Just after writing a post earlier this morning that Microsoft’s Bing is out beta in a few countries, following Bing USA, Google has announced that they will be removing the Beta tag from a slew of Google applications, including Gmail, Talk and Docs, which are some of the applications in Google Apps Premier Edition. Google’s move is a bid to lure enterprises like software companies to subscribe to their paid service.

While I think that it is high time these Google applications come out of Beta since Gmail, for example, has been in Beta for at least five years, if memory serves me well, I am not sure if Gmail, at least, is ready due to my bad experience with it which has not been addressed or acknowledged by anyone in Gmail until today.

In any case, hopefully, now that they are coming out of Beta, we will see improved services for these apps, even for users of the free versions.

Microsoft issued an urgent warning about a security hole to their Internet Explorer browser where hackers exploit the hole to hijack the systems of victims. Vulnerable systems are those that run on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

According to Microsoft, attacks have happened for a week already and they are rushing to come out with a patch for this security hole. Meanwhile, we could visit the website of Microsoft to remove the problem from our Internet Explorer browser for the time being as a solution is being worked on.

The scary thing is that anyone could be a victim by just clicking a link from a spam email that would lead to a hacked website that would look like the legitimate website.

But I guess, whether we are using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome or anything else, we should never use simply click on links that come in spam emails, or even emails that we perhaps know the sender.

Microsoft has decided that Bing is ready to be out of beta in Australia, Canada, China, the United Kingdom and Japan. Obviously, with just a short while being launched, many features are still missing from the Bing compared to Bing USA, which has been out of beta already.

I have to confess though, that since Bing’s launch, I have not used it at all. Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying I do not like Bing or that Bing search results are irrelevant or more irrelevant than other search engines but Google has served me so well I see no reason to change.

Perhaps, out of habit cultivated through years of searching with Google, the first search engine I will fire up is Google. If I could not find the desired results, THEN I will continue my search with other competing search engines but that rarely happens, which explains why I have never used Bing yet. LOL

I read an article in an online newspaper which highlighted that there seems to be more perverts and sexual predators using MSN. This came after being made aware by two readers. Just a couple of days ago, I also read on a blog of a girl’s encounter with a guy on MSN which she said stalked her for a year.

Based on these two incidents, I wonder why these so-called “victims” never used the BLOCK feature. I use it liberally and would block anyone whom I think has gone out of line. Of course, in the first place, I will only allow people who know me or have dealt with me one way or another to add me to their messenger.

One thing I noticed from the screenshots provided is that these victims had strung along with these “perverts” which they shouldn’t have. Just let these perverts have a one-sided conversation and they will leave soon enough.