Microsoft has no plans to pull out of China, its chief executive said on Thursday, playing down concerns about recent cyber-attacks and censorship raised by rival Google Inc. "There are attacks every day. I don't think there was anything unusual, so I don't understand," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Reuters after a meeting on modernizing government services at the White House.

A few days ago, technology blog Valleywag's launched its Apple Tablet Scavenger Hunt, a sort-of contest in which people with evidence of the existence of Apple's much-rumoured tablet could win large sums of money. Apple apparently wasn't amused, as the company resorted to its usual tactic whenever it doesn't like something in the press: litigation, litigation, litigation.

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions how open is too open when it comes to mobile app markets, especially in light of the recent discovery of suspected malware in the Android Market. "Open platforms are attractive to developers, but as we have now seen, developers come in all flavors," McAllister writes, "If smartphone vendors aren't careful, they risk repeating the mistakes of the PC software industry, with mobile platforms becoming the new Wild West of computing." As McAllister sees it, strong governance is the only solution, and this includes the ability to act swiftly when exploits arise - "something only centralized oversight can provide." Sure, Apple's App Store approval policies are somewhat 'draconian', "but by ensuring that each and every app in the App Store has met its rigorous standards, Apple has forged a bond of trust with iPhone users that no other smartphone vendor can match."

It's that time of the quarter again: research firms IDC and Gartner published their PC market share figures for the past quarter, the fourth and last quarter of 2009. Coincidentally, it means I get to break out the chart tools in Word and Excel! Fun (and I'm serious).

Two days ago, Google dropped a bomb by announcing its intentions to cease censoring its search engine results in China, partly because the search giant claimed that attempts were made to crack the GMial accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The Chinese government has officially replied to these allegations. Update: More on the infrastructure of the attack.

It's funny how while software changes so fast, and many hardware components evolve at ridiculously fast paces (processors, memory, hard drives), the keyboard has remained largely unchanged over the years - until recently, that is. Even Lenovo has now buckled under the pressure, switching to a chiclet-style keyboard for ThinkPads - while also removing the SysReq key.

Over at the osdev.org forums, they're hosting a brand new Bootsector Competition. Entries are limited to 512 bytes, and must be able to work with both FAT12 and FAT16 file systems. Each entry must be capable of locating a 32-bit ELF file in the filesystem, parsing the ELF headers, and executing the ELF binary. All entries are ISC licensed, and two prizes (in the form of Amazon.com gift certificates or donations to the PDPC/Freenode) are at stake, in addition to bragging rights. For the full contest rules, and how to enter, check out the forum post.

"Microsoft has confirmed that the version of Adobe Flash bundled with Windows XP contains multiple bugs, and urged customers to upgrade to a newer edition of the multimedia player plug-in. In a security advisory issued alongside a one-patch update for the month, Microsoft acknowledged that Flash Player 6 contains numerous vulnerabilities. Flash Player 6 is the version of Adobe's software that Microsoft includes in Windows XP, even in the copies it continues to sell to computer makers, who offer the eight-year-old operating system on netbooks, laptops and some desktop PCs."

Upgrade prices were mysteriously absent from Microsoft's Office 2010 pricing information, which they revealed last week. The upgrade versions of Office have been removed in an attempt to simplify the purchase process for customers, but sadly, it only makes matters more complicated. Simplification -you're doing it wrong.

"The Android variant found on Google's Nexus One handset now has an SDK, answering one of the criticisms aimed at the search giant's foray into hardware. The Android 2.1 SDK includes APIs for creating animated wallpapers, as well as some additional telephony functions and a couple of improvements to interaction with the WebKit browser, all of which are used by Google's own Nexus One applications and are now available to other developers too."

Ah, and there we have it: another chapter in the discussion between open and closed when it comes to application stores. A phishing application, masquerading as a banking application from First Tech Credit Union, made its way onto the Android Market. It was removed quickly, but the damage is done.

Intel has created a web site for its Intelligent Home Energy Management Proof of Concept. In its current incarnation, the device is a beautiful, wall-mounted Atom-based device that allows a homeowner to view and control various home-tech-related displays and dashboards. It's being promoted as primarily a home energy monitoring tool, with real time and historical reports on energy usage. Even the clock feature has an in-line graph displaying current home energy usage. Being a home automation enthusiast, though, I'm more excited about this device's potential as the interface to the home's nerve center.

"Imagine that you are a super-successful movie director, who's been given hundreds of millions of dollars and lots of whiz-bang technology to make a cinematic epic. Sounds good? Not once you are told that people will have to watch it on fuzzy old black and white television sets. Something similar happens to the text that appears on your computer screen whenever you log on to a Web site. The site's owner has so little control over the fine details of what you will see that the typeface in which the text appears is bound to be distorted. Pity the poor designer who struggled to perfect it."

"At one time or another you may have used a rented-out Windows PC, be that at business kiosks or Internet cafes. Technically speaking, though, doing so has never been legal. As of January 1, 2010, the licensing terms for Windows and Microsoft Office have been tweaked so that those that wish to rent, lease, or outsource desktop PCs to third parties with either software can do so by paying an extra fee."