Following in the footsteps of Microsoft, Adobe said this week that it plans to adopt a monthly schedule for releasing patches to its products, including the newly-acquired Macromedia line. Adrian Ludwig, manager of Adobe's security software engineering said customers don't want to be surprised.

The moves come after a spate of security holes in Flash prompted Macromedia to urge customers to install version 8. The patch schedule will cover all of Adobe's products, including the popular Adobe Reader, and begin within the next six months. Also like Microsoft, Adobe will provide advanced notification of each month's fixes.

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Google on Thursday said it was launching a new music service that would make it easier for users to find information on artists, album titles and song lyrics. Google Music would also provide links to download songs if they are available from the major digital music services.

The search engine cautioned speculators from reading too much into the new feature, as it said it had no plans for a digital music service of its own, but rather sending traffic to other sites.

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Google, Microsoft and Sun are joining forces to assist the University of California, Berkeley in opening its Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems lab. The lab would help technology startups introduce their ideas to a wider audience. The companies will contribute equally to the $1.5 million that the project is expected to give yearly to entrepreneurs.

Altogether, the project is expected to cost $7.5 million dollars. Six faculty members and ten graduate students would staff the lab initially; it would produce Web-based software services that anyone could use. Microsoft cautioned that the collaboration should not be seen as a truce, pointing out they are working with the college and not each other.

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Since the announcement that Internet Explorer 7 would add built-in support for RSS news feeds there has been much discussion over two key points: what to call them and what icon to use. Microsoft developers shared conceptual designs in October, but have now settled on a preexisting icon -- Firefox's.

"I'm excited to announce that we're adopting the icon used in Firefox," said Jane Kim, program manager for RSS in IE. "We'll be using the icon in the IE7 command bar whenever a page has a feed associated with it, and we'll also use it in other places in the browser whenever we need a visual to represent RSS and feeds." Microsoft says it will continue to work with Mozilla to encourage consistency between browsers.

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A report released Wednesday by the Harvard Medical School may turn some common assumptions about computer usage on their head. According to the report, titled "Hands: Strategies for Strong, Pain-Free Hands," heavy keyboarding may not be responsible for incidences of carpal tunnel syndrome after all.

Carpal tunnel is caused when nerves in the wrist are pinched, however it's not caused by frequent use of a keyboard, claims the report. Instead, it is caused by heredity, body weight, fracture, or even pregnancy.

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IBM said that it was strengthening its partnership with Linux operating system vendors Red Hat and Novell on Wednesday, announcing it had added them to the company's strategic alliance program. The partnership is expected to make the Linux buying experience simpler and easier for customers.

Customers have been asking for packaged deals where they can deal with one entity for both its hardware and software needs, IBM said. It is hoped that the agreement will strengthen the company's position in Brazil, Russia, India, China and Korea by driving more open source deals in these developing markets.

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According to research firm NPD Group, illegal peer-to-peer file sharing has dropped for the first time since the RIAA began its legal assault in 2003. Since that initial victory, P2P usage has only gone up -- until the June U.S. Supreme Court ruling against Grokster.

In June, an estimated 6.4 million United States households downloaded at least one music file, but by October that number had dipped to 5.7 million, an 11 percent decrease. NPD says the change is the first significant drop it has seen that is not related to "seasonality," such as students returning to school.

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Apple has settled the last of three lawsuits it filed against individuals who leaked beta versions of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The suits brought a flurry of discussion in the Mac community over whether Apple's actions were justified. In a separate case, a California man pleaded guilty to uploading a copy of "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith."

Marc Hoaglin, 36, said the movie was stolen from a post-production company and is the second person to be sued under the new Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. Another individual was sued in September for recording a film with a camcorder. The terms of Apple's settlement with David Schwartzstein were not disclosed, but he is barred from sharing any confidential Apple-related information in the future.

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The European Parliament voted 378 to 197 with 30 abstentions on Wednesday to approve a plan that would give law enforcement access to telephone and Internet data to help combat crime and fight terrorism. The legislation means service providers would be forced to log messages and conversations.

Under the new rules, businesses would be required to keep a record of phone calls from landline and mobile phones, text messages, and Internet-based conversations for a period of up to two years.

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Yahoo late Tuesday released a beta version of Yahoo! Messenger 7.5, which includes the new inbound and outbound calling features it detailed last week. The client now allows users to place phone calls to over 180 countries, costing a penny per minute in the US and two cents to over 30 other countries.

In order to place calls, users must first purchase prepaid credit in either $10 or $25 amounts. The account can be automatically recharged from a credit card when necessary.

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VoIP provider Vonage said on Wednesday that all of its nationwide customers now have access to enhanced 911 services. The news means Vonage can continue to sign up subscribers in all states. In the event local authorities cannot display the customers name or address through E911, it would offer basic 911 service.

The call would be answered by the local public safety answering point, or PSAP. As an additional service, Vonage will also create and staff a national 911 emergency response center to provide emergency assistance in the event that the 911 network fails or is unavailable. "Not only are we spending over $50 million, but we're working with public safety to create a framework to hasten this national deployment and remove any local roadblocks," said Vonage CEO Jeff Citron.

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Microsoft on Wednesday delivered Beta 1 of Exchange 12 to a select group of about 1,400 beta testers. The next-gen communications server promises to bring "unified messaging" that combines e-mail, fax and voicemail into a standard inbox. But be prepared to upgrade: Exchange 12 will only run on 64-bit systems.

By bringing together disparate types of communication into a single Exchange inbox, users can access messages from anywhere, including their desktop, mobile phone and browser though Outlook Web Access. Traditional phones can also be used with the voice recognition provided by Outlook Voice Access.

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Intel's next-generation mobile platform, codenamed "Napa", will use a quarter of the power, but still see boosts in performance, the chipmaker said on Tuesday. Facing fiercer competition from rival AMD, Intel is looking for ways to ensure it remains dominant in the processor industry.

The Napa chipset will be based on the company's new "Yonah" microprocessor, which is Intel's first dual-core mobile chip. According to tests, Yonha will use 28 less power while performing 68 perfect quicker than the Pentium M used in Intel's Centrino package.

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British tycoon Richard Branson's dream of a space tourism airline came one step closer to reality on Tuesday. Virgin Galactic, the company created for the project, announced it had struck an agreement with the state of New Mexico to build a $200 million "spaceport."

Virgin Galactic has agreed to locate both its headquarters and Mission Control within the state, which would be built on a 27 square-mile area of state-owned lands in southern New Mexico.

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Apparently taking cues from Microsoft, Google late Tuesday announced that it would allow users to personalize their homepage much in the way Live.com already works. The new feature would allow for drag and drop organization, as well as an API to build "modules" for use on the homepage.

Microsoft allows much of the same functionality through its Microsoft Gadgets framework. Both make use of RSS feeds, and can use various Web technologies to give the mini-applications functionality.

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