Sources are reporting today that Google is deep in talks to get music labels on board for a Google competitor to iTunes. The service would offer digital downloads, as well as a digital locker that users could stream music from. This is a feature Apple has yet to implement despite buying music streaming startup Lala several months ago. 

The man behind Google's Android operating system, Andy Rubin, is supposedly leading the talks with music labels. Rubin is the driving force for getting the service up and running this year, say sources. The labels meanwhile, see this an opportunity to take some of the wind out of iTunes' sails. 

Google will have a steep hill to climb if they can get Google Music off the ground. Amazon has thus far been able to capture only 12% of the US digital music market. Google's ace in the hole will be Android. If this streaming is integrated with Android handsets via a downloadable app, it could make the service very desirable.

Image via Gadget Reviews

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After the whole iPhone 4 antenna fiasco, you'd think Apple would be a little reluctant to start flinging mud. You'd also be wrong. During Apple's San Francisco event yesterday, Steve Jobs used part of his time on stage to call into question Google's activation numbers, albeit not directly.

"We think some of our friends are counting upgrades in their numbers," said Jobs, presumably directed at Google's Eric Schmidt, who last month announced Google was activating over 200,000 devices a day. "We think we are ahead of everyone."

In responding to Jobs' accusation, a Google spokesperson got right to the point.

"The Android activation numbers do not include upgrades and are, in fact, only a portion of the Android devices in the market since we only include devices that have Google services," a Google spokesperson told CNN.

If we're to believe Google, then not only was Jobs wrong in his assertion, but the number of Google Android devices could conceivably be higher than the 230,000 Apple devices Jobs says are activated on a daily basis.

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Online auction site eBay is slated to ditch Google Checkout as a payment option by next July. At that time, the only online payment method available to users will be eBay's own PayPal service. An eBay spokesperson claimed the move is intended "to give eBay buyers a consistent, speedy checkout experience and to ensure support for fast-growing sales via mobile platforms." 

If you ask us, this has more to do with eBay owning PayPal than user experience. Google Checkout has had trouble finding widespread usage. Amazon does not support Checkout, so the loss of eBay will hit the service hard. Users of Android phones in most countries do, however, use Google Checkout to pay for apps. 

Have you used Google Checkout to buy anything lately? Do you think either PayPal or Checkout is a better service?

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Can you name the company with the worst track record for patching critical vulnerabilities in recent times? IBM’s X-Force security research team reckons it knows the answer. According the X-Force 2010 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report, there is no one worse than IBM itself when it comes to leaving critical vulnerabilities unattended for long durations. IBM took the top spot thanks to its failure to fix 29 percent of all critical bugs that were brought to its notice in the first half of 2010. Oracle (22%) and Microsoft (7%) occupy the next two spots on the list.

This, in fact, is a revised version of the report. As per the original, Google was the company with the highest percentage of unpatched flaws in H1 2010. However, Google was quick to dispute IBM's claim that it had left 33 percent of critical and high-risk bugs in its software unpatched: “We learned after investigating that the 33% figure referred to a single unpatched vulnerability out of a total of three — and importantly, the one item that was considered unpatched was only mistakenly considered a security vulnerability due to a terminology mix-up. As a result, the true unpatched rate for these high-risk bugs is 0 out of 2, or 0%.”

But this wasn't the lone mistake in the original, which also erroneously rated Oracle-owned Sun as the vendor with the highest percentage of unpatched vulnerabilities in the first half of 2010. But that honor now belongs to Microsoft.

“After we released our trend report this week, we received feedback from two software vendors regarding the severity and remedy information for some of the vulnerabilities behind this chart,” IBM said in a blog post.“As a consequence of this feedback, we have manually reassessed the CVSS scoring, remedy information, and vendor information for every vulnerability that impacted the percentages that appear in this chart.”

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