In a battle between AT&T and Verizon Wireless that never seems to end, AT&T's partner Apple now appears to be getting into the mix with two retaliatory iPhone TV ad that air Monday night. The ads comes hot on the heels of AT&T's TV ad campaign that aimed to "setting the record straight" around Verizon's "there's a map for that" campaign.

The two Apple ads (see below) show the iPhone's ability to browse the Web and manage phone calls simultaneously, a feat that's possible over AT&T's UMTS/GSM wireless network but not over Verizon's CDMA network, according to an account in Apple Insider.

The recently released Microsoft Security Intelligence Report highlights the vast improvements in security from Windows XP to Windows 7. Even so, no operating system is perfect. I asked security experts what they think about Windows 7 security and came up with a list of what Microsoft got right and where Microsoft is still missing the mark.

A Step in the Right Direction

Microsoft made significant changes to how it protects the Windows operating system kernel and added a number of new security controls when it transitioned from Windows XP to Windows Vista. With Windows 7, many of those security controls are enhanced and there are some new features as well.

Google's gobbling up another advertising company, the search giant has announced. Google will acquire Teracent, a Silicon Valley startup specializing in "intelligent display advertising." Yep -- that means more online ads customized specifically for your visit.

Teracent, of course, is far from Google's first foray into the online advertising world; as most people who use the Web can't help but know, Google-served ads are practically everywhere these days. Here's an overall look at Google's ad-related acquisitions and how they play into your online life.

A report from AdMob has people claiming there is now proof that iPhone users now account for more than half of mobile data traffic. For months now many have suspected the iPhone - with its data-hungry applications - is a network bandwidth hog. But a closer look at the AdMob report reveals iPhone users probably aren't as hoggish as some in the blogosphere are claiming.

It's not totally fair to extrapolate AdMob's results, as AppleInsider does (and as we have), to all smartphone data traffic, because that's not what the report measures. AdMob serves advertisements for mobile Web sites, but its in-app ads only appear on the iPhone and Android phones. AdMob spokeswoman Nicole Leverich said that roughly a third of the company's network consists of iPhone and Android applications.

In my early computing days (I'm talking Commodore Amiga here), I grew accustomed to file managers that used a side-by-side approach: Your complete file system was represented in two adjoining windows. That made it very easy to move or copy files and folders.

Consequently, I've never liked Windows Explorer, which uses a single file-tree structure. To me that complicates something as simple as moving a file from one folder to another. It's not intuitive.

If you had over $3,000 to spare, what would you do with it it? Component vendor OCZ Technology hopes that you'd spend it on one of its new, massive 1TB Colossus Series SSDs.

It's official: AOL is now Aol. As the fading Internet giant nears its 20th anniversary, the newly independent media company is prepping for another revamp. The latest step is a new logo, as seen below. The corporate name is now spelled with an upper case "A," a lower case "o" and "l," and a period:

A newly discovered threat that doesn't yet have any patch can allow for a Web-based attack against up-to-date Internet Explorer 6 and 7 browsers, according to security companies.

Both Symantec and Vupen Security have posted alerts about the bug, which involves the way IE handles cascading style sheets, or CSS. According to the posts, browsing a Web site with embedded attack code would trigger the assault. The site could be a specifically created malicious site, or one that was hijacked and had the attack code inserted.

Microsoft Windows 8 may be coming as early as 2012, based on a recent rash of comments and hints dropped by Microsoft personnel in official capacity and informal context.

About 10 percent of software applications turned down by Apple's App Store are "inappropriate," either because they will steal personal data, are meant to help users break the law, or contain "inappropriate content," an Apple senior executive reportedly said.

But in an interview with a leading business magazine, Apple's Phil Schiller ignored some big issues spurring iPhone developers to move to the Droid and other mobile platforms, and he didn't explain why Apple is acting as a software gatekeeper for mobile users.

No doubt they're breathing a big sigh of relief at Microsoft right now, after the world has had a first look at the Google Chrome operating system. Chrome represents absolutely no threat to Windows for the foreseeable future, just at a time when Microsoft is vulnerable.

Chrome will be an Internet-only operating system for netbooks that can only run Web-based applications --- it won't even be able to run applications written for Android, Google's operating system for smartphones. In essence, it's not much more than a browser that sits on a piece of hardware, and handles plumbing tasks like printing and connecting to hardware.

News Corp. and Microsoft are reportedly in "early stage talks" to cut an exclusive deal that would prevent Google from indexing the media conglomerate's news Websites some of which include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and others. The deal will allegedly give Microsoft's Bing search engine the exclusive rights to deliver search results and news pages with New Corp. content, according to The Financial Times . The report also says that Microsoft has approached other unnamed major Web publishers to cut similar deals.

This is the second time this month that rumors and speculation have surfaced about News Corp. delisting its content from Google. In early November, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch told Sky News Australia that his company might block Google from indexing its news Websites once all of the company's news properties erect pay walls by next year.