Sprint, the United States' third largest mobile phone network operator reported its second quarter earnings today, showing a total loss of $384 million, and 257,000 subscribers. For Sprint, these numbers actually represent a minor improvement.

In the past two years, Sprint's number of subscriptions has dropped by more than 7 million, or roughly one million subscribers per quarter. This quarter Sprint lost 991,000 contract subscribers, but coupled it with the biggest gain in prepaid customers from any U.S. mobile carrier in three years (more than 777,000).

With the deal signed and ink drying, you may be wondering about the details behind the historic Microsoft and Yahoo search agreement, which may finally begin to put some pressure on Google's dominance in search. We break it down for you.

The Basics

In Twitter's efforts to make the microblogging service more welcoming to first-time users, a new homepage has been unveiled which focuses on search and trending topics.

"We have a lot of work to do when it comes to the quality of our search results and trend analysis but repositioning the product to focus more on discovery is an important first step in presenting Twitter to a wider audience of folks around the world who are eager to start engaging with new people, ideas, opinions, events, and sources of information," Co-founder Biz Stone said in the site's blog.

Opening arguments Tuesday in Joel Tenenbaum's file-sharing trial covered both the you-don't-know-he-did and the so-what-if-he-did angles the defense advanced in pre-trial discussions, with various witnesses testifying that they hadn't used the "sublimeguy14@KaZaA" account on Mr. Tenenbaum's machine even as defense lead Charles Neeson told the jury that "Everyone could download [songs] for free. And millions and millions did. Joel was one of those millions."

Writing for Recording Industry vs The People, Mark Bourgeois supplied detailed information on the five witnesses and two items of deposition testimony presented on Tuesday. The depositions were given by Mr. Tenenbaum's sisters, who spoke about their brother's music tastes and said they'd never downloaded from his machine.

UPDATE: Microsoft and Yahoo issued joint statements this morning announcing their search partnership. As expected, Bing will power Yahoo's search and Yahoo will deal with sales, advertisement and "providing consumers with great experiences with the world's favorite online destinations and Web products."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, "This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there's so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search."

It seems as if the high-profile trial of The Pirate Bay's operators hasn't really changed much at all in the eyes of Hollywood, as thirteen studios have banded together to sue the site into closing down.

The case was filed in Stockholm District Court on Monday and requests that the site cease and desist from pointing to copyrighted material. According to a Swedish news site given access to the documentation, about 100 movies and TV shows are listed in the complaint. The complaint asks for an injunction to keep the site from operating and mentions compensation for court costs.

The first of Microsoft's planned retail stores will be opening in Scottsdale, Arizona and Missioin Viejo, California, according to reports today.

Images of Microsoft's potential in-store design were leaked late last week and later confirmed by Microsoft to be real, though they were dismissed as "early prototypes" of plans for their retail stores.

Microsoft today issued security updates for the Active Template Library (ATL) which address a vulnerability that could allow remote code execution.

Libraries are collections of codes upon which software is built, and Microsoft's ATL is used by developers to create controls or components (such as Automation and ActiveX) in Windows. But any components or controls created with the vulnerable version of ATL may now become vulnerable due to how ATL is used or due to issues in the ATL code itself.

To tie in with Barnes and Noble's increasing emphasis on eBooks, AT&T announced today that Wi-Fi connections at any of the 777 United States Barnes and Noble bookstores will be free for anyone to use. Previously, only AT&T subscribers had free access to the network.

Last week, Barnes and Noble launched a Web-based eBook store and free eReader apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch, BlackBerry, and Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS 10.1+. The bookseller is gearing up for the launch of its own eBook reader, made by Plastic Logic which will compete with the market-leading Amazon Kindle.

Yesterday, the Chinese Ministry of Culture announced that gangster-themed online games have been banned in China as they pose "a serious threat to distort the rule of law and moral standards of society."

Games which promote "fighting, murder, robbery, rape, cheating, or other antisocial behavior" have been deemed illegal content. Web sites hosting, publicizing or linking to games that have organized crime as a major theme face severe punishment. The severity of punishment, however, was not explained by state media.

Sprint, the United States' third largest Tier 1 mobile carrier, will be acquiring mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Virgin Mobile USA for an estimated total of $483 million.

Sprint already owned 13.1% of Virgin Mobile USA, and the MVNO was the first prepay-only business to lease Sprint's mobile network. After the deal closes, Virgin Mobile USA's CEO Dan Schulman will lead Sprint's prepaid business, which already includes Boost Mobile.

The grand unveiling of Google Voice apps for BlackBerry and Android was two weeks ago, but an iPhone app for the service was conspicuously absent. Now it has come out that all Google Voice apps are being pulled from the iTunes app store on the familiar grounds of "duplicate functionality."

Apple has done away with a lot of notable apps that provide a service which the iPhone already presumably provides. The most famous instance of this happened in 2008 with Podcaster, which duplicated the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes. It also happened with Opera Mini, which duplicated Safari's functionality.

Palm's plea to the USB Implementers Forum -- the nonprofit group organized by the companies that developed the USB spec -- is an interesting but potentially dangerous gambit for the Pre's home team.

Engineers at Palm re-established via a firmware upgrade the Pre's ability to connect to iTunes late Thursday evening, to the continued annoyance of Apple's closed-source partisans -- especially, no doubt, since Palm's John Traynor made a point of prefacing the news with Steve Jobs' "and one more thing" catchphrase. As it did in the previous workaround, the Pre's firmware now passes to iTunes a Vendor ID indicating it's an Apple device, allowing the phone to download content legally purchased by its user.

A pre-trial ruling by the judge hearing the RIAA's case against Joel Tenenbaum -- only just pre-trial -- threw the defense's strategy in the copyright-infringement case into serious disarray just seven and a half hours before proceedings kicked off Monday morning.

The defense in Joel Tenenbaum's case, which is led by Charles Neeson of Harvard, has made it clear that they'd be arguing that Mr. Tenenbaum engaged in fair use when he shared on KaZaA the 30 songs at the heart of the trial. The RIAA moved to disallow that line of defense, and Judge Nancy Gertner agreed to think it over... which she did until early Monday morning. Concerned parties received an e-mail with her ruling at 1:37am.

In anticipation of AOL's spin off from parent company Time Warner, Google has sold its 5% stake in AOL back to Time Warner for almost 75% less than it paid for it in 2006.

According to an SEC filing released today, Time Warner paid $283 million for Google's 5% share of AOL on July 8, which Google spent a billion dollars on in 2006.