Today, imeem confirmed earlier reports that it had acquired content licensing and DRM company Snocap. No financial terms were disclosed.

After Snocap saw a major downsizing, laying off 60% of its workforce, the company made it known it was pursuing a sale. Four months later, reports started to circulate that social network for artists and musicians imeem had entered into an acquisition of the suffering company.

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In a world, to sound like Don LaFontaine for a moment, where nothing could possibly go wrong, when something small does go wrong, it's huge. Today, Microsoft is hoping a small patch will make a huge difference to Vista's image.

The problems Microsoft had in simply rolling out early versions of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to its initial testers served to vindicate its worst critics' complaints: It didn't seem the company could even correct Vista correctly. The rollout problems were even the topic of at least one of Apple's recent anti-Vista Mac ads. But many of those problems were apparently caused by a minor issue with automatic updates; and now, Microsoft says it's publishing a patch for pre-SP1 Vista that will enable customers with Automatic Updates to apply the SP1 series of patches without fear of entering an endless reboot cycle.

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"You grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue...from [Your] Content" read its original Terms of Service, which apparently didn't go over well.

Maybe the company didn't expect anyone to actually read the Terms of Service word-for-word, or maybe it didn't actually read the text itself after "boilerplating" it from some other product. But last Friday, Adobe said it has altered the Terms with regard to its online Photoshop Express product, so that it doesn't appear the company will claim the right to open a service on the side that resells users' own photos.

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One thing you start to notice about companies doing business "in the cloud" is that it's becoming harder to tell whether they were software or hardware companies to begin with. This morning, Hewlett-Packard publicly launched a subscription-based backup service where the "cloud" houses duplicate data.

HP's Upline allows users to share their stored data with other Internet users via uniquely created URLs. Though HP offered similar services in the past, Upline was created using technology from Opelin, a startup company it recently acquired. Opelin created the Titanize software solution, though anyone searching for Opelin Titanize will now be redirected to HP Upline.

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The Internet Crime Complaint Center (I3C) has released its annual report of online misconduct, with 2007 showing a huge increase in the amount of money lost to theft.

Though the number of complaints has been steadily decreasing since its peak in 2005, the total losses were the highest yet at $239.09 million. This is an increase of $40.65 million over 2006, or about 20.5% year over year.

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Two Google counsel said in a blog post this morning that Google didn't really want wireless bandwidth, even though it did place a bid during the FCC's recent 700 MHz spectrum auction.

Verizon Wireless spent $9.6 billion to win a majority of licenses for spectrum in the coveted C block. But Google is claiming at least partial credit for the auction's results, with the search engine leader saying today its intent was to drive up the asking price "in order to reach "the $4.6 billion reserve price that will trigger the important 'open access' and 'open applications' license conditions."

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A printed tape offered as evidence of the integrity of a Sequoia Voting Systems machine failed a very obvious test last week, as a Princeton professor noted a simple column of numbers actually added up to 105, not 106.

The Princeton University professor who has received national acclaim for his efforts to assess the true integrity of electronic voting machines, discovered one very simple error amid the evidence one manufacturer, Sequoia Voting Systems, had actually offered in its own defense. In recent weeks, Sequoia has found itself in hot water again for as many as sixty separate discrepancies reported in a single election in New Jersey last February 3.

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The third update to Redmond's answer to Flash addresses several bugs within the platform.

The technology is still not seeing widespread use outside of Microsoft's own sites, but that is not stopping Microsoft from pressing forward with Silverlight. The company is simultaneously working on the second major version as well.

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Motorola said Monday it had reached an agreement with the activist investor to place two of his allies on the company's board, one of them effective immediately.

Icahn Enterprises chief Keith Meister will be appointed to serve on the board immediately, and also be nominated for election to the board on the 2008 proxy statement. Additionally, investment banker William Hambrecht will be nominated.

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After years of legal struggles over the two Harvard-rooted social networking sites and their respective origins, ConnectU and Facebook appear to be finally settling.

The suit dates back to 2004 in Boston's Federal District Court, when ConnectU's founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra sued Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly illegally using source code in his site that he had written for ConnectU's predecessor, called HarvardConnection.

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A complete withdrawal from the table at this point might spur shareholder resentment, but Yahoo's executives and board had to make some signal in light of Microsoft's claims last week of foot-dragging.

In recognizing what many independent financial analysts termed an untenable position, Yahoo's new chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang responded to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's "time is running out" statement on Friday by saying it would be unopposed to some kind of fair transaction with Microsoft that Yahoo's board would feel is in the best interests of its shareholders.

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An advance notification regarding Microsoft's Patch Tuesday promises eight security updates to Windows, Office, and IE vulnerabilities and eight more non-security related updates for Windows Update and Windows Server Update Services.

Five of the patches are rated as "Critical," the highest level of severity given to updates, and most of those patches affect Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. The remaining three updates are classified as "Important." These updates may require a restart. There will also be eight high priority but non-security related updates on Windows Update and Windows Server Update Service.

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Intel, Phoenix Technologies, Fujitsu-Siemens, Lenovo, and McAfee have announced their collaborative effort to create a remote access solution that allows a laptop to be locked down in the event of a theft or loss.

Precisely how Intel's Anti-Theft Technology (ATT) will function was not fully elucidated today at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai, but it has been said that it will be added to the Active Management Technology present in Centrino vPro systems, which enables remote management functions.

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When it looks like things couldn't get any worse, OnSat Network Communications is expected on Monday to pull the plug on thousands of Internet users who reside in Navajo Nation. Residents use the wireless connection of reservation chapter houses after they get home from work or school.

Navajo Nation is a 27,000-square-mile Indian reservation spread across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, and is home to more than 175,000 residents.

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Citing troubles in setting up backhaul connections, Sprint said its XOHM WiMAX service will not see widespread commercial availability until "later this year."

As the first company attempting a major WiMAX deployment in the United States, Sprint's service has seen its share of doubt from analysts and consumers alike, citing the company's budget problems in operating three separate networks, and instability in upper management.

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