AOL has added new RSS feeds to its video search engine product, including content from Blastro.com, EVTV1.com, Forbes.com, GameTrailers.com, PC World and the Time4 Media properties. The company also announced it would continue efforts to add more content to the video search, as well as its Singingfish A/V search.

AOL says it will allow content providers to control the video playback experience while driving traffic back to partners' Web sites. The video search engine includes over 18,000 videos from AOL's own catalog, in addition to 1.5 million videos across the Web indexed by the Singingfish service.

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Two vulnerabilities within Skype were made public on Tuesday and resolved in a new release of the VoIP software. The flaws centered on boundary errors in the way Skype handles URLs meant to trigger an action within the program, and when importing VCARD files. Both issues could be used for a code execution attack when the user loads specially crafted URLs and files.

Web security firm Secunia rated the flaws as "highly critical" and recommended that users of the program download the latest version. "As a work-around prior to updating the Skype software, this bug may be avoided by not selecting Skype-specific URLs and not importing VCARD records," Skype recommended in its advisory. The problem affects all previous versions of the software.

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Massachusetts' plan to drop Microsoft Office in favor of open standards formats has drawn criticism from the Commonwealth's Secretary of State, who says he has "grave concerns" about switching to OpenDocument. But politics could be playing a larger role in Secretary William Galvin's opposition.

The proposal, which was finalized last month, calls for all electronic documents created by Executive Department agencies after January 1, 2007 to utilize only formats deemed "open," which include OpenDocument and Adobe's PDF. OpenDocument is the centerpiece in the new OpenOffice.org 2.0 release, but is not supported by Microsoft Office.

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SnapStream announced on Tuesday that it had reached agreements with several HDTV tuner card manufacturers to bundle its BeyondTV personal video recording (PVR) software with their products.

HDTV cards from DS Technologies, KWorld, and VBox Communications will now ship with the next version of the BeyondTV software, version 4, which is due out by the end of the year. SnapStream says this will give users of the cards a complete HDTV DVR solution.

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Microsoft has confirmed that a high-ranking manager in the MSN division has left the company in order to start his own business. Hadi Partovi, who was behind the MSN.com revisions and the Start.com portal, has left the company before to pursue personal projects, the Seattle Times first reported.

After the cooling off of the browser wars in the late 90s, Partovi left Microsoft in 1999 to start Tellme Networks, but then returned in 2002 to help Microsoft launch several new initiatives including MSN Music.

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PERSPECTIVE Cross-site scripting attacks have recently shot into the spotlight following a high-profile MySpace worm and banks taking extra measures to stop phishing. In a guest column for BetaNews, security expert Jeremiah Grossman delves into the XSS problem with a peek inside the world of those hunting down security flaws.

As the CTO of a Web application security service company, much of my time is spent educating companies on how to reduce the risks of conducting business online. Most of the people I speak with are stunned to learn that nine out of ten Web sites contain vulnerabilities. Think about it. Every time you visit your favorite online store, check your account balance or participate in a chat, there's a 90 percent likelihood that the site can be compromised in some way.

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The long-awaited 5.0 release of MySQL has arrived to bring the free open source database up to par with its pricey enterprise rivals. New features include stored procedures, triggers and views, along with support for the ANSI SQL standard to ensure compatibility with other database systems.

Such features were once limited to expensive offerings from Oracle and IBM. Stored procedures enable administrators to embed business logic directly into the database to improve performance. Trigers enforce rules at the database level, while Views secure protected information.

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Let the "All your base" jokes begin. Google is preparing to unveil a new service that will serve as a giant Web database for miscellaneous content submitted by users. Called Google Base, the site will host all types of items and make them searchable through the use of "attributes," or tags.

Google says examples of items that could be added include a description of your party planning service, listing of your used car for sale or a database of protein structures. Standard Google searches, including Froogle, could even include Google Base items if their relevance is high. Google is expected to launch the service today at its invite-only Zeitgeist conference.

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Microsoft on Tuesday will issue a refreshed beta of Windows OneCare to testers, which brings a number of improvements to the PC protection and maintenance service. New features include the ability to backup to an external drive, scan incoming files from MSN Messenger and perform on-demand virus detection.

The updated beta will be delivered automatically through OneCare's built-in update facility. However, changes to the firewall and anti-virus component means currently policies and exclusions will be lost in the transition. Developers have also now integrated Windows OneCare into the new unified Microsoft Update download center for patches.

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Aiming to increase its base of business users, VoIP provider Skype on Tuesday launched Skype Groups, a new option where one person will be able to purchase premium services for multiple accounts. The service will be aimed at business customers, which Skype says makes up 30 percent of its users.

A group administrator would be able to distribute credits among its members, and there is no limit to the number of people in a particular group. The company found through its studies that 63 percent of customers use the service to conduct business abroad, and 46 percent use it to conduct conference calls. "No longer do managers have to juggle multiple communications plans among multiple providers," Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom said in prepared remarks.

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A 38 year-old man from Hong Kong has become the first person convicted for sharing copyrighted material over BitTorrent. Chan Nai-Ming used the P2P technology, which requires you to distribute what you are downloading, to share Hollywood films "Daredevil," "Red Planet" and "Miss Congeniality."

Nai-Ming was arrested last January and pled not guilty to the charges of copyright infringement. He was convicted after a four-day trial and released on bail until a sentencing hearing scheduled for November 7. Nai-Ming could face as much as four years in jail and a fine for his actions.

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IBM will disclose details of the processor it developed for the upcoming Xbox 360 gaming console at a chip conference Tuesday in Silicon Valley. Microsoft switched from Intel's Pentium III, used in the first generation Xbox, to the PowerPC architecture in 2003.

The chip is a customized version of the regular PowerPC chip and will run at a speed of 3.2GHz. The iteration developed for the Xbox 360 includes three cores, and would be able to run up to two simultaneous tasks at the same time, the company said.

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Eight storage device makers announced on Tuesday plans to form a group known as Aperi that will look to develop a platform for managing storage devices. The group includes IBM, Sun, Cisco, Fujitsu, McData, Computer Associates International, Brocade Communication Systems, Network Appliance, and Engenio Information Technologies.

Aperi will attempt to settle on an open source standard for storage, and will use preexisting work done in the arena, such as that from the Storage Networking Industry Association's Storage Management Initiative Specification. IBM will also make a donation of technology to the group; other members may do so at a later time, but no announcement had been made as of yet.

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Internet Explorer 7 will come with several security enhancements to HTTPS connections, a Microsoft program manager said on the IE Blog over the weekend. Chief among the changes is the disabling of the SSLv2 protocol by default in favor of the stronger-encryption available through TSLv1.

"Generally, IE users will not notice any difference in the user-experience due to this change; it's a silent improvement in security," program manager Eric Lawrence wrote. He said that few sites still require SSLv2, and upgrading to SSLv3 or TSLv1 is generally a simple migration on most sites.

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Becoming the first official legal peer-to-peer service, iMesh on Tuesday announced it was taking the sixth version of its software into public beta. The company says it is the only globally active P2P network that maintains the experience of file sharing while assuring the copyright holders are fairly compensated.

The original iMesh was founded in 1999 and enjoyed several years of success before it was sued in September 2003 by the RIAA. Since then, the company has been working on a way to stay viable as a P2P service, yet assure the record labels that it was serious about offering compensation for its members' file-sharing activities.

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