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Microsoft's Bing search engine is getting a little help from a very smart friend. Wolfram Alpha and Bing have reached a licensing deal that allows Bing to present some of the specialized scientific and computational content that Wolfram Alpha generates, according to a source familiar with the deal. Representatives from Microsoft and Wolfram Research declined to comment on the deal.

The beta for Moonlight 2.0 is now available. It's considered feature complete and is ready to test against Silverlight 2.0-minded websites. Microsoft has already gone and released Silverlight 3.0, but the Moonlight team is pretty confident that users will generally be able to access most if not all web content while Silverlight 3.0 is still young. Moonlight will ask to update itself to the beta automatically in Firefox, but new users can also download the plugin.

"Linux: If a lack of third-party plug-in support (i.e. Flash) kept you from trying out Chrome on your Linux system, then avoid no longer. The 'early developer version' now supports many plug-ins, and they seem to work pretty well. You'll need to add --enable-plugins to your Chrome shortcut's command line operation to get the 'buggy' plug-in support, but it seems worth the hassle, as YouTube videos are playing relatively stable and smooth. Google's updated their alpha-level Chrome builds to include the newest start page tweaks as well, and it's generally a browser worth checking out, even if a few standard settings and convenience items are still missing."

The rumours and back-and-forths have been going on for as long as I can remember, but today, the deal was finally announced: Microsoft and Yahoo! have tied the knot - but only strictly related to internet search and advertising. The move is supposed to help both Yahoo! and Microsoft in their competition with Google.

We've been buying Wireless N draft devices for two years now, and some of us were holding our breaths to see if we'd have to replace that N hardware sooner than expected. Your uber-fast wireless hardware, if you even utilize its speed, is safe. The Wi-Fi Alliance said that the final standard of 802.11n will essentially remain the same with only a few minor additions; most if not all Draft 2.0 hardware will still function properly with final-version hardware. What's more is that the Wi-Fi Alliance also said that the final version of 802.11n will be effective in September and products will start testing the complete version later in the month.

It is not a secret that Apple is showing resistance to supporting Adobe's flash on the iPhone and that their efforts to add new features to HTML/CSS is driven towards reducing their dependence on Flash. Going further in that direction, the new hardware accelerated 3D CSS visual effects proposed for standards inclusion will be supported in Snow Leopard's Safari (it is already available in the latest Webkit nighty builds). An new impressive demo of the technology is available at Charles Ying blog.

A day earlier than expected, Microsoft has released version 3 of its Flash alternative Silverlight, including a number of related tools to aid in Silverlight development. It comes with a whole lot of new features.

Web browsers have become ever more important for our computers. Instead of the browser displaying static HTML pages, they now handle complex web applications, ranging from social networking to text editors to online banking, and everything in between. While some browsers have finally started treating the browser more like an operating system (Chrome and Internet Explorer 8), those are just baby steps. The real thing is coming with Microsoft's Gazelle, a research project which applies operating system concepts to the browser.

Chances are that you've already heard of and even visited Bing, Microsoft's new search offering launched earlier in June, replacing the Live search of yesterday. It's new, shiny, and has pretty pictures, but does it really have much effect on the market? There have been those headlines claiming it's "taken a bite out of Google," but, looking at the statistics, it hasn't really affected the search industry at all.

We here at OSNews have taken somewhat of an interest in the new HTML5 video and audio tags, which should - some day - make embedding audio and video material into web pages as easy and straightforward as embedding images, allowing the web to finally remove the shackles of dreadful Flash video. Sadly, the problem with these new tags are the codecs; as it turns out, browser makers have not reached an agreement about what codecs to choose for video, with mostly Apple throwing a spanner in the works, and Microsoft shining in absence.

"The Pirate Bay has been urging users not to abandon ship following yesterday's announcement that a Swedish internet cafe software firm planned to buy the BitTorrent site for $7.8m. The site has been flooded with account deletion requests from angry users griping that TPB had sold out to Global Gaming Factory X."

In what you can certainly call a surprise move, The Pirate Bay has been sold. Global Gaming Factory has announced that is has purchased the torrent search engine for 60 million Swedish Krona (7.8 million USD). They plan to build a business model around The Pirate Bay where content providers and copyright owners get compensatation.

The relationship between the United States government and ICANN, the private non-profit corporation which oversees the assignment of domain names, has often been a thorn in the eyes of the European Union. A recent document issued by the European Commission again advocates a change in internet oversight - but at the same time, the document also states that ICANN has actually been doing a pretty good job.

While Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun duke it out with proprietary technologies for implementing multimedia on the Web, HTML 5 has the potential to "eat these vendors' lunches", offering Web experiences based on an industry standard. In fact, one expressed goal of the standard is to move the Web away from proprietary technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX. "It would be a terrible step backward if humanity's major development platform was controlled by a single vendor the way that previous platforms such as Windows have been," says HTML 5 co-editor Ian Hickson, a Google employee. But whether HTML 5 and its Canvas technology will displace proprietary plug-ins "really depends on what developers do", says Firefox technical lead Vlad Vukicevic. It also depends on Microsoft, the only company involved in the HTML 5 effort that is both a browser developer and an RIA tool developer.