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NewsFactor – Although the final upgrade to the Windows XP operating system was supposed to be made available this week on Microsoft’s Download Center, Microsoft has apparently decided to delay its release. Service Pack 3 was originally released to manufacturing on April 21 and plans were set for May 2 to make the upgrade available via MSDN and Technet download.

AP – Edgar Masri was removed as chief executive of data network equipment maker 3Com Inc. on Tuesday and immediately replaced by Robert Mao, a fluent Mandarin speaker who will be based in China, which the Massachusetts-based company sees as its biggest market.

PC World – The growing use of encryption software— like Microsoft’s own BitLocker— by cyber criminals has led Microsoft to develop a…

Macworld.com – Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit (BU) has announced the release of Messenger for Mac 7, its instant messaging client. Version 7 is a free download, available from the Mac BU’s website.

Reuters – Viral marketing has gone
positively bubonic. While this unconventional approach to
building buzz online is nothing new, it has achieved full-blown
plague status in the walk-up to the summer movie season.

AFP – Microsoft could make its next move against Yahoo Wednesday with the software giant likely to try and replace Yahoo’s board of directors, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Reuters – French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen
is looking to make a bit of extra cash by putting his old
bullet-proof car up for sale on eBay.

PC World – Sony Ericsson is hoping to promote “wow” mobile-phone applications by enabling developers to combine the best of Java and…

PC World – SpringSource, maker of the Spring Framework for Java development, will announce a new application server on Wednesday that it…

PC World – Asustek Computer on Wednesday forecast it will nearly double shipments of the popular Eee PC low-cost laptop in the second…

PC World – Skype has released an upgraded version of its VOIP (voice over IP) software client for Windows PCs that cuts out more…

AFP – The World Wide Web is still only in its infancy, its British inventor said Wednesday, on the 15th anniversary of the web’s effective launch.

USATODAY.com – This episode of the CBS crime drama CSI: NY, scheduled to run Wednesday night, is fiction. But the technology at its core, Microsoft’s Photosynth software, is real. It analyzes scores of images for similarities and stitches them into a three-dimensional reconstruction.

AP – Telecommunication equipment titan Alcatel-Lucent on Wednesday reported a fifth straight quarterly loss and said it expected annual revenues to fall while scaling back its market forecast for 2008.

AP – Time Warner Inc. reported a 36 percent decline in first-quarter profits Wednesday following an asset sale a year ago and said it would spin off the rest of its cable business.

InfoWorld – Tibco Software is throwing its support behind Microsoft’s new Silverlight browser plug-in technology for rich Internet applications and also is offering users of Microsoft Web services technology an alternative message platform.

AP – IAC/InterActiveCorp, the Internet conglomerate led by Barry Diller, said Wednesday its first-quarter profit slipped 13 percent marketing and other expenses, but adjusted results met expectations.

PC World – Clarizen, like other small vendors in the on-demand project-management software space, is trying to lure Microsoft Project…

Reuters – Italians were surprised, and in some cases
outraged, on Wednesday to discover that their income levels
were available for public viewing on an Internet site.

AFP – The Japanese police moved Wednesday to stop a string of suicides using detergent, asking Internet providers to remove information on how to generate the deadly gas.

NewsFactor – When you release a game that celebrates beatings, shootings, carjackings and other forms of social mayhem, it had better work properly. If the official forums for Grand Theft Auto IV are any indication, the programmers at Take-Two and Rockstar North should avoid lingering in dark alleys for the foreseeable future.

NewsFactor – Fans of the Windows XP operating system will have to wait for the latest — and possibly last — service pack update. Microsoft said Tuesday that further release of Service Pack 3, which had been made available through Windows Update and Microsoft Download Center the same day, was being delayed because of a recently revealed problem.

Reuters – Annie Mole’s blog about the London
Underground rail system began as a New Year’s resolution to
teach herself how to make an Internet Web site and has
blossomed into a popular slice of commuter life.

Reuters – The New York Stock Exchange said on
Wednesday that Virgin Mobile USA declined to comment on
unusual activity in the cell phone company’s shares.

NewsFactor – Fortune reports that AT&T expects to launch Apple’s new 3G iPhone either on, or very near to, the June 27 anniversary of the original handset’s 2007 launch. Citing an unnamed source familiar with the matter, the magazine said AT&T intends to heavily subsidize the new smartphone, giving anyone who signs up for a two-year contract a $200 discount on the iPhone’s retail sticker price.

NewsFactor – Fortune reports that AT&T expects to launch Apple’s new 3G iPhone either on, or very near to, the June 27 anniversary of the original handset’s 2007 launch. Citing an unnamed source familiar with the matter, the magazine said AT&T intends to heavily subsidize the new smartphone, giving anyone who signs up for a two-year contract a $200 discount on the iPhone’s retail sticker price.

TechWeb – Though impacted negatively by weakness in the dollar versus the euro, the company said it will continue to pursue 3G, 4G, and WiMax.

AP – Japanese Internet services and telecommunication company SoftBank said Wednesday it hopes to boost its stake to 40 percent in a major Chinese Internet company, eyeing booming demand.

PC World – A new USB cell data modem from Sprint includes storage, automatic software installation, GPS hardware, and multi-platform software.

PC World – Enterprise search vendor Dieselpoint is behind a new open-source project centering on a document “pipeline”— or as the…

Reuters – A new, viral web site conceived by
U.S. college students challenges stereotypes about who might be
infected with HIV using a model pioneered by a campaign to
raise awareness about Darfur.

AP – Google Inc.‘s once-austere Web site is turning into an eclectic art gallery.

AP – Owners of Wii game consoles from Nintendo Co. have always enjoyed the freedom its motion-sensing games offer, but the wire between the remote and the nunchuk needed for some games could limit movement.

AP – AOL made key mistakes that pushed down display-advertising sales and resulted in the Time Warner Inc. unit’s first quarter of flat ad revenue since it began staking its future on the boom in online ads, executives said Wednesday.

AP – For nearly 40 years, scientists have speculated that basic electrical circuits have a natural ability to remember things even when the power is switched off. They just couldn’t find it.

NewsFactor – A federal court has dealt a body blow to the recording industry’s efforts to sue people who use peer-to-peer software to download music from the Internet. In fact, says one copyright lawyer, the P2P decision could mean the end of the Recording Industry Association of America’s litigation strategy.

AP – The NASA inspector general says the space agency is breaking the law by allowing conflicts of interest on a board overseeing the building of a new spaceship to return astronauts to the moon.

NewsFactor – As Macintosh computers make some inroads into the enterprise, they are still behind in certain areas of corporate communications. On Tuesday, Microsoft took a step toward closing a bit of that gap by releasing its Messenger for Mac 7 with audio and video support, if users are connected via Office Communications Server 2007.

NewsFactor – As Macintosh computers make some inroads into the enterprise, they are still behind in certain areas of corporate communications. On Tuesday, Microsoft took a step toward closing a bit of that gap by releasing its Messenger for Mac 7 with audio and video support, if users are connected via Office Communications Server 2007.

PC World – James Treacy, former chief operating officer and president of online job board Monster Worldwide, has been charged with…

AP – Microsoft Corp.‘s directors are meeting Wednesday to consider raising the software maker’s $41.9 billion bid for Yahoo Inc. instead of pursuing a threatened hostile takeover attempt, according to a published report.

AP – Sales of Blu-ray disc players haven’t been helped by maker Toshiba’s capitulation over producing the rival HD DVD format, research firm NPD Group said Wednesday.

AP – Even criminal hackers want to protect their intellectual property, and they’ve come up with a method akin to copyrighting — with an appropriate dash of Internet thuggery thrown in.

InfoWorld – Tibco Software is set to make a play in the computer hardware space, readying its Tibco Messaging Appliance for ultra-low-latency messaging deployments.

AP – EBay says Craigslist believed eBay broke an agreement not to engage in competitive activity and thereby lost rights granted to it as a shareholder.

AFP – Megastar couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and their four children have traveled to the south of France where they will stay for some time, People magazine reported online Wednesday.

PC World – SugarCRM is bridging the distance between mobile phones and PCs with a new version of its Web-based customer relationship…

Reuters – International Business Machines
Corp on Wednesday launched tools to reduce computer
energy consumption as IBM hopes to boost its business of
selling power-saving technologies.