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Update 3:15 p.m. PDT: The headline and opening sentence have been changed to clarify that VeriSign is expanding its Project Titan initiative to strengthen and secure Net infrastructure. On Thursday, VeriSign announced plans to increase the level of security within Project Titan, a global initiative to expand the infrastructure of the Internet to anticipate future demand brought by increased e-commerce transactions. In its announcement, VeriSign said that it is going to spend more than the $100 million-plus initially budgeted. One of the goals of Project Titan is to increase the overall capacity of the Internet to sustain a predicted increase in the daily load of Domain Name Server (DNS) queries. DNS is how a domain's common name (say CNET.com) is converted to its Internet address consisting of numbers. ***

LAS VEGAS--While Internet Explorer 8 demos, Silverlight progress and a Monkey Boy reprise from Steve Ballmer captured much of the attention at Mix 08--it was a database announcement that could be the sleeper announcement of the show. Dave Campbell(Credit: Microsoft) What Microsoft ***

LAS VEGAS--On one score, Yahoo has been extremely receptive to an offer from Microsoft. With its Yahoo Messenger for Vista, the Internet company has been one of the few consumer software companies to come out with a Windows Vista-specific product. Yahoo's updated messenger program for Vista adds voice dialing as well as eye candy known as "Voice Visualizations."(Credit: Yahoo) The instant messenger program doesn't have a lot of extra features (in some cases it has fewer than the generic Windows version). What it does have is an extremely pleasant look and feel. ***

Following a most amazing pre-keynote performance by Vince Mira, a 15-year-old with the voice of Johnny Cash without the gravel, Microsoft Chief Software Architect took the stage to update the software and services strategy, in the context of content, commerce and community, for company. Vince Mira, the 15-year-old reincarnation of Johnny Cash(Credit: Dan Farber) As News.com's Ina Fried chronicled in her play-by-play of the keynote, Ozzie offered carefully orchestrated nod to the bid for Yahoo. "I can say its [Yahoo] already added some interesting twists to what promises to be a really, really exciting year," he said. ***

There are a number of software projects that enable Web applications to run offline, including Adobe's AIR, Google Gears, and the Mozilla Foundation's Prism. What about Microsoft and its Silverlight browser plug-in? Microsoft does not currently have specific plans to bring offline capabilities to Silverlight, but it's something it will eventually do, said John Case, general manager in Microsoft's developer division. "It's something that we will want to do," Case said in an interview on Monday. "Eventually, customers will expect us to do it." Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-platform plug-in for running media-rich applications in different browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Apple's Safari. ***

Just about everyone else on the Internet has written on the potential acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft for $44.6 billion, but I thought that I would weigh in on what I think this might mean for search and Web services. According to ComScore's search share numbers for December 2007, Google has 58.4 percent of the market share, with Yahoo and Microsoft trailing at 22.9 percent and 9.8 percent, respectively. If Microsoft and Yahoo combine forces and change nothing, that will put them at 32.7 percent to Google's 58.4 percent. ***

Just when you thought its legal troubles were over, Vonage gets involved in another legal squabble with telecommunications equipment maker Nortel Networks. On Friday, Nortel filed a lawsuit against Vonage claiming that the voice provider has violated nine patents related to its Internet phone service, including features such as 911 and 411 calling and click to call. The lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware, comes in response to a suit Vonage is pursuing against Nortel. In 2004, a company called Digital Packet Licensing sued Nortel for infringing on three of its patents. Vonage acquired Digital Packet Licensing last year and is continuing the lawsuit. For more than a year, Vonage has been caught up in one patent lawsuit after another. AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and Verizon Communications have all ***

Photoshop Express offers users a selection of different options from which to select as an easier alternative to adjustment sliders.(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks) MONTEREY, Calif.--Adobe Systems has committed to shipping a beta version of its online image-editing tool, Photoshop Express, this year, and said it will be complete in 2008. "By late this year, we anticipate having a beta version," said John Loiacono, senior vice president for Adobe Creative Solutions, speaking at the 6sight digital imaging conference here. And next year, the online service will be "available to anyone," he said. ***

Google is ready to unveil a suite of software for mobile phones based on open-source technology, backed by some of the largest wireless industry companies in the world. The company is expected to hold a press conference on Monday to unveil the project, which is expected to incorporate software from the Linux world into a mobile platform code-named Android that's designed to run on phones, according to sources familiar with Google's plans. A software development kit for what's being called "a complete mobile-phone software stack" is believed to be in the works and will be released relatively soon thereafter, the sources said. It's not exactly clear what kind of software will come as part of that stack, but it's said to include everything you need to run a phone. ***

It continues to amaze me at how overlooked Microsoft's crown jewel is: SharePoint. It's not overlooked by the market, which has bought it up to the tune of $1 billion or so in license fees in its first four years. Yet its competitors have largely downplayed it as a threat--even partnering with it--as it pillages their installed bases. Now Microsoft is taking its SharePoint story one step further by decoupling it from Windows Server. I wish I could think of some nefarious reasons for this, but it actually seems to be worse for Microsoft, not better. ***

It's clear there's a core group of computer enthusiasts who still love the command line, 1984 Apple advertisements notwithstanding. Ever notice that most screenshots intended to show off Linux user interface bling still sport a terminal window, usually with some green text on a black background? Or that one of the shiny new technologies coming out of Microsoft is the scripting and command environment called Monad? (It's officially called Windows PowerShell, but I like Monad better.) The latest example of new-meets-old: the gcalcli command-line interface to Google's online calendar application. It's an open-source utility that lets people read and update ***

(Credit: Skype)Yes, you read the headline right. I have long been a critic of Skype, suggesting that eBay was foolish to buy the VoIP toy and generally ridiculing it as a serious business tool. Today I'm eating crow, and it tastes great. Why? Because Vonage has been complete rubbish for me, whereas Skype is increasingly approaching perfection. I dropped my traditional phone service for Vonage. I'm now about to drop my traditionally awful Vonage for Skype. I have been a Vonage customer since May 2004. ***

BOSTON--As marketing gimmicks go, this one is pretty good: put a bunch of coders and tech evangelists on tour bus once used by The Who and Def Leppard and send them on a cross-country road trip. That's just what Adobe Systems has done with its AIR Bus Tour, which visited Boston last Friday. Ten employees of Adobe will making three two-week trips to tout Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR, Adobe's software for running Web applications on desktop PCs. At the Boston event on Friday, Adobe rich-Internet application evangelist Ryan Stewart (and ZDNet blogger) showed off a number of applications already using AIR. The FineTune music player can look at the listener's local iTunes file to suggest music from its Web radio service. ***

When I first read the headline, I was shocked. I thought, "Wow! Skype runs on Windows servers???" But no. Skype blamed its outage over the weekend on a different kind of Windows problem. It turns out that when you have millions of Windows machines restarting at the same time (getting their weekly doses of patches because, um, the system is rock-solid), it can cause all sorts of problems for others. Like Skype. As reports The Register: The latest security update from Microsoft required a system reboot. ***

Update: I clarified some wording in the last paragraph to make it clear that the subscription price includes the hardware, not just support. I confess that, years ago, I was one of those people who was skeptical and somewhat uncomprehending when Linux seller Red Hat changed its pricing to a subscription model, charging for software updates and support over a set period of time. Traditional software companies charge for a license to use a particular piece of technology, but that doesn't work as well in the open-source domain, where getting access to the software itself is easy and free. Now, with many open-source software companies also offering subscriptions, the approach seems comparatively ordinary. So it should come as no surprise that Digium, which commercializes the ***

At least two sets of exploit code have been posted on the Internet for the security flaws in Yahoo Messenger 8 first disclosed on Wednesday by the security vendor eEye on Tuesday. The two exploits were posted on the Full Disclosure mailing list on Wednesday. One set of code shows how to cause buffer overflow in the Webcam ActiveX component. Another causes a buffer overflow in the viewer ywcvwr.dll. Both exploits were written by Danny. This morning Yahoo released ***

eBay gets the highest overall marks from developers as a Web platform provider followed by Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, according to a new survey by Evans Data. Amazon.com, which is trying to develop a large Web services business, scored near the bottom while Google gets good marks for its tools--even better than Microsoft. Although ***

Google engineers have enabled what Internet surfers for years have yearned for--Web applications that work offline. The search giant on Wednesday launched Google Gears, a browser plug-in that will let people run Web applications when they're connected to the Internet or not. The company released the source code for the Google Gears software in conjunction with Google Developer Day, a daylong conference in 10 locations. The goal of Google Gears is to create a single, standardized way to add offline capabilities to Web applications, said Linus Upson, engineering director at Google. The initial code is aimed at JavaScript developers who write ***

Amazon in June will modify the pricing of its Simple Storage Service (S3) to take into account bandwidth costs. The changes, which are set to go into effect June 1, will lower costs for 75 percent of the customers and cause an increase of over 10 percent compared to current costs for 14 percent of its customers, according to the company. Introduced last year, S3 lets developers store application data on Amazon servers. Pricing is now set at 15 cents per gigabyte of storage per month and 20 cents per gigabyte of data transferred. The changes lower the cost of storage to 15 cents per gigabyte-month of storage used. The new scheme also sets up tiered pricing for downloaded data and introduces a new cost for server requests over the Internet. ***

This just in on an official press release: "Linksys, a Division of Cisco Systems, and the recognized leading global manufacturer of voice, wireless, and networking hardware for home, Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) and small business user, today unveiled its iPhone family of Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions. The iPhone family of handheld devices harnesses the power of the Internet to enhance voice communications, integrate compelling information services, and deliver access to multimedia. In short, Linksys iPhones voice solutions and products give consumers the ability to do more with their phone than talk." iPhone Cordless Internet Telephony Kit sells for $79.99. Other models and bundles range from $99 to $329. ***