Search giant Google’s latest feature, a personalized Web page creator, appeared to have stumbled on its first day, Feb. 23. However, Google says it planned the limited release to last for just a few hours’ worth of sign-ups. Capacity issues forced the company on Feb. 23 to temporarily stop letting people sign up for Page Creator. Google Reader and Google Analytics, two of Google’s other applications, also opened and closed on their first days. Google’s new service promises easy-to-create Web pages, stored on Google’s servers. Each page has a Web address that begins with the user’s Google account name followed by ".googlepages.com."

Microsoft is inviting testers to try an early version of new parental control software for Windows XP called Windows Live Family Safety Settings. The parental controls software lets people filter online content, Microsoft said in an email invitation to testers sent Wednesday. It is designed to help keep Web content that parents deem inappropriate from reaching their children–such as items on alcohol, pornography, gambling and tobacco, the company said. Windows Live Family Safety Settings lets customers create individual accounts for children and see activity reports on the Web sites they visited. The service can be disabled when the parents themselves go online.

Yahoo Mail will now let people register usernames that include the word "allah," after a ban designed to thwart prejudice went astray. The policy reversal, announced Wednesday, came too late for Linda Callahan of Ashfield, Mass., who set up a Google Gmail account after being rejected by Yahoo Mail because of the presence of "allah" in her name, said her son, Ed Callahan. The existence of the ban made a bit of a splash on the Web after it was reported in The Daily Hampshire Gazette on Friday and picked up by The Register and Slashdot this week. Early Wednesday, Yahoo issued a statement about its new policy and the reasons for the original ban.

A group of the world’s largest technology companies complained to the European Commission on Wednesday that Microsoft was guilty of anticompetitive practices. The European Committee for Interoperable Systems, which includes IBM, Nokia, Oracle and RealNetworks, claimed that Microsoft was hampering competition in the software market. ECIS called on the European Commission to take action against Microsoft. It cited the software giant’s refusal to use the OpenDocument standard or release details of its .doc, .xls and .ppt file formats, which it said prevents the makers of other productivity suites from being fully interoperable with Microsoft Office.

Essential Methods Software announced the release of a new software product, Monkey Explorer 1.0. Monkey Explorer allows for scheduled keyword searches of specific Web pages and reports the results via desktop notification, email or other program of your choice. It is the first desktop software available to perform a Web page defined micro-search in a market filled with mega-search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Monkey Explorer’s intuitive wizard guides the user through creating their first keyword search. Monkey Explorer can run multiple searches at the same time, so the user can search and detect text from multiple Web pages simultaneously.

The Washington Post’s online arm has apparently been caught in a metadata gaffe that exposed the whereabouts of a 21-year-old hacker who confessed to controlling thousands of compromised PCs for malicious use. The hacker agreed be interviewed by Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs on the condition that he not be identified by name or home town, but when the article was posted on the newspaper’s Web site, an accompanying photograph included metadata that pinpointed the location to Roland, Okla., a small town with a population of 2,842. Because of the metadata slip-up by the Washington Post, it is very likely that law enforcement authorities will be looking in the direction of Roland, OK to find the hacker, who was described in the story as "tall and lanky, with hair that falls down to his eyebrows," and speaking with a "heavy Southern drawl and Midwestern nasality." But, as eagle-eyed Slashdot posters discovered, the online images by photographer Sarah L. Voisin contained tags about the location of the shoot.

MailList King allows you to manage and communicate with a mailing list from your own computer. MailList King V6 is a major upgrade that implements over 250 changes and improvements. Particular areas of focus have been performance and improved functionality and reliability when sending.

Microsoft Business Solutions unit and its partners are testing new Web-service add-ons to Microsoft’s ERP and CRM applications by making code available under various Microsoft’s Shared Source licenses. Microsoft quietly has been posting these add-ons to workspaces on its GotDotNet source-code hosting site since last fall. Like the MSN business unit, MSB (Microsoft Business Solutions) is testing out potential new products and code samples by sharing them via "Sandbox" test sites, company officials said. The most recent Sandbox project, which MBS unveiled officially on February 20, is a family of "Snap Dynamics" tools that are designed to bridge Microsoft Office 2003 with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 and Dynamics/AX (formerly Axapta) ERP products. Microsoft is making the Snap code for these first Snap tools available under the Shared Source Permissive license. And more Shared Source Snap tools are in the pipeline, officials said.

Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab have recovered from an error that caused significant email troubles for some users of Microsoft’s Antigen email security software. Antigen users started receiving updates for their Kaspersky Lab antivirus engine again on Tuesday. Microsoft and Kaspersky had put those on hold after a flawed update caused trouble last week. The problems left some people without fully functional email systems for as long as 10 hours. The culprit was a routine update to the Kaspersky antivirus engine.

Windows narrowly bumped Unix in 2005 to claim the top spot in server sales for the first time, according to a new report from IDC. Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers, IDC analyst Matthew Eastwood said of the firm’s latest Server Tracker market share report. "It’s the first time Unix was not top overall since before the Tracker started in 1996."