The long saga of the Lime Wire company appears to be close to an ending.

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This German software is all about diminished reality – removing objects from the visual field. We’ve seen something similar for photos (we’re reminded ofPhotoshop’s content-aware fill), but this software can neatly delete any object from live, full-motion video.

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GUANGZHOU, China — Two factories that make Microsoft Corp. products in southern China violated overtime regulations and failed to properly register the use of workers aged 16 to 18, officials said Monday.

The problems at the plants in the city of Dongguan were initially raised last week by the National Labor Committee, a New York-based nonprofit that monitors the treatment of foreign workers by U.S. companies. The group alleged that the teen laborers worked long shifts and were not allowed to use bathrooms during working hours at the plants, owned by Taiwan-based KYE Systems Corp.

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The original release of Windows Vista reached the end of its support on Tuesday, meaning that customers now need to be running eitherService Pack 1 or Service Pack 2 of Vista to get assistance from Microsoft.

However, in conjunction with this milestone, Microsoft did make a subtle adjustment to its support policy, easing the hard deadline a bit. Under the new policy, Microsoft support staff are allowed to make their “best effort” to provide limited troubleshooting to customers running unsupported service packs, even if they don’t have a custom support contract.

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SAN RAFAEL, Calif. – Autodesk Inc. has settled a 3-year-old trademark dispute over its DWG, or drawing, file format with the Open Design Alliance, a consortium of software developers and users that promotes open and standard formats for computer-aided design data.

Under the terms of the agreement, the Open Design Alliance will cancel its DWG-based trademark registrations with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and stop using DWG and DWG-based trademarks in marketing and branding. And Autodesk will abandon its efforts to cancel the Open Design Alliance’s DWG-based trademark registrations with the Patent Office.

Autodesk, based in San Rafael, makes 2D and 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. The company’s shares were down 5 cents at $31.04 Friday afternoon.

Autodesk said the settlement “focuses on avoiding customer confusion by non-Autodesk products’ use of DWG as a trademark without prior permission from Autodesk.”

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Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new approach to software development that will allow common computer programs to run up to 20 percent faster and possibly incorporate new security measures.

The researchers have found a way to run different parts of some programs – including, for the first time, such widely used programs as word processors and Web browsers – at the same time, which makes the programs operate more efficiently.

In order to understand how they did it, you have to know a little bit about computers. The brain of a computer chip is its central processing unit, or “core.” Computing technology has advanced to the point where it is now common to have between four and eight cores on each chip. But for a program to utilize these cores, it has to be broken down into separate “threads” – so that each core can execute a different part of the program simultaneously. The process of breaking down a program into threads is called parallelization, and allows computers to run programs very quickly.

However, some programs are difficult to parallelize, including word processors and Web browsers. These programs operate much like a flow chart – with certain program elements dependent on the outcome of others. These programs can only utilize one core at a time, minimizing the benefit of multi-core chips.

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The sudden takedown of an Internet provider thought to be helping spread one of the most promiscuous pieces of malicious software out there appears to have cut off criminals from potentially millions of personal computers under their control.

But the victory was short-lived. Less than a day after a service known as “AS Troyak” was unplugged from the Internet, security researchers said Wednesday it apparently had found a way to get back online, and criminals were reconnecting with their unmoored machines.

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Google Inc stepped up its assault on Microsoft Corp’s productivity software business with the acquisition of a small start-up company that allows Microsoft users to edit and share their documents on the Web.

Google said on its company blog on Friday that it has acquired San Francisco-based DocVerse. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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In this post, Ed Bott will share my experiences, including close encounters with some very nasty malware and some analysis on how the latest showdown between Microsoft and the pirates is likely to play out.

You won’t find names or direct links here—although these guys seem like genuine enthusiasts, I have no intention of giving them any free publicity. But if you’re interested in tracking down the tools I tested you should have no trouble finding them using the clues available in screenshots and descriptions here.

If you do intend to try this stuff out for yourself, I recommend extreme caution. My hunt for utilities that bypass Windows 7 activation technologies led me to some very seedy corners of the Internet. First, I did what any red-blooded wannabe pirate would do and tried some Google searches. Of the first 10 hits, six were inactive or had been taken down. After downloading files from the remaining four sites, I submitted them to Virustotal.com, where three of the four samples came back positive for nasty, difficult-to-remove Windows 7 rootkits. Here’s one example:

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Two telecom operator-backed mobile software groups signaled closer co-operation on Tuesday as carriers face increasing competition from the new rivals Google and Apple. The two consortiums, wireless Linux group LiMo and application alliance WAC, offer operators alternatives to the software and services of Apple, Google or Nokia as they can brand and customize their software.

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