While a bill passed by the House last month put stricter requirements on software to protect consumers from spyware, the body has passed another bill with even stricter policies.

This bill faces opposition from the software industry, that says the new regulations could place an unnecessary burden on developers and stunt technology investment. It passed in bipartisan fashion by a vote of 368 to 48.

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Security firm eEye says it has notified Yahoo of multiple security vulnerabilities within its instant messaging application, which could lead to "remote execution of arbitrary code with minimal user interaction." The flaws were given a severity rating of "high."

Although eEye has withheld specific details of the vulnerabilities and says no exploit code has surfaced, the company notes that both Yahoo! Messenger 8.0 and 8.1 running on Windows are affected. Yahoo says it is working on a fix for the problems, which follow an April security update related to audio conferencing.

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Nearly doubling the educational institutions participating in its massive effort to digitize the world's books, Google said Wednesday that another twelve universities have joined Google Book Search. In total, they will contribute up to 10 million volumes to be scanned.

The new agreement was forged with the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which is represented by the University of Chicago and 11 universities that make up the Big Ten athletic conference: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin. The committee and Google say they will respect copyright law, but the search engine is facing lawsuits from the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the effort.

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Google said Tuesday that it had acquired software company PeakStream, which specializes in software to assist developers in programming for multi-core processors.

Although the buy may seem strange to those who are following the Mountain View, Calif. company's moves, it may actually hold clues to Google's future plans. PeakStream's software has been used to program graphics processor units.

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ORLANDO - Although Softricity was officially in the business of finding ways to virtualize applications within their own self-contained memory envelopes since 1998, for many of us (guilty as charged) the concept is an entirely new science, with new concepts and technologies. In what for many was the first demonstration they'd seen of these concepts, Microsoft senior technical product manager Chad Jones - who came on board when it acquired Softricity - introduced the concept of application sequencing, which is the process admins will undertake to pre-install applications that users will run within a SoftGrid virtualization envelope.

What am I talking about? SoftGrid is now Microsoft's system for enabling remote users to run applications in Vista without their having to be installed there beforehand. In reality, they're being run on the server, in such a way that they just appear to be run on the client.

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Could TiVo make a return to DirecTV? Comments from the DVR maker's CEO are certainly opening the door to such an idea.

With DirecTV under new management, it could very well happen. The two companies parted ways after the satellite provider's former owner, News Corp., decided to back technology from its NDS subsidiary.

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Any hope from Sony that its fortunes were turning around with the PlayStation 3 were dashed Tuesday as data showed it was falling further behind the Nintendo Wii in sales on its home turf.

Japanese gaming magazine company Enterbrain said that the PS3 had only managed to sell 45,321 units in May, far less than the Wii's 251,794 units during the month of May, a five-to-one margin. In April, the Wii was outselling the PS3 by a four-to-one ratio.

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ORLANDO - Last Friday, I wrote about how Microsoft appeared to be scheduling TechEd this year in a way that reduces its emphasis on "what's coming next," and focuses more on what developers should be doing to improve their standards and practices, to catch up with the operating systems that are already on our doorstep: Vista and the forthcoming Windows Server 2008.

I said it was a welcome change, and on Monday, I emphasized that point once again with some words of approval of the abbreviated keynote event (down from an often three-day affair to 90 minutes), giving more time for attendees to attend sessions and hands-on labs.

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Following in the footsteps of rival CBS, NBC said Wednesday that it will allow users to post snippets of popular NBC news and sports programs to their personal Web sites. Programs to initially be offered include Meet the Press, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, Dateline NBC and programming from NBC Sports, DotComedy.com, and iVillage.com.

NBC has allowed users to post clips of Saturday Night Live and Heroes in the past. A Web site owner can post the video through the use of a widget, much like YouTube does to allow its videos to be distributed.

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Although it stops short of an all-out ban like some wildlife activists are looking for, eBay said Tuesday it will no longer allow cross-border sales of ivory.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) accused the site in mid-May of not following its own wildlife policies, and in some cases aiding the illegal trade of the material in as many as nine out of every ten listings.

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eBay will begin to sell radio advertising time through its auction site thanks to a partnership with Bid4Spots, which holds inventory from 2,300 radio stations in the top 300 markets.

The auction site typically offers unsold ad inventory, according to Bid4Spot's website.

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ORLANDO - During an updated version of one of the more popular sessions at TechEd each year, senior security engineer and Microsoft MVP Marcus Murray did attendees a major service by demonstrating that hacking into a network is not really an art, and in some ways, not even much of a science.

His "Why I Can Hack Your Network in a Day" session is actually something of a misnomer, as many of the tools he uses (including one written by SysInternals guru-turned-Microsoft fellow Mark Russinovich) can enable individuals to work their way to revealing the passwords of domain administrators in closer to 15 minutes.

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ORLANDO - During an invitation-only demonstration here at TechEd, small device developer EmbeddedFusion demonstrated a prototype programmable small device - actually a circuit board with a 2x3 color LCD display - that is capable of being programmed using Microsoft's .NET Micro Framework. It's a managed code system with which developers can rapidly build programs for embedded devices, and embedded device drivers.

Within the first 20 minutes of programming the card using C# in Visual Studio 2005 (after re-installing the EmbeddedFusion SDK), we were able to construct a simple application that...[drum roll]...blinked an LED on and off.

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Continuing its effort to provide an alternative to the One Laptop Per Child project, Intel announced plans on Tuesday to team up with Asustek to produce a notebook for developing countries that could cost as little as $200. The 'Eee PC' will be a full-featured low-end notebook, whereas the OLPC is more aimed at children. Intel has criticized the device in the past for being too simple, and not having enough functionality to even make it worthwhile.

Depending on the feature set, the Eee PC will retail for $199 to $299 and be available publicly. The OLPC currently retails for about $180 to government clients, but there is no currently planned retail push. Intel said it hoped to ship about 200,000 of the notebooks this year after production begins later this summer.

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Toshiba will ship HD DVD drives in all of its laptops beginning in 2008, its senior vice president said Tuesday. While it is unclear what effect the decision will have on the prices of its laptops, typically bundling the high definition drives have resulted in higher retail costs.

Doing so, however, holds promise for the future of the format. According to data from IDC, the company sold 9.2 million notebooks last year, and is in the top five overall in shipments. The company is also planning to use flash memory in its laptops beginning this month, as prices on NAND chips have fallen far enough to make them feasible for such use, it said.

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