Web application

Yahoo has confirmed that it will acquire San Francisco-based Xoopit, which won the Yahoo Open Hack contest in 2008 and powers Yahoo Mail's My Photos application. The app finds photos in a user's in-box, including both file attachments and URLs that link to photo sites like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums.

Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president of Yahoo applications, said the acquisition will bring "phenomenal photo organization, improved photo sharing, and the serendipity of discovering forgotten photos to Yahoo Mail."

Mozilla Labs has unleashed its first beta release of Prism -- an experimental program that enables users to break out Web applications from the browser and run them directly from the desktop, even if the browser crashes or stalls.

Through Prism, Mozilla Labs aims to harness the increasing power and ubiquity of Web applications and put them to work directly on the desktop in their own separate windows like normal applications. The organization said this will reduce browser loading, leading to improved browser performance and stability.

In the nightmare scenario of Luddites everywhere, The Computers have been entrusted with mankind's accumulated knowledge. All is well until that fateful day when the machines band together, creating a mammoth, all-powerful, living network that thinks, grows and takes over the Earth.

Think "The Terminator" or "Colossus: The Forbin Project."

These days, the geek buzzword for this is "the Cloud" and the catchphrase is "Cloud computing."

First, the bad news, at least for the Luddites: The Cloud is already here.

Microsoft issued four bulletins that address nine vulnerabilities for July's Patch Tuesday, none of them critical. This is the first time since last year that none of the patches were rated critical.

With only four vulnerabilities rated "important," IT administrators have some breathing room to get caught up and reassess their security, researchers said.

Where is Saturn in relation to the moon? Does the Milky Way really have a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy? Microsoft has some answers.

Indeed, Microsoft likes to think the final frontier got a little closer this week with its public beta launch of the WorldWide Telescope software.

WorldWide Telescope is a rich Web application that brings together images from ground- and space-based observatories across the world to allow people to explore the night sky through their computers.

Where is Saturn in relation to the moon? Does the Milky Way really have a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy? Microsoft has some answers.

Indeed, Microsoft likes to think the final frontier got a little closer this week with its public beta launch of the WorldWide Telescope software.

WorldWide Telescope is a rich Web application that brings together images from ground- and space-based observatories across the world to allow people to explore the night sky through their computers.

Hoping to continue building momentum for its Silverlight technology, Microsoft announced Monday that major content providers are coming aboard and it unveiled a new digital-rights management (DRM) system.

The announcement, at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, said Silverlight technology will be used by Madison Square Garden Interactive, Tencent, Abertis Telecom, Terra Networks Operations, SCSi, MNet, and Yahoo Japan.

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