The news from Redmond is actually worse than analysts estimated, with sharply lower revenue from the Client segment (Windows Vista) triggering one of the most substantial layoffs in its history.

Choosing not to wait until its originally planned time of 5:30 pm this afternoon, Microsoft held true to its new policy of corporate transparency, letting the world know as it informed its own employees that as many as 5,000 jobs will be cut from its payroll over the next 18 months, 1,400 of those immediately.

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TomTom, Europe's leading provider of Personal Navigation Devices, announced a cost-cutting program and re-alignment which involves cutting around 7% of its staff, or about 115 individuals. Citing a "challenging consumer spending environment," the layoff announcement precedes the company's fourth quarter earnings report by just over one month, and is expected to save TomTom an annual €35 million.

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Slower consumer spending hurt eBay's results for its fiscal fourth quarter and depressed its forecast for Q1 2009.

The online transaction provider's earnings call on Wednesday detailed life in a climate where, as CEO John Donahoe noted glumly, e-commerce itself is trending down for the first time ever.

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In a filing with the SEC this afternoon, the company revealed it will streamline some older operations in order to focus on the 32 nm transition.

A US Securities and Exchange Commission filing this afternoon cites Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy as reporting that his company will shut down assembly two assembly test facilities in Malaysia and one in the Philippines, along with a once-valuable 200mm wafer production facility in Hillsboro, Oregon. Some 700 employees are currently stationed there, according to local reports.

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Web radio service Pandora has announced plans to start playing short audio ads, now and then between songs. The ads were first introduced on Pandora's Twitter feed. The company pledged to be "prudent" and "respectful" in delivering the commercial interruptions to the personalized listening service.

In press interviews today, Pandora founder Tim Westergren made clear this may be the only way the company can afford its now-higher royalties, while avoiding layoffs or even a possible shutdown. Yesterday, the company's Twitter feed read, "So you know, we did not take on audio ads lightly. We try to be extremely respectful of your listening experience, & p romise to be prudent [sic]."

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With the United States' FCC continuing to crack down on Comcast, the Canadian government is finally starting to take action, too, against ISPs that slow down Internet traffic.

Newly released results of an investigation by the Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) reveal that all major ISPs in Canada are interfering with network traffic.

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One of the more obvious, though still practical, permutations of domain name usage is now no one's intellectual property in particular.

Ever use an Internet site that automatically gave you your own subdomain...like Google's blogspot, which automatically gives you "your blog title" @blogspot.com "http://blogspot.com" or LiveJournal, which gives you "your journal title" @livejournal.com?

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There's a saying that goes, I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death for the right to keep folks from hearing it. Or something like that. No, the Supreme Court said today, that's not how it goes.

Unconvinced by the argument that begins, "The children, the children!..." the US Supreme Court this morning refused to hear an appeal brought forth by the Bush Justice Dept., of a decision that effectively bars the government from punishing individuals for failing to protect minors from Internet-based pornography.

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For the first time in history, Apple surpassed $10 billion in quarterly revenue during its previous quarter. But a question late in Wednesday's earnings call raised interesting questions about IP and the company's multitouch interface.

Apple not only blew past its own guidance (and Wall Street expectations) for the quarter ending December 27, it sold a record 22,727,000 iPods, 4,363,000 iPhones and 2,524,000 Macs. But a question late in Wednesday's earnings call raised interesting questions about intellectual property and the company's multitouch interface.

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The company's response is raising troubling questions about the security of such processing centers and laws ostensibly intended to protect consumers in general.

Millions of credit cards per month, primarily used in restaurants, could have been exposed to hackers who broke into the Heartland Payment Systems processing center network, in an incident the company said Tuesday took place the previous week.

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Kaspersky is reporting this morning that a Trojan affecting Symbian systems looks to transfer money from the accounts of users of a certain mobile-phone operator and into the accounts of someone else, presumably the person or persons responsible for the malware. The Trojan's not new -- but the target certain is.

Written in Python, the malware -- as per Kaspersky, Trojan-SMS.Python.Flocker, versions .ab through .af -- sends an SMS message with an instruction to transfer money from the user's mobile account to the other account. The amounts are rather small (under a dollar), but obviously if the infection becomes widespread, such things can add up without triggering a reaction from any scammed individual.

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One of the canceled projects on Google's list last week was a surprise: a cloud application with at least the hope to become ubiquitous. It was called Google Notebook, and it was essentially a way for individuals to jot down notes in a way that they could be retrieved from multiple locations.

We learned today that Zoho, a cloud application provider that began deployment of some of its services on Google's App Engine just last month, is more than happy to pick up the slack. A Zoho spokesperson told Betanews today that the latest beta of its Zoho Notebook, which includes a plug-in for Firefox, will feature an interesting kind of on-screen interface that will let users who are logged onto both services simultaneously export their Google Notebook content (while that service is still active) directly into the plug-in, hopefully without change of format or function.

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Kentucky is just about out of luck in its attempts to leverage its own state legislature and court system for protecting online horse race betting from competition by overseas gambling Web sites.

The Kentucky Court of Appeals decided on Tuesday that the state does not have the authority to seize 141 Internet domain names associated with online gambling.

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The vulnerability that's enabled the new Downadup (or Conficker or Kido or whatever) worm was patched back in October of last year. Still, because at least 9 million machines that haven't been patched are now infected, here's what you need to know.

Windows of all shapes and sizes. The worm targets them all: Win95, Win98, Windows Me, NT, XP and Vista, along with Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Windows server 2008. Oh, and Windows 7 pre-beta.

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Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions...To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

If you live in China and read only Chinese, you didn't see those lines from President Barack Obama's inauguration speech yesterday, and if you were watching the inauguration live on television, you didn't hear them, either.

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