msnbc.com: "With the arrival of Facebook Places , Facebook is showing (not for the first time) that it has the power to steamroll friends and competitors alike.

People can gripe all they want about privacy concerns, but with half a billion members, Facebook is the only game in town, so leaving comes at pretty huge costs. And people developing new apps and services that might be within Facebook's reach? They should be afraid. Does this all sound familiar? It's not too tough a riddle: Just replace 'Facebook' with 'Google' and it all holds true.

The question is, how soon until Facebook takes on Google directly?"

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CNET News: "If Facebook Places catches on with the company's 500 million users, Facebook could be sitting on a gold mine of local business listings that advertisers and users will love and Google will hate.

The software vendor finally rolled out its latest version of Hotmail to its 350 million users last week, but since then the company has faced plenty of complaints from disgruntled customers unhappy with the new interface.

Many have griped that emails have disappeared and that scripting errors in Hotmail prevent them from composing new messages.

Others cannot access their accounts at all, and the grumbles are continuing to mount up in the Hotmail forums.

Blackberry services stand to be banned from the UAE unless manufacturer Research in Motion allows the UAE government to access users' encrypted messages.

Image via Wikipedia

Sci-Tech Today To the list of dwindling worldwide resources add Internet addresses. According to experts, the nearly 4.5 billion current addresses aren't enough, only six percent of available addresses are left, and the Internet will run out of addresses by sometime late next year.

Three main factors are behind the upcoming shortage. One is the explosion in web access from multiple devices for each user, primarily in developed countries. Each of those smartphones, laptops, tablets, desktops and other devices that access the web require a different IP, or Internet protocol, address. And the demand for device addresses is increasing rapidly, with TVs, game consoles, even automobiles offering web-browsing capability.

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Honoring the great tradition of 'borrowing' other browsers' features, the next version of Firefox looks a lot like Google Chrome, with tabs moved above the navigation bar and a single button that replaces the menu bar. That doesn't mean the two browsers look and feel the same. Here's a breakdown of Firefox 4 beta's interface features and how they fares against Google Chrome:

TechFlash has reported that Microsoft is eliminating jobs in the low hundreds in the Seattle, Wash. region - and hundreds more globally. Though the figures are imprecise, they don't appear to represent a significant percentage of Microsoft 88,000-plus workforce--nor do they suggest that Microsoft is in immediate financial peril

Fortune