Becoming the second major Internet company in as many months to go public, online coupon site Groupon announced Thursday its intentions to file for an initial public offering. The site says it preliminarily expects to raise $750 million.

Groupon has seen some successes as of late: after only pulling in a little over $713 million in all of 2010, in the first quarter of this year it had already pulled in some $645 milion. This is a likely indication of the swelling interest in discount sites among consumers, and very well could be seen as a validation of Groupon and other's business model.

Russian security software company Elcomsoft on Thursday released a free tool dedicated solely to recovering Facebook passwords cached in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome called Facebook Password Extractor.

We've looked through a lot of software, and this is the first freeware we've seen dedicated solely to peeling Facebook login information out of a system. It's based on Elcomsoft's Internet Password Breaker, a $49 piece of password recovery software that can extract account information from other social networks, webmail, POP3/IMAP, and instant messenger clients.

Reports from victims of fraud on iTunes are beginning to paint a picture of what could be a significant security issue for Apple's online entertainment store. Worse yet, several of the victims that reported into Betanews on their experience are employed in IT -- obviously understanding the risks of improperly secured personal data.

Although not uniform, Betanews investigations into the issue seem to suggest that attackers have primarily targeted users that had credit balances with iTunes. Monitoring of Sega's Kingdom Conquest app page show new comments posted today of fraudulent charges, indicating the hack is ongoing. But that's not the worst of it: other apps may be victims of these hackers.

Amazon apparently is getting into the Groupon coupon-like business by aggregating deals from LivingSocial. But don't rush out to the AmazonLocal website, unless you live in Boise, Idaho. That appears to be the only city where there are local deals.

Tip of the hat goes to TheNextWeb for uncovering AmazonLocal and its apparently one-city offering. I've got a call in asking for more details and will update this story should Amazon respond.

Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 isn't the only new portable getting the early sales treatment -- and, hey, it runs another Google operating system. Gilt Groupe is offering the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook, for presale. I meant to write about the offer yesterday, but got sidetracked with other news. Gilt Group spam promotional email reminded me today.

Yesterday I received an unexpected email from "The Chrome Team" offering the presale, starting at Noon ET June 1, but leading to the Gilt Groupe site. Can you say phishing scam? So I suspected before confirming legitimacy.

On Wednesday, Engineering Director of Google's Security Team Eric Grosse said his team had uncovered a password-stealing campaign originating from Jinan, China that targeted senior U.S., South Korean, and other Asian government officials, Chinese political activists, military personnel, and journalists.

Unlike a typical phishing scam looking to steal money from whomever falls for its social engineering tricks, Grosse suggested that this campaign was more for the purposes of espionage or information collection, and was targeting individuals.

In a smart, and perhaps risky, marketing move, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 will be available early -- that's June 8 -- at one store in the United States. Otherwise, the tablet goes on sale June 17 nationwide. Will the Android Army line up for the Tab? Samsung should hope so.

Samsung says that a "limited quantity" of Galaxy Tab 10.1 WiFi models will be sold at Best Buy Union Square, in the great NYC. You're a lucky sod, if an Android fan and living in the New York metro area or planning to travel there next week. I dunno what kind of customer-waiting line the Tab could draw on a Wednesday, but, hey, it's the kind of thing that could be a marketing coup for Samsung and the tablet.

Last night, I was sitting around with friends enjoying the evening and happened to check my e-mail. To my surprise, I had received two e-mails from PayPal with the subjects "Receipt for Your Payment to iTunes Store." That's funny -- I hadn't bought anything on iTunes in over a week, and the last charge had already hit my account days ago.

Imagine my horror when I logged into the Account Management section and saw this: repeated charges totaling $95.30, split in two equal parts. Worse yet, it was for a game I had never downloaded, Sega's "Kingdom Conquest." Repeatedly, somebody had purchased within the app 1,200 CP (which I'm guessing is in-game credits) at $8.99 a piece.

Sign me up for the Windows 8 beta, Microsoft, and I'll sell my MacBook Air. Perhaps the Samsung Series 9 should be next?

Late yesterday, Microsoft gave the first sneak peak of Windows 8. What a peak! Apple unveils Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" in just four days, and it's antiquated before release. Microsoft has taken one of the freshest approaches to operating system user interfaces since, well, the Macintosh in 1984. The new UI is fluid and modern, using HTML5 for rendering.

Windows isn't the only makeover going on at Microsoft this week. Alongside today's Windows 8 preview, Microsoft also announced the BUILD conference, what had been PDC 2011. Microsoft previously announced the developer conference during MIX11, in April, for Sept. 13-16 in Anaheim, Calif. BUILD is the same event, made over, and with new name.

What a name! The connotations are loaded, and Microsoft is doing good job endearing them. From Microsoft: "BUILD what you DREAM." "BUILD with Windows 8."

At the D9 Conference on Wednesday, Microsoft gave the public a much deeper look at Windows 8 than it had previously, revealing the company's progress in making a Windows that is scalable to the most popular types of interfaces in addition to the most popular instruction sets.

The result looks a lot like Windows Phone, but it has a lot of the underpinnings of Windows 7.

Google's Facebook "Like" clone +1 took another step towards becoming exactly that on Wednesday as the company said it was now allowing web publishers to place the button directly on their websites.

Previously, +1 was only a feature within Google's search engine that allowed users to 'upvote' results as a method of approving of their relevance. With the expansion of the functionality, it would now include votes from users directly on those pages as part of those totals.

Wouldn't it be funny if Google turned out to be the Internet's security cop? That's one way to interpret the search and information giant's continued push to clear away aging web browsers. First Internet Explorer 6, now Firefox 3.5, IE7 and Safari 3. Google will stop supporting these latter three browsers two months from today.

Google's reasons have nothing to do with security, but there could be a safety benefit. Let's face it, major developers invest more in their newest browser versions. More significantly, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla are now on fast development tracks, with new browser milestones coming every six to eight weeks. For example, Firefox 4 launched in late March with great fanfare -- 6 million downloads in 24 hours -- yet version 7 Nightly builds are already available for download. Firefox 5 is scheduled to release on June 21.

Have you noticed a decline in spam reaching your inbox? Sadly, the respite won't last long. More spam is coming your way.

Today, McAfee Labs released its First Quarter 2011 Threat Report, and there's good news. Spam volumes are considerably lower and it's because of some significant law enforcement victories. Among them: In march, law enforcement, working with Microsoft, took down the Rustock botnet and with it a big chunk of the zombie/bot population.

Market research company Nielsen has released its smartphone market share figures for the first quarter of 2011 which show that Android has risen to both the top of market share and data consumption.

Android's meteoric rise can be seen quite clearly when comparing Nielsen's first quarter 2010 numbers with those it just released.