Technology

Microsoft’s bid to make the Open XML (OOXML) file formats international standards has succeeded, barring any last-minute changes

Google Docs is getting offline access baked in with Google Gears starting with a small number of users today, the Official Google Docs blog reports — via lifehacker

If you’ve ever wondered where stolen credit card numbers end up, Finjan might have part of the answer. The security company-cum-cybersleuthing outfit has uncovered a Web site supermarket for stolen card data. The SellCVV2 Web site, as it is called, was found to be trading the card numbers and other data in a number of sophisticated ways. Criminals visiting the site would be able to earn discounts based on volume bought and choose from a range of tiers, starting at the least valuable Classic Visa or MasterCard — those with the lowest credit limits — through more valuable Gold, Platinum and Corporate levels

Users of Google Calendar are angry and frustrated that they have been unable to access the Web-based application at various times over the past two weeks. Google, in a note on its Calendar help page, said Google Calendar was experiencing temporary performance issues that were affecting users of Google Account and Google Apps. It gave no indication of when the problem would be fixed. Google Calendar users who are unable to access their calendars are venting their frustrations on the Google Calendar Troubleshooting Group

Three-quarters of phishing sites are built on hacked servers that have been tracked down using pre-programmed Google search terms, according to research from brand-protection firm MarkMonitor. Among other activities, MarkMonitor tracks phishing attacks that target brand names. Researchers compiled a list of 750 Google search terms that are used to track down websites likely to have easily exploitable vulnerabilities — mostly PHP-based sites

Mozilla Lab’s push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it’s running on, and also more hooked into Web services. So extended, the browser becomes an even more powerful and pervasive platform for all kinds of applications. Chris Beard, VP of Labs for Mozilla, wants the new online/offline, browser/service to be more intelligent on behalf of its users. Early examples of this intelligence include the awesome bar, which is what Mozilla calls the new smart address bar in Firefox 3. It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history. He’s looking to extend on this with a linguistic user interface that lets users type plain English commands into the browser bar — via Slashdot

US cable operator Comcast said that it would change the way it managed its network and would co-operate with critics to resolve allegations that it had unreasonably interfered with some Internet file-sharing services like BitTorrent

The Church of Scientology has come under fire for some items on their recently launched video channel. Most notably, claims have been leveled that dignitaries in one of their videos were faked and at least one of the people featured in the video is claiming their statements were taken out of context — via Slashdot

Adobe’s Photoshop Express, its free, online version of Photoshop is live right now. Targeted at everyday consumers, it’s Photoshop stripped down to a pretty slick Flash 9-powered web application

When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be Microsoft’s most modular yet. Having never really been comfortable with the idea of a single, monolithic desktop OS offering, Microsoft has offered multiple desktop OSes in the marketplace ever since the days of Windows NT 3.1, with completely different code bases until they were unified in Windows 2000. Unification isn’t necessarily a good thing, however; Windows Vista is a sprawling, complex OS. A singular yet highly modular OS could give Microsoft the best of all possible worlds: OSes that can be highly customised for deployment but developed monolithically

At noon today (Eastern Standard Time), the long dead ORDB spam identification system began returning false positives as a way to get sleeping users to remove the ORDB query from their spam filters. The net effect: all mail is blocked on servers still configured to use the ORDB service, which was taken out of commission in December of 2006. So if you’re not getting any mail, check your spam filter configuration — via Slashdot

Mozilla CEO John Lilly has hit out at Apple, accusing the company of doing a disservice to Windows users everywhere by including its Safari browser as a default add-on installation in the latest iTunes update, likening it to the way malware is distributed

Google has quietly introduced a new feature, called search-within-search, that is alarming some big-name Web publishers and retailers. They worry that users will be siphoned away through ad sales to competitors. What Google is doing is offering a secondary search option if the user initially searches explicitly for one of the brand-name destinations that Google has identified, such as “Best Buy.” This secondary search lets users refine their query entirely within the pages of the desired site — but using Google’s search, not the site’s, and showing Google ads on the result pages, quite possibly ads from competitors — via Slashdot