Social bookmarking service del.icio.us announced on Friday that it had been acquired by Yahoo. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Joshua Schachter, creator of the site, said that the acquisition would allow it to work more closely with photo site Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo in March.

Schachter created del.icio.us in 2003 as a way for himself and his friends to save and share Web pages that they visited. Earlier this year, del.icio.us, Inc. was formed to attract investment and help grow the service.

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Microsoft confirmed on Friday that Burton Smith, formerly the chief scientist for Cray, would be joining the company as a "technical fellow." Smith will work to expand Microsoft's efforts in parallel and high-performance computing, and would report to chief technical officier Craig Mundie.

Smith had worked with Cray since its inception as Tera Computer Co. in 1988. He has also published several works on issues regarding parallel computing. "As microprocessor technology continues to evolve over the next decade or so, we're going to see the capabilities of a supercomputer cluster on the desktop which will require a different software architecture," Mundie said. "Burton will be investigating how to develop software to benefit from the opportunities which multi-core multiprocessors will present."

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Gateway announced late Thursday that it had won an appeal of a judgment that the company infringed on patents held by HP surrounding parallel port technology. The decision by the International Trade Commission remands the case to an administrative law judge for further proceedings.

At issue was the legacy circuitry involved to run parallel-port printers. The ruling stems from a decision in 2004 by HP to attempt to assert six patents against its rival computer maker. Three of the patent claims were dismissed before trial, and Gateway prevailed at trial on two others.

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Detailed analysis of four separate data breaches involving a half-million identities indicates that misuse of the information could be lower than what some may expect. Identity risk management firm ID Analytics announced the results of the findings on Thursday.

Research suggests the level of the breach and how the data was lost contribute to the risk factor. For example, the firm separated the incidents into two categories, "identity-level," where names and social security numbers were stolen, and "account-level," where account numbers were stolen, occasionally tied to accountholders.

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NTP is willing to finally put to rest a long-running patent dispute with Research In Motion in exchange for 5.7 percent of all future revenue coming from BlackBerry service in the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. NTP previously rejected a $450 million settlement offer from RIM and is demanding that BlackBerry be shut down over patent infringement.

RIM's revenue in the last quarter topped $490 million and NTP's patent would stay in effect until 2012. It's not clear how RIM will respond to the new offer, however the company may not have much choice. On November 30, U.S. District Judge James Spencer gave the green light for enforcement of a 2003 injunction against the BlackBerry service.

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Intel's chairman chided plans by rival AMD and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build a $100 laptop for the developing world. At a press conference in Sri Lanka on Friday, Craig Barrett said that potential computer users would scoff at the computer's lack of features.

Barrett also said the device isn't worthy of being called a laptop. "I think a more realistic title should be 'the $100 gadget'," he mused. "The problem is that gadgets have not been successful."

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Finnish security firm F-Secure said on Thursday that it had cracked the Sober worm, and could now warn of what URLs it would check to update itself.

The company claims it had cracked the code back in May 2005, but chose to stay silent, only alerting German authorities where the free hosting servers that host the update files exist.

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International technology standards organization Ecma International voted Thursday to approve the creation of a technical committee to begin looking into standardization of Microsoft Office's Open XML document format. The effort has been backed by Apple, Intel and Toshiba.

The vote to create the committee would have been unanimous, however OpenDocument supporter IBM voted against the proposal while HP abstained. Critics outside of Ecma questioned the organization's move to standardize what they consider to be a proprietary format.

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Google has upgraded its Gmail service with a few new features, including a built in RSS reader and address shortcuts. RSS feeds appear as "Clips" on the top of the Gmail screen and users can choose from random popular feeds or input their own. Yahoo added a similar feature to its private Mail Beta last week.

Shortcuts, which display next to messages, take addresses and tracking numbers that appear in an e-mail and automatically link to maps and package information. Attachment support has also been improved. Users can choose to view Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or PDF documents as HTML files directly within Gmail without loading a separate software application.

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Napster on Thursday announced it was launching a version of its music service aimed at the German market, which would be the first subscription offering available in the country. The company has struck agreements with Germany's major labels and over 150 independents, allowing it to carry a catalog of 1.5 million songs, including 20,000 German albums and 135,000 local acts.

Napster's subscription service will be available for 9.95 euros per month, and the Napster to Go service for 14.95 euros. Tracks will also be available a la carte for 99 euro cents per song or 9.95 euros per album. Interested users can sign up for the service at www.napster.de.

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Microsoft gave advanced notice Thursday of updates it plans to release next week as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday. The company will issue two security updates, with at least one of them deemed "critical." Microsoft also plans to deliver an update to its Malicious Software Removal Tool on Tuesday as well.

Additionally, Microsoft will issue two non-security high-priority updates through Windows Update and Software Update Services, and three non-security high-priority updates through Microsoft Update and Windows Server Update Services. It is standard Microsoft procedure to not disclose the nature of the updates beforehand for security reasons.

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Yahoo revealed on Wednesday that it had two new VoIP services in the works for its Yahoo Messenger client, which would allow users to place and receive phone calls. Called Phone In and Phone Out, the additions would allow Yahoo to compete with companies like Skype in the growing VoIP market.

The company has remained mum on when it plans to launch the services, although they are expected to debut first in seven countries including Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore, Spain, and the United States.

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Google now offers directions for those tired of sitting in traffic through a new beta service called Google Transit. It hooks into public transportation schedules and routes to enable users to plan trips without needing their cars. Google Transit currently only supports Portland, but more cities are on the way.

"Public transportation offers a unique type of data that people use in very different ways than most of the data Google has worked with before," says Transit product manager Avichal Garg. "We really want to understand how people use Google Transit and the challenges we'll face as we cover additional cities. To that end, we'd love to hear your feedback!"

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Proof of concept exploit code for an unpatched security flaw in the newly released Firefox 1.5 was publicly posted Wednesday by Packetstorm Security. The problem involves Firefox's history database, which cannot handle extremely long page topics. A malicious Web page could cause a buffer overflow that crashes Firefox each time it is started.

The only way to fix the problem is to manually delete the history.dat file before Firefox is started. "This vulnerability has been tested and does work, and no known patches are available at this time," wrote John Bambenek on the SANS Internet Storm Center. "Presumably, if the topic was more tightly crafted than in the proof-of-concept code, a more malicious attack could be crafted that would install malware on the machine."

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Aiming to steal some of the thunder from the video iPod, Creative on Thursday introduced the Zen Vision:M, a device that looks quite a bit like its popular rival. The player sports a 30GB hard drive, 2.5"-inch screen, and will be available in five colors.

The Singapore-based Creative continues to struggle against Apple, even having trouble competing against other Windows-based player manufacturers such as iRiver. According to recent surveys, the company's players regularly come behind competitors Apple, Sony and iRiver in just about every country.

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