Google and Microsoft took Capitol Hill Thursday as their rivalry spilled out during hearings on the Google's DoubleClick acquisition. Both parties have posted their prepared remarks before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights Committee on the Judiciary. Here's a look at the backstory, Google's remarks and blog and Microsoft's testimony. So put on a little dueling banjos in the background and let's get to it. Economics and privacy: Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, will argue that there are serious economic questions and consequences to consider around the Google-DoubleClick deal. His two biggest questions to ponder are: What are the economic consequences of allowing the Google to acquire its "most significant competitor," DoubleClick (all resources)? And...

The AJAX Control Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0 has been updated. Nothing new was added, but the bug fixes are sure to be welcome. In related news, a VS 2008 Beta 2 compatible version was also released with a couple of interesting features. And in case you did not know, they are now accepting patches.

Open source actually does fix itself faster, as two studies show.

In an apparent attempt to make CardSpace more accessible to the 'little guy', Microsoft has decided to drop the requirement for an SSL certificate.

Filed under: Microsoft, Search

Microsoft has launched an updated version of Live Search. Some of the changes will be visible in the user interface, but the company also made a bunch of changes under the hood to make the search engine more useful and reliable.

• Increased the site index by more than 400%
• Improved understanding of query intent
• Auto-spell correction
• Faster page-loads
• Uses more click-stream data to improve page ranking and relevancy
• Improved answers to questions about specific items like weather, images, celebrities, entertainment, maps, or sports

The interface is also a bit cleaner. The search box has moved to the left. The tabs for searching images, video, news have been replaced with text links (which are a bit harder to notice than tabs at first). And the fonts look a little less 1985-ish.

Apparently 40 percent of the searches on Live.com involve entertainment, shopping, health, and local search, so Microsoft has focused heavily on these four areas.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Researcher Aviv Raff said he has found a way to defeat the patch AOL issued to address an IM vulnerability.

In an interview conducted by William Jackson for GCN, the CEO of a traffic analysis company claims that the onset of cyberwarefare is 'pretty close'.

Has EBay or paypal been hacked? A co-worker of mine lost thousands of dollars last night. Another co-worker has been notified by paypal of problem transactions (he was notified by phone, not email) that he didn't make. And now, there's a headline on Mashable, eBay Hacked??. According to mashable,

We're getting reports in our

Mark Finkle has been pushing out builds of WebRunner, a Mozilla-based tool for running a standalone application with a single web site in it (a.k.a, a "Site-Specific Browser"), for some time now, but WebRunner 0.7, released today for Windows, Mac,...