Microsoft and Motorola announced on Tuesday an agreement to work together on technology aimed at emergency services and criminal justice customers. As a part of the deal, Motorola would develop new applications built on the Microsoft platform.

The Redmond company sees its alliance with Motorola as a way for it to further expand its business into the public sector, where contracts for services can prove quite lucrative and beneficial to those involved.

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Sirius announced Tuesday that it had nearly doubled its third quarter subscriber numbers, adding 359,000 new customers during the quarter. Sirius ended the quarter with 2.17 million subscribers. In comparison, XM said on Monday it had added 617,000 subscribers during the quarter for a total of 5.03 million.

XM's growing lead doesn't seem to bother Mel Karmazin, Sirius' CEO. "We continued to experience strong subscriber growth during the third quarter, which was the best third quarter in our history, and increased our market share from the year-ago quarter by more than 20%," Karmazin said. Sirius said it expects to have three million subscribers by the end of the year.

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In a press conference following a speech at the Ceatec Japan 2005 conference, Intel Digital Home vice president Donald MacDonald said Intel planned to push the industry to create a unified standard for high-definition DVDs that would join Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD DVD camps.

"If we don't, who will?" asked MacDonald. "We have to avoid the format war. We certainly need to have one format." The statement comes one week after Intel joined Microsoft in publicly backing HD DVD. Even with pressure from Intel, however, it's not clear if a compromise is possible. Talks between Blu-ray and HD DVD representatives have taken place throughout the year with no resolution in sight.

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Philadelphia announced on Tuesday that it had selected Earthlink as the provider to build out the network that will offer the city's one million residents high-speed wireless Internet access.

The service would be free in public places such as parks, but in order for a resident to receive Wi-Fi in their homes, they will be charged $20 USD per month. A special $10 USD per month rate will be available for low-income families.

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Microsoft's possible future plans for a subscription based music service may now be in jeopardy after talks broke down late last week, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday. At issue was what the company saw as unjustifiably high royalty fees being demanded by the record labels.

Microsoft had been in talks with EMI, Warner Music, Universal, Sony BMG, and Bertelsmann. However, according to the reports, Microsoft could not get a favorable rate that would allow it to compete with Yahoo, which is the cheapest subscription service currently offered.

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For a second time, the Web site used to promote the adoption of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser has been compromised by hackers. The remote attackers potentially accessed SpreadFirefox.com by exploiting a security flaw in the TWiki software installed on the server.

The problem was limited to SpreadFirefox.com and did not affect mozilla.org or any Mozilla software. TWiki was disabled as soon as the intrusion was discovered.

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Instant messaging security firm IMLogic said on Monday that attacks on IM networks increased to record levels, multiplying by fourteen times through the first three quarters of this year.

"Over the past three months the nature of the IM threat has continued to evolve with increasing levels of sophistication and rates of infection demonstrated by IM worms and viruses," IMlogic CTO Jon Sakoda said.

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AOL subsidiary Netscape has signed the first non-IE browser distribution deal with a major PC manufacturer since the late 90s. Starting early next year, Hewlett-Packard will ship Netscape 8 on all new PCs and laptops, with customized tabs leading to HP and Compaq Web destinations.

However, Internet Explorer will remain an option for HP customers. During initial setup, an option will be presented to select Netscape as the system's default browser. Icons to launch Netscape will be placed on the Windows desktop and Start Menu.

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XM on Monday said it had further solidified its lead over competitor Sirius, announcing it had added another 617,000 subscribers during the quarter for a total of 5.03 million. The company bested its year-ago new subscribers by 48 percent, and said it expects the holiday quarter to be the best in the company's history.

"This continues to be a phenomenal year for XM Satellite Radio," Hugh Panero, President and CEO of XM said. The company has added 1.8 million new subscribers during the year, and expects to surpass the 6 million mark by the end of the year. Rival Sirius had not reported third quarter subscriber numbers as of press time.

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Symantec on Monday said it had agreed to purchase Bindview, a maker of security software for businesses that focuses on compliance of regulations. Symantec will pay $209 million in the all cash deal, which is expected to close early next year. The acquisition follows Symantec's purchase of Sygate and anti-phishing firm WholeSecurity.

""We are excited to be able to offer customers BindView's leading agent-less policy compliance solution. Not only will we be able to meet customers' IT security and policy compliance needs with a complete range of product capabilities, but we will also be able to help reduce the cost and complexity associated with compliance," said Ajei Gopal, senior vice president of Solutions, Alliances and Operations at Symantec.

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Digital music continues to become a bigger force in the broader music industry, contributing six percent of total revenues during the first six months of 2005. However, even with the increased revenues, the broader music market fell 1.9 percent.

The report, released Monday by the trade group International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), said globally recorded music sales fell to $13.2 billion from $13.4 billion during the same period in 2004.

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Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt will sit down with Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy on Tuesday morning to outline a collaborative effort between the two companies. It's not clear what the partnership will entail, but Sun has already begun to hype the event.

The news conference will take place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California and webcast live at 10:30am PST. The announcement will mark the second high-profile joint venture for Google in as many weeks - the search giant recently forged a partnership with NASA to collaborate on technology and space research.

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California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law on Friday a bill that makes "phishing," or identity theft, scams a civil offense. The law allows for victims to seek damages of up to $500,000 per violation. However, it's not clear how easy it would be to track down such scammers, which often operate overseas.

The bill was pushed through by California Senator Kevin Murray in order to help stem the growing tide of phishing scams taking advantage of novice Internet users. It will be the first attempt to legislate against phishing attacks, which may prove a difficult task. Like spam, phishers often forge e-mail headers and use other methods to hide a message's origin.

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Paramount Home Entertainment announced late Sunday that it had decided to produce movies in the Blu-ray disc format, indicating that the studio may be considering releases of its movies in both next generation DVD formats. The studio had previously said that it would be supporting HD DVD, however Sunday's statement made no mention of the technology.

"After more detailed assessment and new data on cost, manufacturability and copy protection solutions, we have now made the decision to move ahead with the Blu-ray format," Paramount said in the statement. Representatives for HD DVD said they believe the studio still backs the technology, but they had not heard directly from Paramount and instead were basing their opinion on comments made by the studio to the press.

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Microsoft over the weekend revealed that PDF support would be integrated into the next version of its productivity software, known as Office 12. The announcement was made on Saturday at the Global MVP Summit, Microsoft's annual confab for its most valuable professionals.

The company says that it's adding the new format to promote "sharing across multiple platforms." However, the move fits in with Microsoft's other recent efforts to take on Adobe in areas where its rival has enjoyed considerable success.

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