Hoping to further differentiate its new Bing search engine from market leader Google, Microsoft is moving away from the proverbial “10 blue links” we so often associate with the search experience. During a presentation at the TechCrunch 50 event in San Francisco, the company announced Bing Visual Search, a Silverlight-based feature that replaces those links with images.
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Obama appointee Vivek Kundra’s new job as chief information officer has gotten off to an inauspicious start. After just a week on the job, Kundra is taking a leave of absence following an FBI raid on the District office he previously led. Yusuf Acar, a D.C. government official who previously worked for Kundra, was arrested on bribery charges this week.
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Five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three-year term of supervised release. That’s the maximum sentence facing the Tennessee college student who was indicted today on charges that he broke into Gov. Sarah Palin’s private email account last month.
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Steve Martin once said, “The difference between a good comedian and a great one is ti … ming, tiiiii-ming, timmm-ing . . . timing!” If that’s the case, Microsoft’s comedic timing is impeccable. In a status report filed with Federal antitrust regulators yesterday, Microsoft said it had done much to comply with its 2002 antitrust consent decree and generally applauded its efforts toward interoperability and fair competition.
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If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, what does absolute information awareness do?
That’s a good question to ask in light of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s call for “omnibus” Internet surveillance. In testimony to the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives on Wednesday, Mueller suggested legislation be passed that would give the bureau [...]
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Now that the FBI has made “significant progress in decreasing the rate of loss for … laptops,” it can get on with the much more important business of using them to nab bad guys. Bad guys like former Timberline High School student Josh Glazebrook of Lacey, Wash., who pleaded guilty to emailing bomb threats and other charges after the bureau tracked him down with a piece of spyware called a Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier, or CIPAV.
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Counterterrorism officer extraordinaire Jack Bauer would have solved this one with a bullet to the temple, so Jorge Romero should consider himself lucky. On Friday, the FBI filed a criminal complaint against Romero for allegedly uploading the first four episodes of the sixth season of “24” to LiveDigital.com, well in advance of their prime-time debut. [...]
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