Technology in your hands.

Apple said on Thursday its iTunes online music store has surpassed Wal-Mart Stores to become the largest music retailer in the United States.

Apple’s statement, citing industry data, came on the same day that iTunes faced a new challenge as News Corp’s MySpace social networking site said it had formed an online music venture with three record labels.

MySpace Music is a joint venture with Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group, according to the News Corporation-owned website…

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Microsoft sent a letter to the Yahoo Board of Directors Saturday setting a three-week deadline for moving forward on its more than $40 billion buyout offer.

The letter signed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Microsoft will take its case directly to Yahoo shareholders and work to elect a new slate of directors, if the board doesn’t respond by the deadline by April 26.

The bid to buy Yahoo was made in January and announced Feb. 1.

At the time, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion, or 62 percent above Yahoo’s market value. The deal is currently valued at about $41 billion, based on Friday’s closing share prices.

Yahoo’s board formally rejected Microsoft Corp.’s bid, saying it undervalues the company.

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WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

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There is a ton of interesting information in the documents that have been released as part of the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit.

There’s the juicy e-mails that show Microsoft caving to pressure from Intel and lowering the graphics requirements to get the Vista Capable sticker. There’s also Dell outlining all of the problems it had with Microsoft in getting Vista to market as well as with its many readiness programs.

For those that want to give the full documents a read, the Seattle Post-Intellingencer has posted the complete PDF files of the documents, linked to from this blog by Todd Bishop.

Another area that got some notice this week was the inordinate number of early Vista crashes that were attributed to Nvidia, according to a list from early 2007. Nvidia was cited as causing nearly 30 percent of early Vista crashes (the exact time of the report is not listed), while Microsoft itself was to blame for nearly 18 percent. Intel and ATI each accounted for about 9 percent of crashes, according to the documents…

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San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe Systems says it hopes to boost its name recognition among a new generation of consumers who edit, store and share photos online.

While Photoshop is designed for trained professionals, Adobe says Photoshop Express, which it launched in a “beta” test version, is easier to learn. User comments will be taken into account for future upgrades.

Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser. And, once they register, users can get to their accounts from different computers…

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News Corp’s MySpace earlier pledged support, and the three companies announced today they were forming a non-profit organisation, the OpenSocial Foundation, to ensure the platform remains neutral and viable.

The idea behind the Google-initiated OpenSocial platform is to create a common coding standard for the applications so they work on hundreds of web sites.

The applications could permit chats, games, media sharing and more.

By contrast, sites that haven’t joined OpenSocial typically rely on unique coding that has prevented widgets developed for its sites from working at other places on the web.

The addition of Yahoo could put pressure on Facebook, the number two social-networking site behind MySpace, to pledge support as well, though Facebook has had tremendous success encouraging developers to write tools specifically for it…

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Now that Windows Vista service pack 1 has been released, all eyes have shifted to Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)’s plans for Windows XP service pack 3, the final package of updates for the trusty OS. And, according to at least one source, Microsoft will roll out XP SP3 next Monday.

As of Wednesday afternoon Pacific time, the BitTorrent search engine Mininova listed a 568.73 MB Windows XP Professional SP3 5503 file available for download. The file, which had 112 seeds and 417 leeches, had been downloaded 2083 times since it was posted Tuesday, according to the listing.

According to the file description notes, Microsoft will release the final version of XP SP3 on March 24, but the 5503 test build passes all Windows Genuine Advantage checks and is able to download Windows updates that previous XP SP3 builds weren’t able to, which suggests that it could, in fact, be the final RTM build…

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While YouTube is best known for its work in promoting social video, the company is looking to live video as its next format. In an interview with NewTeeVee, YouTube founder Steve Chen said that the company plans to introduce a new live feature sometime this year. He said that the company had always wanted to do it, but didn’t have the resources. Now that YouTube is owned by Google, Chen said the resources are now at their disposal.

Analysts say that YouTube is likely to quickly build momentum in the marketplace, which is primarily due to its already strong presence in social video. “Like video, content creators want to be on the service that gives them the most exposure, no matter how good the alternatives are,” Duncan Riley wrote for TechCrunch. “YouTube already has the user base; live video streamers will flock to YouTube like a moth to a flame.”

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Spammers have cracked the captcha mechanism Gmail uses to make sure you are a human before you can open an e-mail account, leading to a huge increase in the amount of spam sent from Gmail last month, security firm MessageLabs says.

We’ve all been subjected to captcha programs when signing up for Web services. They typically consist of a box with some characters, either distorted or displayed against some noisy background, and you have to type the letters and numerals in exactly as you see them before the system will accept your sign-in.

They are designed to catch, or stop, automated programs called bots that are written to create new accounts for spammers to use. Annoying as the captcha systems are, they have been successful in keeping bots out, until recently.

Yahoo Mail and Hotmail captcha mechanisms were broken in July 2007, according to MessageLabs. And now, Gmail has succumbed…

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At Microsoft’s MIX08 online technology conference, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, provided a first glimpse at the successor to IE 7, which was released in October 2006.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser is the world’s most widely-used Web browser with a greater market share than Apple Inc’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox. The browser is also part of the ongoing battle between Microsoft and arch-rival Google Inc.

Firefox is closely affiliated with Google, which provided around 85 percent of the revenue of Firefox’s parent organization, the Mozilla Foundation, which was $66.8 million in 2006, according to filings published last October.

Google distributes Firefox as its preferred browser software in a number of its own products. Mozilla continues to receive revenue from Google under a contract set to expire in November 20, 2008.

Microsoft’s presentation was catered heavily toward Web developers, but Hachamovitch showed some user features of IE 8. One feature allows users to save work being done on a Web site to the local computer when an Internet connection goes down.

Another feature lets users highlight an address on a Web site and then see a map within the Web site with a single click. Users can also highlight a product name and be able to see if the item is available for sale on eBay.

The new browser is available to developers at http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8

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