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This story was updated at 4:50 p.m. PDT with a new headline, and additional comment from Microsoft.

Microsoft has taken the covers off a future update to its Bing Maps service that removes the need for its Silverlight browser plug-in to view an alternate mapping layer, and has also announced that it plans to remove its 3D map viewer. The changes will arguably make the service more approachable to the masses, but indicate that the company is going in a different direction with its online tools and technology platforms.

In a post on the Bing community blog, Bing … Read more

If you've never used an Eye-Fi SD card, it's a pretty great solution for using wireless networks to get photos and video you've just shot out of your camera and stored on your computer and/or uploaded to a favorite sharing site. Getting full access to that content from a computer other than your own, however, wasn't easy until today's launch of Eye-Fi View. The service lets you shoot and store to the company's cloud storage so you can view and share from just about any Web-connected computer and mobile device.

One of the … Read more

How confident are you that your computer is safe from an online attack?

Chances are you rely on vendors like Microsoft and Apple to let you know when a security update is ready to be installed. (Google updates systems automatically.)

But until a patch is released, that hole--known as a zero-day vulnerability--in effect makes your computer a sitting duck for anyone who writes an exploit for it and bothers to distribute it via e-mails and drive-by downloads on Web sites.

EEye Digital Security launched a Web site yesterday that lists current zero-day vulnerabilities and offers an archive on ones that … Read more

Speaking to the U.K.'s Official Nintendo Magazine, Hollis said he believes Activision sees more value in the franchise's name than in the quality of the title. And he's concerned that the company will allow its "business decision" to get in the way.

"I imagine it's a business decision, isn't it?" Hollis said in an interview with Official Nintendo Magazine. "'This name is valuable, let's use … Read more

TinEye, a Web-crawling Google Chrome extension, has the job of locating an image's site of origin. While you are on a Web site, TinEye will open a gallery filled with the page's images. After selecting the image you want, TinEye will try to find it in their database of 1,647,128,150 images and their respective sites. Though this service would be very useful, it failed to come up with a satisfactory amount of results during testing.

After the quick installation, a little T icon is installed to the right-hand side of Chrome's address bar. To … Read more

If you're a fan of the old N64 classic GoldenEye and look forward to Activision's remake for the Wii coming this fall, we're happy to note that Activision will be serving up a special bundle that contains a gold-colored Classic Controller Pro for $69.99.

The standalone game, which will retail for $49.99, does allow you to play with the Wii's motion controller, but many argue that the dual-analog Classic Controller Pro lends itself better to first-person shooters. Alas, a white Classic Controller Pro retails for $20, so you're not getting any sort of … Read more

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an arm of the U.S. government that oversees satellite imagery collection for military and intelligence work, has awarded two satellite imagery companies contracts worth more than $3 billion each.

The two 10-year contracts are part of a program called EnhancedView to produce a new generation of satellite imagery. GeoEye, based in Dulles, Va., was awarded $3.8 billion, and DigitalGlobe, based in Longmont, Colo., was awarded $3.55 billion.

Each contract is paid annually, subject to congressional approval, and can be canceled annually. The long-term funding paves the way for development of next-generation satellites with … Read more

The first thing that should come to mind when you think of Cooliris is photos. The company is well known for its imaging products, which include a very snazzy cross-platform browser add-on, an iPhone app, and embedded Web site and mobile phone technology. All of these are able to turn a collection of photos into an interactive, 3D wall, be it in on your browser, Web site, or cell phone.

But with its latest creation for Apple's iPad, called Discover, Cooliris is moving beyond the presentation and organization of photos and into something a little more pedestrian: text.

Discover, which was submitted to Apple on Tuesday, takes content from Wikipedia--both text and still images (but mostly just text), and splits it up into sections. These can be flipped through with your finger, instead of scrolling down a large page in Safari. The app also keeps track of where you've been so you can retrace your reading path if you've gone several pages deep.

"When the iPad came out, we took an idea we had, and said 'this is probably a perfect platform to try it on,'" Cooliris' executive VP of products Michele Turner told CNET. "This new application takes structured data--in this case Wikipedia, as the starting point. We've then created a templatized starting page and structured data from Wikipedia to let users navigate the depths of Wikipedia in a beautiful and efficient way."

The end result is a Wikipedia with larger text that can be read like an e-book, and photos that can be thumbed through and scaled up to the iPad's full resolution. The app also takes advantage of orientation to reposition, or expand or consolidate the data it's showing. Along the way, Cooliris serves up advertisements, which is where it can make some of its money given the app's free price tag.

But why Wikipedia, and not a larger chunk of the Internet, as something like the recently popular Flipboard has done with RSS feeds? The short answer is that it's not there yet, but it will be soon. Turner and company do, in fact, envision Discover as a platform for various data feeds from around the Web. "We have over 100 content partners in the mainstream Cooliris product," Turner said. "The longer term opportunity is to work with the content partners to flow into this application, but that's kind of down the line."

Eventually the company plans to bring it to other platforms, including Android tablets. In making the iPad iteration of Discover, the company even built one for the iPhone, though Turner says it didn't feel quite right given the smaller form factor.

More pics of Discover can be seen after the break.… Read more

Security researcher and former Microsoft gadfly Marc Maiffret has returned to the company he started when he was a teenager, eEye Digital Security.

Maiffret had been serving as chief security architect at antimalware firm FireEye since December and will remain on the company's technical advisory board, Maiffret said in an interview on Monday.

"I'm coming back to eEye as chief technology officer to lead the overall technology vision and be involved in day-to-day stuff on the research front," he said.

Asked why he was returning to the company he started in 1998 when he was a … Read more