London

In a move to redefine the often testy relationship between online publishers and search engines, Microsoft plans to help European media owners protect and profit from copyrighted material online, the company's top intellectual property lawyer, Thomas Rubin, said Wednesday.

Rubin said Microsoft planned to work more closely with publishers on the development of a new technological standard that would give them more control over what happens to their material after it has been referenced by search engines like Microsoft's Live Search, Google and Yahoo.

Google on Tuesday announced a deal with Life magazine to bring more than 10 million of its archived photos online in a public display. The mix of iconic and never-before-seen photos is searchable through Google Image Search.

The archives include famous images and films, including the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, The Mansell Collection from London, Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s, and the entire works left to the collection from Life photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen.

When Google began hiring in Zurich for its new engineering center in 2004, local officials welcomed the U.S. company with open arms. Google's arrival is still bearing fruit for Zurich: 450 employees, about 300 of them engineers, work in Google's seven-story complex in a converted brewery on the outskirts of the placid mountain metropolis.

One of the biggest and glitziest shopping malls in Europe opened last week in London, in a test of British consumers' ability to keep spending during a steep economic downturn. The shopping center, Westfield London, is also shaping up as a vast experiment in making over the humble billboard.

CBS Outdoor, a division of the CBS media conglomerate, has installed more than 100 digital advertising screens at Westfield, including a giant one covering 60 square meters, or 646 square feet.

Two researchers have opened a new can of worms that could let hackers wreak havoc on network managers.

Erik Tews and Martin Beck say they have found a way to crack the widely used Wireless Protection Access (WPA), a standard supported by the Wi-Fi Alliance and currently used to secure wireless computer networks. The researchers say they have specifically cracked the Temporal Key Integrated Protocol (a set of algorithms used by WPA), a feat that had been considered nearly impossible.

Perhaps the biggest threat to Google Inc.'s increasing dominance of Internet search and advertising is the rising fear, justified or not, that Google's broadening reach is giving it unchecked power.

This scrutiny goes deeper than the skeptical eye that lawmakers and the Justice Department have given to Google's proposed ad partnership with Yahoo Inc. Many objections to that deal are financial, and surround whether Google and Yahoo could unfairly drive up online ad prices.

A month after irking part of the independent recording community by launching its online music service mostly with major labels, MySpace Music has made a deal to almost double the amount of indie tunes available through the service.

In an agreement announced Thursday, the San Francisco-based Independent Online Distribution Alliance -- a digital distributor of tunes for several thousand labels -- will make its library of more than 1 million tracks available through MySpace Music.

Say you want to reach an old friend who's always on the move. Calling her at home using the number listed in the phone book [what a quaint notion!] probably won't work. But how else can you find the various other ways to reach her -- via mobile, or at work, or perhaps e-mail, instant messaging, Skype (EBAY), Facebook, or Twitter addresses?

Google's recent decision to open its Android mobile-device platform is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to open-source plans for revolutionizing wireless environments worldwide.

Nokia's transition of Symbian to a new, free licensing model is also well under way, according to executives attending this week's Symbian Smartphone Show in London. Plans to establish a new Symbian Foundation with strong open-source underpinnings are expected to reach fruition during the first half of 2009, said AT&T Vice President Kris Rinne.