Today's announcement officially means Microsoft is the latest entry in a market of services that Microsoft actually made feasible: It can now host Exchange mailboxes for Active Directory users that do not have Exchange Server 2007.

Reporters were put into a frenzy this week when Google announced it was set to launch version two of its mobile search application for the iPhone which included the addition of voice-powered search, allowing you skip the keyboard altogether. But now the question is, where is it?

The takedown of the McColo hosting service led to a gratifying, if temporary, decrease in spam this week -- but it could also portend a rise in malware infections.

Today's round of updates to Apple's Safari contains just four patches that affect the Mac OS X edition, but eleven for Windows Vista and XP, several of which would forestall some very familiar sounding exploits.

They're not guaranteeing users the coveted top spots on search results, but Google's got a free guide for those looking to make their Web pages as tasty as possible to the search giant's robot spiders.

Microsoft has offered an explanation as to why it took the company seven years to issue a patch for a known vulnerability. The flaw, which lies in the Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, was addressed Tuesday in Microsoft security bulletin MS08-068. The flaw could enable an SMB Relay attack, which would allow an attacker to install programs; view, change or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.

On Wednesday, Mozilla released Firefox 3.0.4 (download for Windows and Mac) and Firefox 2.0.18 to address a dozen security flaws, half of which the browser maker ranks as critical. Among the critical is one that could allow an attacker privilege escalation after a session restore. Another could allow arbitrary code to execute with compromised Flash media files.

AT&T today began the public beta phase of VideoCrawler, a search and organization portal for rich Web media.

On Tuesday an update for AVG 8 suggested that a Windows system file is a Trojan horse, and users who delete the file form the system could leave their Windows XP systems endlessly rebooting or unable to reboot at all. The problem only affects users of AVG 8 products running the Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish language versions of Windows XP. AVG immediately sent out a corrected update to its customers, including those using the free editions of AVG.

The weary war against net scum continues, as Google's much-abused BlogSpot service finds its CAPTCHA tech hamstrung and malicious Web sites spread like stinkweed.