That computer is NELL, the Never-Ending Language Learning system, and it’s the star of a project involving researchers from Carnegie Mellon, supercomputers from Yahoo!, and grants from Google and DARPA.

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A company linked to Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen is suing 11 major corporations, including Apple, Google and Facebook, accusing them of infringing on technology patents.

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Google Inc, its YouTube video service, and Yahoo Inc on Thursday filed counterclaims against Xerox Corp in a lawsuit accusing them of infringing the document management company’s patents on Internet searches.

In filings in Delaware federal court on Thursday, the defendants sought declarations that they did not infringe the two patents at issue, or variantly that the patents are invalid and thus cannot be enforced by Xerox.

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Microblogging sensation Twitter. which has now signed up more than 100 million users, outlined on Wednesday several revenue-generating initiatives, declaring that making money was now a primary goal.

The popular Internet service hopes to snag hundreds of millions more users in coming years by making the service easier, integrating Twitter directly into Web sites and focusing more on customizing the service for mobile devices.

At the company’s first conference for Twitter developers on Wednesday, Chief Executive Officer Evan Williams said generating revenue was among the key priorities going forward — a change of tone for a firm that had previously said it focused mainly on improving the user experience.

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A cyber-espionage group based in southwest China stole documents from the Indian Defense Ministry and emails from the Dalai Lama’s office, Canadian researchers said in a report on Tuesday.

The cyber-spies used popular online services, including Twitter, Google Groups and Yahoo Mail, to hack into computers, ultimately directing them to communicate with command and control servers in China.

The report, entitled “Shadows in the Clouds”, said the spy network was likely run by individuals with connections to the Chinese criminal underworld. Information might have been passed to branches of the Chinese government, it added.

“We did not find any hard evidence that links these attacks to the Chinese government,” said Nart Villeneuve, who, like the other authors of the report, is a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“We’ve actually had very healthy co-operation with the Chinese computer emergency response team, who are actively working to understand what we’ve uncovered and have indicated they will work to deal with this … It’s been a very encouraging development,” Villeneuve told a Toronto news conference.

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In the latest set of data on the U.S. search market, Nielsen earlier this week reported that Microsoft (MSFT) Bing in February saw its share jump to 12.5%, up from 10.9% in January, as it pulls customers away from all of the other major players.

* Nielsen estimates that Google (GOOG) had 65.2% share in the month, down from 66.3% in January.
* Yahoo (YHOO) fell to 14.1%, from 14.5%.
* AOL (AOL) fell to 2.3%, from 2.5%.
* Ask.com (IACI) was steady at 1.9%.

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer intends to keep the regulatory heat on Google as his company strives to lessen its rival’s dominance of Internet search.

In an appearance Tuesday at a search engine conference, Ballmer said Microsoft believes Google Inc. has done things to gain an unfair advantage in the Internet’s lucrative search advertising market. He didn’t specify the alleged misconduct.

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Microsoft has rescinded the copyright complaint that resulted in the shutdown of the long-standing whistleblower website, Cryptome.org, after it published Redmond’s spy guide for law enforcement.

The company said it has asked Cryptome’s ISP, Network Solutions, that the website be restored and that it no longer wants the offending document to be killed. On Wednesday, Cryptome hosted a 22-page PDF that outlines what information Microsoft gathers about its users and what can be handed over to authorities if required.

Similar guidelines for law enforcement have leaked their way to the website before, exposing the policies of Facebook, AOL, Skype, and Yahoo, among others.

Microsoft lawyers swung the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) in an attempt to force Cryptome to pull the document. When it refused to take action, Microsoft complained to Network Solutions, which not only closed the website, but placed a lock on the Cryptome.org domain to keep it closed.

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The watchful eyes at Phoronix noticed that a pair of small changes were announced yesterday on the Ubuntu dev list. Both will affect the browser in Lucid Lynx — and both have to do with search.

The more subtle of the two is a small tweak within Firefox. When a user changes his or her default search, the Ubuntu start page’s search box will send queries to that provider. While most users may never see this in action (just about everyone sets a custom home page, right?), it’s a nice change and keeps the search experience consistent.

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Firefox has just turned five, and it’s doubtful anybody outside of Redmond begrudges Mozilla’s celebrations. The open-source browser now accounts for 25% of the global market, according to figures from Net Applications, and has brought a radical rethink in what we expect from a browser.

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