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Microsoft is reportedly considering to launch an own-brand tablet PC that features Windows 8 by the end of 2012 with cooperation from Texas Instruments and Taiwan-based OEMs/ODMs, according to sources from the upstream supply chain. However, Microsoft did not confirm the rumor.

we show a shortened version of the original link, people will know which site the link points to. This service also increases security. If users click links that are reported as malicious, we direct them to a page that warns them.

Well, now might be a good time to check your Facebook privacy settings as many Facebook users are reporting that the site has enabled the option in the last few days without giving users any notice. There are billions of photographs on Facebook's servers. As your Facebook friends upload their albums, Facebook will try to determine if any of the pictures look like you. And if they find what they believe to be a match, they may well urge one of your Facebook friends to tag it with your name.

Chrome also now gives you more control over the data that websites store on your computer. This includes Flash Player’s Local Shared Objects (LSOs), which were previously only manageable using an online settings application on Adobe’s website. We’ve worked closely with Adobe to integrate Flash LSO deletion directly into Chrome, making it easier for you to manage your online privacy. Finally, Chrome’s graphics capabilities continue to improve. This release includes support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, which means you’ll get a snazzier experience in some web pages and web apps that choose to implement 3D effects. To see hardware-accelerated 3D CSS in action, check out this Chrome Experiment on Windows Vista / Mac OS X 10.6 or above, featuring clips from Aardman Studio's “Shaun the Sheep.” In this simple experiment, you can rotate the video, scale it up and down, toggle the reflection on and off, and activate a rotating carousel of videos. Of course, you can also just enjoy the animated antics of a few funny animals.

Starting now, Google Maps for mobile and desktop can tell you when your ride is actually going to arrive with new live transit updates. We partnered with transit agencies to integrate live transit data in four U.S. cities and two European cities: Boston, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, Madrid and Turin.

The problem of IPv6 brokenness will be significant today and tomorrow because there are 418 corporations, universities and government agencies participating in a large-scale trial of IPv6 known as World IPv6 Day. One of the primary goals of World IPv6 Day, which is being sponsored by the Internet Society, is to determine the magnitude of IPv6 brokenness.

Path CEO Dave Morin, who knows firsthand the challenges of social log-ins from his photo-sharing app, tweeted during the keynote yesterday, “Twitter is the luckiest company on earth today.”

We are no longer offering specialized search services at google.com/linux, google.com/microsoft, google.com/bsd, google.com/mac, google.com/about and google.com/unclesam. These services were established many years ago to offer search across a limited index of the web, which in the past was a better way to find this information. For example, google.com/linux was designed to help people find information from message boards and blogs about the Linux operating system. Today, search quality has advanced tremendously, and based on our analysis we’ve found that in most cases you're better off looking for this kind of specialized information using the regular Google search box

A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are, is that we are willing to invent. We are willing to think long-term. We start with the customer and work backwards. And, very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. I believe if you don’t have that set of things in your corporate culture, then you can’t do large-scale invention. You can do incremental invention, which is critically important for any company. But it is very difficult — if you are not willing to be misunderstood. People will misunderstand you.

Skype announced today that its users are having trouble signing into the VoIP service, yet again. "A small number of you may have problems signing in to Skype. We're investigating the cause, and hope to have more details to share soon," Skype tweeted this morning. Since then, the company has issued two updates on its blog. "We've identified the cause of the problem, and have begun to address it," wrote Skype's Peter Parkes. "If you've been affected, you should start to see improvement in the next hour or so. You shouldn't need to manually sign back in to Skype—it should reconnect automatically when it's able to do so."

Dutch tech site All About Phones claims that Google Maps Navigation will get a true offline mode later this summer. In December the Android app received an update that cached routes and the surrounding areas, but without a data connection you still couldn't enter a new destination. A source inside the Dutch telco industry said that Goog would removing the requirement for coverage -- an obvious next step for the nav tool, especially with Ovi Maps bringing its turn-by-turn prowess to WP7. The move is also bound to be another thorn in the side of standalone GPS makers like Garmin and TomTom. After all, it's tough to compete with free.