Associated News.net

Microsoft is rolling out the new design for its MSN Web portal in the U.S.

Patent trolls would generally disappear, because a loophole in the current patent system allows them to wait for a technology to spread before retro-actively patenting it.

Russia announced a halt to space tourism on Wednesday, saying it would struggle to ferry professional crews to the International Space Station after the U.S. mothballs its shuttle fleet this year.

Microsoft Corp made its most vehement and public attack on Google Inc on Friday, calling its internet rival's actions potentially anti-competitive, and urging victims to file complaints to regulators.

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: Fifty years after NASA began grappling with the idea of life beyond Earth, it's in the midst of planning missions to bring potential traces of Martian life back to Earth ... again.

Flickr member flypigs has made this series of six cover mock-ups for the rumored forthcoming Steve Jobs autobiography. They're all pretty cool, and if you look at the notes for each photo you'll see that flypigs has put a little research into it. For Steve Jobs: The Man Who Makes It A Different Place.

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: The winning entries in an international visualization contest prove that you can see good science at work in a variety of venues, ranging from cartoon strips to art galleries.

A McAfee report reveals that more computers are hacked in China than anywhere else in the world. The hacked computers often are clustered into "botnets," a.k.a. battalions of corrupted computers commandeered to attack websites and spew spam. The growing presence of botnets is yet another sign of network insecurity...

You owe it to yourself to stop for a moment and examine how much of your personal information will be public when you're using Google Buzz and whether you're comfortable with that.

A man in southern China was sentenced to 13 years in jail for running a pornographic Web site, a state news agency reported Sunday, amid a national crackdown on lewd online content. The court in the Guangdong province city of Jiangmen handed down the sentence to Huang Yizhong and fined him 100,000 yuan ($14,600), official News Agency said.