The complaints have come from different quarters, including competitors and industry experts, and have focused on various arguments, but at bottom all charge Google with using its dominant search engine to deliberately boost Google+’s popularity, by giving Google+ pages and profiles an artificially prominent position in result pages.

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Giving the user control over the Web experience has been a longstanding Mozilla priority, and Firefox 8 takes a new step here. With earlier versions, third-party software could extend Firefox with new features–Skype’s tool for highlighting phone numbers for easy online calling, for example. With Firefox 8, though, third-party add-ons will be disabled by default.

“These add-ons installed by third parties present a number of problems: they can slow down Firefox start-up and page loading time, they clutter the interface with toolbars that often go unused, they lag behind on compatibility and security updates, and most importantly, they take the user out of control of their add-ons,” said Mozilla programmer Justin “Fligtar” Scott in a blog post about the feature.

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This team of hackers, Anonymous and LulzSec, working under the name AntiSec, aka Anti-Security, released this file containing aproximately 100,000 emails from officers in states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Kansas amongst other files. Inside these emails was at least one appearing to contain dozens of tip-offs about local seemingly illegal incidents from members of the public, including names and addresses of the supposed offenders and/or tipsters.

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The possible deal, which was reported by the Wall Street Journal, may be unveiled as early as Tuesday and would be one of Microsoft’s biggest acquisitions in years.

The transaction is expected to value Skype at $8.5 billion including debt, according to several reports.

Representatives for Skype and Microsoft MSFT -0.15% couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

The U.S. firm’s last significant deal was the 2007 purchase of online advertising group aQuantive Inc. for around $6 billion.

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But perhaps now Windows users are wondering if they should use Internet Explorer 9. Some of those folks are using previous versions of the browser and might be pleased with it. Others might be using Chrome, Firefox or Opera, and couldn’t fathom the thought of moving to Microsoft’s latest browser.

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Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo, says talk of a $10bn (£6.2bn) acquisition of the messaging company by Google is “just a rumour” and that the site is already making money.

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Costolo asked whether Google could afford a $10bn acquisition – following rumours that this was the price being considered by the search engine firm for the messaging startup. “People write that stuff all the time … I don’t know where these things come from, it’s just a rumour.” He fell short of an outright denial, however.

Costolo also suggested that Twitter, which started operations in February 2006, will this year introduce a new method of making money, to add to its existing roster of promoted tweets, accounts and trends. However, he did not specify what that would be.

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The “botnet” of infected computers included PCs inside more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 major banks, according to investigators.

Spanish investigators, working with private computer-security firms, have arrested the three alleged ringleaders of the so-called Mariposa botnet, which appeared in December 2008 and grew into one of the biggest weapons of cybercrime. More arrests are expected soon in other countries.

Spanish authorities have planned a news conference for Wednesday in Madrid.

Read more at Yahoo News

Twitter, which was launched in 2007, has enjoyed rapid growth in recent months. In 2007, around 5,000 tweets were sent per day. That increased to 300,000 messages per day in 2008 and now in 2010, it has reached a staggering 50 million tweets per day!

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According to the security firm, just 19 percent never use the same password twice. Sophos added that three years ago, 41 percent of web users said they used the same password, indicating that just 8 percent of web users have realized the importance of strong, unique passwords.

“It’s worrying that in three years very few computer users seem to have woken up to the risks of using weak passwords and the same ones for every site they visit,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

“With social networking and other internet accounts now even more popular, there’s plenty on offer for hackers and by using the same password to access Facebook, Amazon and your online bank account, you’re making it much easier for them. Once one password has been compromised, it’s only a matter of time before the fraudsters will be able to gain access to your other accounts and steal information for financial gain.”

Full article at PCWorld

ISPs have criticized IFPI’s move, and Pirate Bay’s spokesman Peter Sunde said that “the crazy people behind IFPI should be stopped.” Bård Vegar Solhjell, Minister of Education and Research in Norway sides with Peter in this assessment, as he vouches for the legalization of file-sharing.

In a recent blog post, the minister who is a member of the Socialist Left Party (SV), said that file-sharing is genius, and a great way to discover and access music. “You and I can get access to all the world’s music when we want. Fantastic!” Solhjell wrote on his weblog.

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