Macromedia has released a new Flash Player Public Beta. This Public Beta is a pre-release version of the next major release of Flash Player. It is being made available for developers and consumers to test their content to ensure existing content plays back correctly and that there are no compatibility issues.

This release is for Windows 98 and later and Macintosh OS X 10.1 and later. You can help Macromedia to ensure that this release will be of the highest quality by installing and using these players. If you encounter any issues you can fill out this form.

The US Department of Justice has decided to take a closer look at Adobe's acquisition of graphics rival Macromedia. Concerned over the future of the high-end graphics and web authoring software market once the transaction goes through, antitrust regulators have requested additional information from the two companies. The DOJ is especially interested in what will happen once the old GoLive vs. Dreamweaver and Illustrator vs. Freehand competition ceases under the suddenly larger Adobe umbrella.

The Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool checks Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 computers for and helps remove infections by specific, prevalent malicious software—including Blaster, Sasser, and Mydoom.

According to Paul Thurrott's sources at Microsoft, the software giant has set its sights on July 27, 2005 as the release date for Longhorn Beta 1.

Former WorldCom founder and CEO Bernard Ebbers was sentenced today to 25 years in federal prison for his role in the massive accounting fraud that brought down the telecom giant, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Tom's Hardware has a great article on two new features from Longhorn that will be interesting to modders and power gamers.

The first and most comprehensive of the two features is a tool called the Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSat). This is essentially a benchmarking tool designed into Windows, which generates scores based on system performance.

Microsoft is investigating a new public report of a vulnerability affecting Internet Explorer. We have not been made aware of any attacks attempting to use the reported vulnerability or customer impact at this time, but we are aggressively investigating the public report.

Google's phenomenal share price advance makes the internet search group now one of the world's 100 largest companies with a market capitalisation of more than $50bn, according to the updated version of the FT Global 500 rankings.

Web services will have a "catalytic effect" on software development; speech recognition will go mainstream in three to four years; search capabilities will feature richer, clearer interfaces; and security, well, Bill Gates is not about to let security get in the way of his digital vision.

When Google expanded their video search function to include user-uploadable videos, many of us wondered exactly where this video search thing was going. When you combine yesterday's announcement that Google Video is offering an in-browser video playback feature for viewing video search results with the fact that you can choose to offer your uploaded content for a fee, the direction becomes much more clear. If Hollywood won't offer video on demand, then Google will. But before I break out the crystal ball, let's go over how the video service works.