It is another of the Internet's most cutting-edge applications outside the Web: the online community of surrogate identities in the 3D realm of Second Life. It's a virtual world supported by real dollars from companies that lease virtual space, providing the service with real revenue. But just how many real users does it have?

In a recent partnership agreement announced with the National Basketball Association, Commissioner David Stern cited what he characterized as Second Life's six million users. A check today of the site's Web home page refer to its 6.16 million "residents," 1.62 million of whom have logged on within the past 60 days.

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Comcast is partnering with several companies including HP, Plaxo and Zimbra to provide its customers with a centralized Web communications application to manage the company's ever-growing offerings.

Comcast customers will be able to send and receive e-mail, check their voicemail, manage a "smart" address book, and send instant messages. The company hopes to have the application live later this year, saying it will be accessible via the company's online portal.

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In the latest intellectual property rights holders' legal attack on YouTube, and perhaps using the most blistering language to date, England's predominant football (soccer) league has launched a class-action lawsuit against Google and its YouTube division. In its complaint, the Premier League literally accuses the newly merged companies of forming an organized "protection" racket, whose methods are to deceive Congress while extorting low license fees from selected partners in exchange for IP protection.

"In a Twenty-First Century embodiment of an age-old scheme," the League's attorneys write for a filing in US District Court in New York last Friday, "Defendants have agreed to provide 'protection' against their own infringing conduct through a series of 'partnership' agreements with various copyright owners. Put another way, when the license fee sought by a copyright owner is low enough to be deemed satisfactory to Defendants, Defendants find themselves able to shed their blinders and employ technology to safeguard the rights of their new 'partners."'

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After a high-profile spat between the two companies, it now appears MySpace and Photobucket will make up with merger valued at between $250 million. In a peculiar twist of events, it was MySpace's move to block videos from Photobucket that jump-started talks between the two parties. The photo site had been looking for a buyer since March.

Rumors of the deal first surfaced over the weekend on several blogs and were confirmed by Silicon Valley watcher Michael Arrington on Monday. Although the agreement has not been publicly announced, Photobucket executives called a staff meeting late Monday morning Pacific time.

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CA is looking for participants to join the beta program of the CA Protection Suite r3.1 for Windows Vista. Protection Suite is designed for small and mid-sized businesses, and includes a range of integrated solutions to minimize risks and prevent downtime.

Beta testers will have a direct impact on the product's development, and help ensure the update will function optimally in their work environment. The installation of CA Protection Suite r3 is a prerequisite for the beta program. Interested users can apply for the r3.1 beta by visiting CA's Web site.

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Owners of Series3 high-definition TiVos will soon be able to expand the amount of programming they can store on the digital video recorder using an external Serial ATA hard drive. While the SATA ports have been on the TiVo since the beginning, a hack to activate them only surfaced over the weekend.

Hard drives up to 750GB in size have been reported to work with Series3 TiVo, which normally stores only 30 hours of high-definition programming. The feature requires pressing pause and 62 on the TiVo remote. Coincidentally, the code leaked out shortly after CableLabs, which certifies CableCARD devices like the TiVo, changed their policy such that the use of external storage does not affect certification.

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Even though the platform itself is struggling to stay afloat, Samsung on Monday introduced a new line of Ultra Mobile PCs in an effort to kick start the market.

The Q1 Ultra is the successor the original Q1, released by the Korean electronics maker last year. It will feature a "split" QWERTY keyboard, mouse, and user-defined function keys.

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The Transportation Security Administration admitted over the weekend that it had lost a hard drive containing data on approximately 100,000 employees.

Among the data on the hard drive are social security numbers, bank data, and payroll information, potentially enough for any identity thief to steal employees' indentities, and possibly compromise their banking accounts.

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Three journalists employed by CNET News.com have indicated that they intend to sue Hewlett-Packard for privacy violations related to their involvement in the pretexting scandal that rocked the company.

Dawn Kawamoto, Stephen Shankland, and Tom Krazit have hired the Los Angeles firm of Panish, Shea & Boyle to represent them, the New York Times reported on Monday. Furthermore, CNET News.com itself is also considering a separate suit.

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During a Webcast Friday afternoon, AMD executive vice president Henri Richard told BetaNews that, although one of the goals of his company's joint CPU/GPU combination project with its ATI division, code-named "Fusion," remains to merge pipelining with multicore architecture for everyday applications, its first few iterations may be limited to getting the two chips to share the same die and conserve power, for now.

"My sense is that Fusion will be an evolution," Richard told BetaNews. "Fusion is a vision more than a product. It's a vision that you can put on the same piece of silicon really multi-purpose computing cores, and really whether one core is going to compute x86 instructions and the next one's going to do shading, you get my message."

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Calling Linux and Windows the "two platforms of the future," Novell this morning hailed the entry of Dell as the first systems vendor to join the Microsoft + Novell pact, as a reseller of Microsoft's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server certificates. The deal effectively makes Microsoft a real Linux distributor for the world's #2 supplier of servers.

As for Dell, already a Linux reseller for its server customers, the deal helps tilt its marketing bias somewhat more toward Novell and away from Red Hat, for which Dell is also a supplier. Dell committed this morning to a new marketing campaign that will target existing Linux customers who have not already purchased a Dell-branded distribution.

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Amid the announcement that Windows Live Hotmail is launching globally on Monday, Microsoft said that it plans to release a beta of its desktop client called Windows Live Mail "within weeks." The application replaces both Outlook Express and Windows Mail as the company's signature e-mail client. Sources indicate that Windows Live Mail would be similar to the Windows Live Desktop Mail client currently being tested.

That application provides desktop access to POP and IMAP e-mail accounts, as well as the Hotmail service. It also integrates with other Live services, including Contacts, Messenger, Spaces. Users of the free client are shown advertising, while subscribers to Hotmail premium services did not. It was not immediately clear whether or not ads will be displayed in the updated version.

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Engineers in India are looking into ways to create a laptop that would cost a mere $10. The effort came in response to the increasing price of the so-called '$100 laptop.'

The Indian government has taken a pass on the device, opting instead for two homegrown designs. One is from a student in one of the country's technology schools, while the other was produced by the Institute of Science, a graduate school in Bangalore.

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In its first public comments since the now-mostly-useless 32-hex-digit media processing key was posted to hundreds of thousands of pages, in defiance of a decision by popular commenting site Digg, later rescinded, to remove references to the key, the head of the AACS Licensing Authority's business group told the BBC it is tracking down those responsible for all those posts, and reserves the right to take legal action against any or all of them.

"There is no intent from us to interfere with people's right to discuss copy protection," the AACS LA's Michael Ayers told BBC technology editor Darren Waters. "We respect free speech... But a line is crossed when we start seeing keys being distributed and tools for circumvention. You step outside of the realm of protected free speech then."

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Facing increasing criticism over its commitment to the environment, Apple CEO Steve Jobs shot back saying that in many cases the company will soon be ahead -- if not already -- of its competitors.

Jobs pointed out that it is generally not the policy of Apple to talk about its future plans, but he said this policy had left its shareholders, employees, and the industry "in the dark" over its commitment to the environment.

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