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Microsoft's latest "Patch Tuesday" updates will be the last offered for Windows XP SP2 or Windows 2000 as had been previously announced. The Redmond-based giant issued four security-related advisories addressing several security bugs. One of the patched vulnerabilities was controversially described by a Google engineer, Tavis Ormandy, before Microsoft has a chance to push out a fix for the issue.

That particular bug, which was exploited quickly by criminals, affected the Windows Help and Support Center. Another two updates cover laws in the Microsoft Access ActiveX component and the CDD display driver foe Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. Overall, the Patch Tuesday load was about the norm.

"The most interesting vulnerability for the enterprise is MS10-045, which lets an attacker use a specially-crafted UNC path in an Outlook attachment to bypass Outlook’s warning about opening potentially malicious attachments," Tyler Reguly, senior security engineer at security firm nCircle, said.

Intel Corp announced its anticipated quarterly results this week with analysts hoping to sample the pulse of the technology sector amidst recovery. The infamous chipmaker did not disappoint, with chief executive Paul Otellini celebrating what he called the "best quarter in the company's 42-year history," and providing figures that fueled hopes that enterprise recovery has arrived.

While the consensus in the financial world was that Intel would report revenues of $10.25 billion and 43 cents per share, Intel announced that revenue for the quarter amounted to $10.8 billion and 51 cents per share. Net income for the quarter was $2.9 billion, up by $445 million from the first quarter and a noteable $3.3 billion from the same period of 2009.

"The PC and server segments are healthy," said Otellini, "and the demand for leading-edge technology will continue to increase for the foreseeable future." While revenue from the PC Client Group jumped 2 percent, revenue from the Data Center Group jumped 13 percent. The second quarter also witnessed record mobile and server processor revenues.

Social networking giant Facebook has hit yet another milestone, this time with its mobile phone users. According to Eric Tseng, head of mobile products at Facebook, the service now has 150 million mobile users, up from 100 million in April 2010. Tseng said Facebook is now focusing on mobile phones as the key platform for Facebook services in the future.

"Mobile is fast becoming our growth lever," Tseng told attendees at the MobileBeat 2010 conference in San Francisco. Overall, Facebook claims to have about 500 million users across all platforms, and over the next six months, it predicts its mobile platforms will catch up with traditional web browser users.

In developing countries, Facebook sees mobile phones as the first route to the Internet for many potential users, and it hopes to attract new users that may never have even turned on a PC in their lives. It is working with Airtel in India on a Facebook mobile-only experience, allowing subscribers to join Facebook by phone. Even without data plans, the company is experimenting offering access to Facebook's text-only service for free.

Toshiba and SanDisk have announced a new joint venture to create an advanced NAND flash memory chip factory in Japan, as a way to keep ahead of strong growth in the market for the chips.

For their part, SanDisk will "pay for part of the production equipment at the factory," which will be overall run by Toshiba.

Both companies will share output from the factory. The companies have worked very closely together in the past in similar agreements, including NAND flash plants.

"Construction of the new fab reflects expectations for increasing demand for NAND flash memory for existing and emerging applications, such as smartphones and solid-state drives," reads a joint statement.

The factory will be called Fab 5 and is already in construction.

It is unclear how much the companies are investing to create the factory.

Earlier in the month, Hulu announced the launch of Hulu Plus, a premium version of the popular streaming site that will cost $10 per month.

Buyers of the subscription get expanded content, and the ability to play the shows on their HDTVs, Blu-ray players, Xbox 360 (with Gold subscription), PS3 and iPad and iPhone.

Hulu Plus gives users season passes for most current shows, which is a massive improvement from only being able to watch the trailing five episodes of a given show. You will also be able to watch back seasons of the shows.

Sony has announced today that the PS3 will be the only console with the ability to stream Hulu Plus in 2010, and select users will be given the ability within weeks.

If you have a PlayStation Plus subscription, you may be sent an invite to test out Hulu Plus.

All users will be given the ability within a few months.

According to new figures from comScore, Microsoft's Bing stole some market share in June from rivals Google after a few stagnant months.

For the U.S. search market, Bing increased from 12.1 percent in May to 12.7 percent in June, its strongest growth in a few months.

Google remained the clear leader, but saw its share dip, from 63.7 percent to 62.6 percent for the same period.

Yahoo, which has been in second place for years, remained there, seeing its share grow minimally from 18.3 percent to 18.9 percent.

Overall, Americans made 16.4 billion searches for the month, up 3 percent from May.

Sony has said today that their PSP, PS3 Minis have reached one million downloads.

The Minis are low-priced games available via the PlayStation Network on either the home console or the handheld.

It is unclear whether the number includes free demos, but if it does, the number is even more insignificant than it already is.

Only 1.7 percent of all PSP owners have downloaded a Minis game, compared to 51 percent of iPhone owners and 54 percent of BlackBerry owners.

Minis were released 9 months ago, and there are over 60 million PSP owners, in all variations.

Of the 86 games available, PocketGamer says the following 10 are the best-selling:

Age of Zombies (Halfbrick)
Monopoly (EA)
Fieldrunners(Subatomic)
Zombie Tycoon (Frima)
Bloons(Hands-on)
Spot The Differences! (Sanuk)
Pinball Fantasies(Cowboy Rodeo )
Mahjongg Artifacts: Chapter 2 (G5)
Yetisports Pengu Throw (Xendex)
Breakquest (Beatshapers)

Kevin Turner, Microsoft's COO has compared Apple's recently launched iPhone 4 to their own Windows Vista, which was plagued with problems from the start, eventually becoming one of the company's worst operating systems, ever.

"It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I'm okay with that," says Turner.

Vista launched in 2007, and users instantly berated how much memory the operating system used, as well as other glaring problems like software and driver compatibility issues.

Turner took a small shot at the iPhone 4 and its antenna issues when asked about the company's upcoming Windows Phone 7: "One of the things I want to make sure you know today is that you're going to be able to use a Windows Phone 7 and not have to worry about how you're holding it to make a phone call."

Last week, Consumer Reports, the respected nonprofit organization that publishes guides on all kinds of products and makes recommendations to consumers said yesterday it could not recommend the Apple iPhone 4, due to the antenna issues.

Federal agents have arrested another alleged Russian spy this month, the twelfth this year in a sting to break a spy ring that has reached across the United States.

The alleged spy, Alexey Karetnikov was a Microsoft employee, working right out of the company's headquarters in Redmond.

Karetnikov was deported to Russia today after a judge ruled for it earlier in the week.

Despite working at the company for some time, officials say Karetnikov was just in the "early stages" of his spying, without obtaining any useful information.

The alleged spy was part of the Microsoft Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) team, in charge of testing code run in Microsoft products such as Windows.

Of the twelve spies, most had day jobs at tech companies, and some even had families here in the States. The first ten were returned to Russia in a prisoner swap, while the eleventh remains in hiding.

Opera has announced the release of a stable Opera Mini, version 5.1 for Android devices, replacing the 5.0 beta which has been available for a couple of months.

The stable update will offer an improved user experience and browsing performance, but otherwise is mainly a grouping of bug fixes.

Opera says there are 61 million users globally using Opera Mini, making it the world's most popular mobile phone browser.

When 5.0 launched, it almost immediately saw 1 million downloads for the iPhone, with the browser topping the charts. It did similar numbers for Android.

Opera Mini uses Opera's servers to render and compress pages, thus increasing speed for the end user.

Updated 5.1 offers improved page layout, and the ability to make the browser the default.

Adds Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software: "Opera Mini 5.1 for the Android platform is the next step in bringing the world’s most popular mobile web browser to all major platforms, offering improved performance and great web experience to almost any handset. Opera Mini is used by over 61 million people on more than 3000 handset models and with today’s release Opera continues its mission to provide the best web experience on any device and on any platform."

Recording Industry vs The People has posted today that the RIAA lost an incredible amount of money on attorney's fees in 2008, while recovering practically nothing from its lawsuits.

The trade group paid firm Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901, firm Jenner & Block over $7,000,000 and Cravath Swain & Moore about $1.25 million for 2008. Each was in charge of pursuing copyright infringement claims.

Apparently 2008 was a bad year for the RIAA though as they only recovered $391,000 from their suits.

The average settlement for copyright infringement cases is $3500 meaning the RIAA only settled with just over 110 people.

On the other hand, 2008 was an improvement on 2007, when the RIAA spent $21 million on legal fees and an additional $3.5 million to pay watchdog MediaSentry. The group only recovered $516,000 in 2007.

You can view the IRS return here: RIAA recover only $391,000.

Rdio has launched the beta version of their Android app which will allow for unlimited music streaming on Android devices.

In October 2009, billionaires Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the creators of the Kazaa P2P client as well as Skype, announced that they had developed and financed the unlimited music subscription service, and the company introduced the service last month.

Separating the service from others like Rhapsody is the fact that Rdio allows users to listen from anywhere in "the cloud," including through their phones, instead of needing to download DRM-laced music locally.

Furthermore, Rdio has many social networking features connected to Facebook and Twitter.

Rdio has over five million tracks available from the major labels and thousands of indies.

To have access at home and via your phone, the service costs $10 per month. The beta is currently private,but TechCrunch has some.

XPRT Ventures has sued eBay for $3.8 billion this week, accusing the auction giant of infringing on six patents used by the PayPal payment system.

The company says eBay stole confidential information from the inventors of XPRT's patents and used them to create certain features in PayPal and PayPal Later.

eBay filed a patent application in 2003 dubbed "Method and System to Automate Payment for a Commerce Transaction." It failed, according to XPRT, however, to disclose that it knew of XPRT's own similar patent applications.

"This involves a trade secret theft, along with sheer patent infringement," adds Steven Moore, who is representing the plaintiff. "It is bad enough to take someone's technology, but it is a bit much to use it in your own patent application."

XRPT is seeking $3.8 billion in monetary damages, based on current and future earnings thanks to PayPal.

Consumer Reports, the respected nonprofit organization that publishes guides on all kinds of products and makes recommendations to consumers said yesterday it could not recommend the Apple iPhone 4.

The organization also said that AT&T was not to blame for the model's left hand antenna issues, placing the blame on Apple's hardware design.

Consumer Reports has said that the design flaw is temporarily fixed by using a sliver of duct tape, and CNN has tested the method.

"When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone's lower left side -- an easy thing, especially for lefties -- the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you're in an area with a weak signal," Consumer Reports adds.

Apple has said an upcoming software update will fix the antenna issues, but seeing is believing in that case.

Last week, Fring released an updated iPhone app that allowed users of the new iPhone 4 to video conference over Wi-Fi and 3G with other iPhone, Android and Symbian smartphone owners.

The app got massive publicity, because Apple's own FaceTime app only allows conferencing between iPhones and only over Wi-Fi.

Fring said, later in the week, that it had to "temporarily reduce support" to Skype, which had supported it for years.

Earlier this week, Fring made it public that Skype was blocking the app, and threatening legal action against them.

Said Fring: "They are afraid of open mobile communication. Cowards. Needless to say, we are very disappointed that Skype, who once championed the cause of openness is now trying to muzzle competition, even at the expense of its own users. We’re sorry for the inconvenience Skype has caused you. We’ve contacted Skype and are awaiting an official response from the company."

Skype has responded, and with force. Says legal chief Robert Miller (via TechCrunch): "An hour or so ago, Fring reported on its blog that we had blocked their access to Skype. I want to make one thing absolutely clear: this is untrue. Fring was using Skype software in a way it wasn’t designed to be used – and in a way which is in breach of Skype’s API Terms of Use and End User License Agreement. We’ve been talking with Fring for some time to try to resolve this amicably.