Web holiday sales are up 24 percent over a year ago, in line with estimates. However it is believed the shopping season may extend longer online this season as consumers appear to be confident that expedient shipping would get their gifts in time, comScore said Thursday.

Spending online from November 1 through December 12 has reached $17.56 billion, up from $14.13 billion last year. In fact, comScore said December 11 set a new record for online spending, with consumers spending $661 million online.

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The man who led the team at IBM that engineered the first storage devices for portable disks a half-century ago, and who later founded the corporation that secured the future of hard disk technology into the coming decades, died yesterday from complications after an earlier heart surgery. Alan Shugart was probably wearing one of his Hawaiian shirts at the time.

Taking a look at the man, you come to realize how "Seagate" got its name - not just that it emerged from Shugart Technology, which is how it was christened in 1979. He was a man of the sea - or, more accurately, the shore near the sea. San Jose was the man's home, in all respects. When asked what his great accomplishments had been, he would list at or near the top his co-founding not of the first great floppy disk manufacturer (Shugart Associates) in 1973, nor the founding of Seagate, but of the co-founding of a five-star restaurant on the Monterey Peninsula. He wrote a book about this venture in 1993, which graced his shelves along the story of his quite genuine 1996 attempt to place his own dog Ernest on the ballot for Congressman.

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Microsoft is fighting back against those attempting to distribute a cracked version of Windows Vista. It has issued an update that detects whether a copy is attempting to bypass the activation system by mixing files from the test and final versions, it said Thursday.

Such a version is currently available on DVD, Microsoft says. When the copy is detected, Microsoft will alert the user, and then give them 30 days to activate the software, or it will be placed in reduced functionality mode.

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Just in time for general press sources, including USA Today and Reuters, to run with the story that iTunes sales in the first six months of 2006 "collapsed," based on a very small piece of information from a Forrester report, the author of that report announced on his personal blog yesterday that iTunes sales "are not collapsing," calling such dire conclusions "misinformation," and stating they could not have been rationally drawn from the report's data alone.

Forrester researcher Josh Bernoff then went on to chastise certain press sources for "diving in" and highlighting only one finding of the report: specifically, that iTunes sales may have been dropping by a monthly rate of 17%, or 65% on an annual basis.

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Microsoft and Baidu announced a strategic partnership on Thursday that calls for the Chinese site to sell ads on select MSN and Live properties within China. Baidu, the top search provider in the country, disclosed the partnership in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, however.

The move is somewhat curious considering Microsoft recently launched its adCenter offering in an effort to compete on a more even keel with Yahoo and Google. Initially offered in the United States, Britain, France and Singapore, Microsoft plans to expand it to other countries in the near future. However, in China its web properties are far less popular, possibly the reason for such a deal.

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Mozilla earlier this week issued a public beta of the next version of its Thunderbird e-mail client, making enhancements to the overall design of the product as well as improved support for extensions, the plug-in architecture for the application. In addition, new features including the use of tags as a way to organize e-mail, and forward and back buttons to cycle through e-mail much like web pages were also added. The beta is available for the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms.

In separate news, Mozilla delayed an expected security release for versions 1.5 and 2.0 of its Firefox browser. Originally scheduled to be delivered automatically to users starting this Tuesday, the update has been pushed back to December 19. No reason for the delay was given.

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Google said it had been awarded a patent regarding the design of it's search pages, although don't expect a rush of infringement lawsuits. This patent and over seven million others will be searchable through Google Patent Search, also announced Thursday.

The design patent (No. 533,561) surrounds the formatting of the Mountain View, Calif. search company's result pages. Google first filed for the patent in March 2004.

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Attempting to soothe concerned consumers over a lack of PlayStation 3 shipments in the market, Sony reaffirmed its target to sell six million consoles by the end of March. Company executives said bringing manufacturing costs down and ensuring a solid line of games is also a high priority. The launch of the PS3 has been a rocky one for Sony: delays in components and last minute troubles conspired to delay the console by over a half a year.

Executives are still not disclosing how well they expect to do during the holiday season, although analysts have said that it expects the company to sell between 500,000 and 750,000 consoles. This is less than half of the two million consoles the Japanese electronics maker originally projected to have available.

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Calling Hewlett-Packard “the most comprehensive partner we have” among a list of over 640,000 such partners, Microsoft announced this evening, along with HP, the formation of a joint marketing alliance, in which both companies would jointly market unified messaging, collaboration, content management, custom business workflow management, and other Microsoft software implemented on HP hardware.

In a press conference this evening, two HP executives and two Microsoft executives gave a sketchy, sometimes cloudy, outline of a new joint working relationship between the two firms. Their joint activities officially begin tomorrow. Neither side would describe the partnership as exclusive, though each side tended to defer to the other with regard to matters of authority or responsibility – for instance, whose customers are we talking about, and which partner will approach those customers?

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An unprecedented international investigation jointly announced by American, South Korean, Japanese, and European authorities, has named the world's ten top producers of LCD in a criminal probe alleging they may all have conspired to fix prices in the burgeoning LCD display market during 2003 and 2004.

Earlier today, a spokesperson for the US Justice Dept. confirmed the investigation to the Associated Press, saying only that it is looking into "the possibility of anti-competitive practices in the LCD industry," though without providing any extra detail.

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In order to attract the world's best talent, Google is offering its employees the option to sell their stock option grants in an online auction to financial institutions that might be willing to pay a premium above the exercise price.

Traditionally, employees of the company could use their stock options in two ways: the first allows them to take ownership of the stock once they have "vested" and sell the stocks for a profit, paying the company back for the "strike price," which is the price of stock when the option was granted, or continue to hold the option.

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AOL has settled with the state of Florida after an investigation regarding over 1,000 customer complaints related to the Internet service provider's billing and subscriber practices. AOL previously settled with New York after AOL employees refused customer requests to cancel their accounts.

The problem shot into the public spotlight earlier this year after a customer recorded a call in which the AOL employee said he could not cancel the AOL service. Florida consumers who filed a complaint about AOL are eligible to be part of the settlement, in which AOL will pay restitution or forgive outstanding balances.

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For Boeing, laptop thefts are beginning to become somewhat of an epidemic. For the third time in 13 months, one of the company's notebook computers has gone missing, the result of an employee leaving it unattended. In this instance, the laptop contained the names and social security numbers of about 382,000 workers and retirees. The location of the theft has not been disclosed.

Affected employees have not yet been notified, however Boeing plans to do so once it has the necessary infrastructure to handle victims' questions. The company also plans to offer credit-monitoring services for a period of three years to those affected. A company laptop was stolen with information on 3,600 employees and reitrees in April, and before that another system with information on 160,000 went missing.

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Yesterday's comScore Media Metrix report, exclaiming that estimates of page views for social networking site MySpace at 38.7 million for the month of November topped those for Yahoo by 600,000, came with some small print that should have generated at least an asterisk beside today's headlines: Yahoo has recently moved to an AJAX-driven page model, which probably reduced the number of complete page refreshes per user.

Web analytics software used by comScore and other services treat "page views" as complete refreshes of an entire page. But Web sites that use more modern approaches to layout have recently adopted Asynchronous JavaScript to enable browsers to refresh select portions of the page when necessary, reducing bandwidth and improving layout. Yahoo is one of the more recent inductees to the roll of sites embracing this technology.

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Microsoft advised users of its Mac version of Microsoft Office that a security patch inadvertently issued through its software update service was not ready for release. It advised those that may have applied the patch to uninstall the update, although it provided no guidance as to when to expect the final version of the patch.

"The updates posted in error were pre-release binaries that had been staged internally as part of our testing for an upcoming release," a Microsoft Security Response Center official wrote Wednesday in the tem Web log. Due to human error, they were accidentally published to the public websites before our full testing release process was complete." Microsoft said it was taking steps to prevent such a mistake from occurring again.

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