which means that for a typical Internet user, only one in about 1,500 (2 ^ 10.5) others will share their User Agent string.

If you visit Panopticlick, you can get an reading of how rare or unique your browser configuration is, as well as helping EFF to collect better data about this problem and how best to defend against it.

The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) released its new spam report which looks at spam budgets, impact of spam and spam management.

The survey targeted email service providers of different types and sizes, and received replies from 100 respondents from 30 different countries, throughout the EU (26/27 EU Member States); and 80 million mailboxes managed. The survey analyses how e-mail service providers combat spam in their networks, and identifies the state of art in the fight against spam.

Some of the key findings are:

* Less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes. This means the main bulk of mails, 95%, is spam. This is a very minor change, from 6%, in earlier ENISA reports.

Space station resident Timothy (TJ) Creamer had been working with flight controllers to establish Internet access from his orbital post ever since he moved in last month. On Friday, his effort paid off. He posted the first live Twitter post truly from space.

“Hello Twitterverse!” he wrote. “We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s”

Before, orbiting astronauts had to send such Twitter updates by e-mail to Mission Control in Houston. Then controllers posted the tweets.

The International Space Station crew can now use an on-board laptop to reach a desktop computer at Mission Control, and thereby browse the Web. This remote Internet access is possible whenever there is a solid high-speed communication link.