We were a bit surprised last summer when the major music publishers piled on to the bandwagon and sued Limewire. After all, the major record labels (who own most of the major publishers anyway) were already involved in a lawsuit with Limewire and had won a pretty complete victory over the file sharing system.

Having the publishers sue as well seemed like just a way to try to squeeze even more money out of a dead shell.

Microsoft has launched a countdown site to track what the software maker hopes is a sooner-than-later death for the 10-year-old Internet Explorer 6.

With IE 9 near completion, Microsoft said Friday its time for IE 6 fans to say bye bye to the trusted friend that clings to life despite being superseded by three generations of the Web browser. "C'mon IE6, it's time for a modern Web, so nice knowing you and all that but … buhbye," Steve Clayton, director of cloud strategy for Microsoft, said in the company's blog.

A few new Windows 8 user interface screenshots have leaked. Windows 8 build 7910 is part of the Milestone 2 branch, so we're not seeing the latest, but it is rather interesting that it took just eight minutes to install, approximately 2.5 times faster than Windows 7.

You have to thank the Chinese website Win7China for offering a glimpse into the future even though the leaks did include several wallpapers with a "ssh…let's not leak our hard work" message.

You thought the 70MB/s write speeds were wild? The kids at Patriot are making the scene at CeBIT with the successor to the Supersonic USB thumb drive we first saw at the tail end of last year, and it's putting its old man to shame.

The Supersonic Magnum series, sporting capacities up to 128GB, boasts a single eight channel controller with 200MB/s read and 110MB/s write speeds. And it will fit in your hip pocket! Release date TBA, and we can only imagine it will cost you a pretty Deutschmark. [engadget]

WEB BROWSERS will be hacked and laughed at during next week's Pwn2Own hacking contest, but Microsoft won't be fixing any Internet Explorer bugs beforehand.

Pwn2Own is held at the annual Cansecwest security conference, which gives away devices and cash prizes. Last year Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox were successfully hacked and exploited.