Move over Billboard. "The times they are a-changin'." Today Google launched a music chart for videos -- the YouTube 100 -- that empowers Jack and Jane Wannabe to stand tall with the likes of Lady Gaga or, gasp, Justin Bieber. The chart tracks "song popularity in user-generated and professional music videos," Chris LaRosa, Google Music product manager, explains in a blog post.

YouTube is still mostly about user-generated content, and opening information -- and possibilities -- is fundamentally in keeping with Google corporate philosophy. So it's very appropriate that Google's music chart should include user-generated videos alongside those from popular, commercial musicians.

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Symantec has announced a major update -- 18.6.0.29 -- to its 2011 security products, including Norton Internet Security 2011 and Norton AntiVirus 2011. This update includes a few new features, such as support for the Firefox 4 browser, plus performance enhancements, improved compatibility with third-party programs and a number of bug fixes.

Version 18.6.0.29 also corrects an issue whereby upgrading from a previous version of Norton resulted in a loss of subscription days being reported. Other enhancements include an "improved" activation process, plus better performance from Internet Explorer 9 plug-ins as well as all previous changes introduced by the previous update (18.5).

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Kiev-based developer MacPaw, best known for its CleanMyMac tool for Macintosh computers, has ventured onto the Windows platform for the first time with an equivalent cleaning application for the PC, the appropriately titled CleanMyPC.

As the name implies, CleanMyPC includes a suite of cleaning tools for Windows computers. The main cleaning component promises to remove gigabytes of files from your PC, and is backed up by five further maintenance tools: Secure Erase, Complete Uninstall, Registry Maintenance, Autorun and Gadgets & Extensions Manager.

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When you need to understand what's happening on your Windows network, then logging its traffic with a packet sniffing tool can help. And there are few easier ways to get the job done than with a copy of the free NetworkMiner.

The program is portable, for instance, so there are no installation hassles. It'll automatically detect and work with standard packet capture libraries like WinPcap, or grab raw sockets with its own capture tool. And so all you have to do is point NetworkMiner at your chosen network adapter, click "Start," then watch as it organizes your traffic into twelve different views.

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Editors Note: 'What if' hypothetical history follows. The events described in this article didn't actually happen. But they might have...

It was all over when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to reconsider the judgement of the Court of Appeals upholding Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's antitrust breakup of Microsoft. A shotgun divorce is an ugly thing in business.

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It's a little over 10 years since Microsoft largely won/lost the appeal of the U.S. government's landmark antitrust case. Today, Thursday, May 12, 2011, the oversight regime created by the judgement against Microsoft ends. Can anyone reasonably say that this case made any meaningful difference to the
technology business?

I've always been hardcore, maybe even an extremist, about the antitrust case against Microsoft. I never thought of it as a dangerous monopoly.

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Just a few hours after Google announced the first "Chromebooks" (and the fact that all Google I/O attendees will be receiving one within a few weeks,) we got to go hands on with Samsung's Chromebook Series 5.

With a 12.1" screen size and a weight of 3.3 pounds, there's no debating that Google is going for the notebook form factor with its Chromebook design. Even though they intend to be connected to the net at all times, these are by no means netbooks.

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Google's Chromebook subscription program could seriously pinch Microsoft enterprise licensing revenue. The $28 per month per user fee is bargain-basement pricing compared to what businesses now pay Microsoft for software and OEMs for supporting hardware. Google could easily take $1 billion a year in software revenue from Microsoft, says one licensing expert, with the number substantially growing over several years.

Earlier today, Google announced June 15 as launch date for Chromebook, which will initially be available from Acer and Samsung with 11.6-inch or 12.1-inch displays, respectively. Prices start at $349, for notebooks with Intel Atom dual-core processors and limited local storage, running Chrome OS. But there is another acquisition option -- a monthly subscription for business and education markets. School price is $20/month per student and for businesses the aforementioned $28/month per user. The subscription price requires businesses to make a 3-year commitment. Microsoft volume-licensing customers typically also license software for three years, although a 2-year option is available.

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The merger of NBC and Comcast had its opponents when it was first announced in December 2009, however the FCC later found it to be acceptable and approved the merger the following year. Now one of those FCC commissioners behind the approval is the combined company's newest hire.

Republican Commissioner Meredith Atwell Baker was one of the most vocal critics of placing any conditions on the deal, and said it could "bring exciting benefits to consumers that outweigh potential harms." Four months later, Comcast/NBCUniversal's Washington office has a new senior vice president of government affairs.

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For years, an accidental security flaw in the way Facebook handled embedded frames allowed applications developers to access information on a user's profile that installed that application. It is estimated that nearly 100,000 applications may have enabled this flaw, potentially affecting millions.

Symantec, the company that discovered the vulnerability, reported it to Facebook. The flaw has been fixed, but it is unknown if any of the data had been used maliciously.

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In the Wednesday keynote at Google I/O in San Francisco, Google disclosed some information about the Chrome Web Store that should be of key importance to web application developers and those measuring the profitability of development in that area.

The total audience of Chrome users is more than 160 million, and in the first three months of the Chrome Web store's existence, 17 million applications were installed. This may not seem like much at first, but the store was only available in the United States, and only to users of the most up-to-date version of Chrome.

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Today, at Google I/O, Google revealed that the first Chrome OS laptops, or Chromebooks, will be available for order on June 15 in the United States. Prices will start at $349 for an 11.6-inch model. Additionally, Google announced a sweet deal for students -- a Chromebook for 20 bucks a month. Assuming a nine-month school year that works out to $180. Businesses can subscribe for $28 per user/a month.

Chrome OS is a cloud-dependent operating system requiring a persistent Internet connection -- or so it seemed before today's Google I/O keynote. The user's Google account ID allows syncing of browser bookmarks and passwords with computers running Chrome and opens access to server-side Google services like Apps, Gmail and Reader.

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NirSoft is famous for creating some of the best free Windows utilities around: tiny, portable and packed with useful features. If you'd like to sample what the company has to offer then you could spend an hour or two browsing the site, individually downloading anything that appeals. But it's probably easier to simply grab a copy of NirLauncher, which crams more than 130 of the best NirSoft tools into a portable, easily accessible package.

We're not just talking about a zip file holding the various executables, either. NirLauncher also provides a front-end menu that organizes its tools into categories like Password Recovery, Network Monitoring, Disk Utilities, System Utilities and more, making it much simpler to locate the particular programs that you need.

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Enterprise security and firewall company Palo Alto Networks on Wednesday released the results of an eight-month study of more than 1,200 organizations and 2 million users that observed more than 28 exabytes of data passing through corporate networks. Among the results of the study, Palo Alto found that applications using SSL (secure sockets layer) in some way represented 23% of all corporate bandwidth, and dynamic/port hopping applications represented a further 16% of all bandwidth.

In total, social networking within the corporate firewall has increased 500% in one year's time.

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WinZip Computing, a subsidiary of Corel, has released a major new update for its Mac zip tool, WinZip Mac Edition. Version 1.5 features a number of improvements based on two key areas: zip/unzip functionality, and file sharing and archiving.

WinZip Mac Edition now features improved support for Mac application bundles, which are recognizable via the .app extension. Previously the program could simply unzip an entire .app bundle, but version 1.5 gives the user additional options, namely the ability to view the contents of the archive, plus the option of extracting individual items. It's also now possible to include hidden files within zip archives, plus the program supports a wider number of archived formats, including .jar and .war files.

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