Facebook says it has dumped Microsoft banner ads, but what the social network really needs are fewer sleazy advertisers, not less Microsoft.

For example, ads like to one that invites Facebook members to "test" an iPad, Kindle, or Mac that they then get to keep, "participation required."

Maybe you have seen career ads that mention an age, but suggest a job that makes no sense for someone in that age group. Become a cop between 50 and 65? Not likely.

These ads are a natural outgrowth of the pay-for-clicks business model combined witth an "anything for a buck" attitude at Facebook. Since FB do...

Google plans to tweak Gmail to make it easier for its users to post and share status updates, in an attempt to inject the Web mail service with social-networking capabilities popularized by Twitter and Facebook, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The announcement could come as early as this week, the Journal reported on Monday, quoting anonymous sources familiar with the plans.

Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the Journal's article.

Google would be the latest consumer Internet company to try to graft social-networking features onto its online communication...

Peter Molyneux says he's terrified Fable-series fans will balk at radical changes to Fable 3, changes he'll apparently reveal this week at Microsoft's Xbox-oriented X10 gaming event.

Chatting with Game Reactor at Game Jam in Copenhagen last week, Molyneux confirmed he'd be making some announcements about Fable 3 at X10.

"Yeah, we're making some announcements about Fable 3, and there's some...wow, there's just some very, very big things happening in Fable," said Molyneux. "Bigger than you think. And it's going to really upset people."

The designer of games like Populous, Magic Carpet, Syndic...

Trend Micro has rebuilt its SMB SaaS security product, formerly known as "Worry-Free Business Security Hosted," and dubbed it "Worry-Free Business Security Services." The new version expands its monitoring and protection features and adds more configuration and reporting capabilities, according to the company. It also brings in features previously available only in enterprise products.

Trend Micro (Nasdaq: TMIC) on Monday announced a new and completely overhauled version of its Software as a Service (SaaS) for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

The new version, named "Worry-Free Busin...

Is Symbian finding its way back through FOSS? "Symbian is on its way out," says Martin Espinoza, a blogger at Hyperlogos. "Even Nokia knows it, which is why their flagship product -- the N900 -- is based on Linux." On the other hand, the news "is a fine example of a near monopoly graciously sharing with the world in order to compete fairly and with better products," says blogger Robert Pogson.

It's not every day that a major operating system gets opened up, never mind one that leads the global market in its category.

So, when the news came out last week that that's just what the Symbian Foun...

Security suite vendor McAfee debuts their 2010 product line today, introducing an overhauled interface and new features in a bid to remain competitive. The change to their interface is as dramatic a shift as the one that Avast introduced in their 2010 suites, although McAfee's look is drastically different from any major security program currently on the market. Most of the features in McAfee AntiVirus Plus, McAfee Internet Security, and McAfee Total Protection are not new, but the presentation is so radical that the improvements are likely to be glossed over. Older users of McAfee should note...

Google has made YouTube available over IPv6 in an effort to encourage more use of the next-generation and more capacious Internet addressing system.

The transition from the current Internet Protocol version 4 has been slow and difficult for the computing industry. But Google has been gradually making its services available over IPv6, including search in March 2008, to those with sufficiently reliable connections.


"The service most requested to have IPv6 support has unquestionably been YouTube," said Lorenzo Colitti and Steinar H. Gunderson, Google IPv6 network experts, in a blog post Fr...