Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter. Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent. Bing’s share peaked in the first week of June at 9.21 percent, falling away in the middle two weeks before coming back at 8.45 percent in the last week of June. The results may give heart to Microsoft, which is investing heavily in its loss-making online services business and is refusing to cede the market to Google.

“At first sight, a 1 percent increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive,” StatCounter Chief Executive Adohan Cullen said in a statement. The world’s largest software company may yet strike an online search partnership with Yahoo to make itself a credible competitor, but talk of such a deal has quietened down. StatCounter, based in Dublin, says its data are based on 4 billion pageloads per month monitored through a network of websites. Other data research firms such as comScore are not expected to release figures on Bing’s share until mid-July.

Wang Junxiu, an Internet entrepreneur in Beijing who has objected to Green Dam and other forms of censorship, said the plan appeared to be poorly thought out and doomed to fail. “The leaders apparently decided the controversy and problems were too much and decided to make a break,” said Wang. “If this had been a well-prepared plan with senior support, the result would have been very different. But it wasn’t.” China said the Green Dam software was designed to block objectionable images, but the policy stoked opposition from industry and human rights groups and foreign governments who said it distorted fair market competition and strengthened Beijing’s ability to censor political views. On Monday, the European Chamber of Commerce in Beijing urged China to reconsider the move, saying it “poses significant questions in relation to security, privacy, system reliability, the free flow of information and user choice”. Last week, the United States also said the policy was “draconian” and the European Union urged it to be scrapped. But the most potent opposition may have been the many Chinese Internet activists, bloggers and lawyers who threatened protests, law suits and other actions against the plan. Susan Shirk, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of California, San Diego, said that earlier open criticism of “Green Dam” in the Chinese media suggested the plan did not have the backing of senior government leaders. “They do watch public opinion very carefully,” Shirk said of China’s Communist Party leaders. “There’s a very dynamic interaction between the Party authorities and the Internet public.”

Adobe said in a security bulletin on its website that Reader and Acrobat users should update their software to the newest versions. Additional software is available if those releases are not compatible with a customer’s PC. The maker of design and document imaging software said it has yet to find any malicious software that exploits the vulnerabilities. It classified the risk as “critical,” the highest level of risk on its scale evaluating the danger of such threats.

Adobe said the threat applies to users of Windows PCs as well as Apple Inc’s Macintosh computers. Once hackers learn of security vulnerabilities, they quickly develop malicious software to exploit them. Such programs can be used for cybercrimes such as identity theft, sending spam and taking control of computer systems. Alerting hackers to the flaws presents a challenge for businesses as they need time to test the patches before installing them on their computer systems. They need to make sure that the new software does not interfere with existing programs because patches can sometimes cause systems to crash. “Patching will be especially challenging for enterprises,” Dave Marcus, a senior researcher with McAfee Inc, the world’s No. 2 security software maker, said of the Microsoft patches. It will be easier for consumers to address the threats as they can quickly download patches over the Internet, easily eliminating their exposure to attack. Such patches rarely cause stand-alone PCs to crash.

The free tool, called “Google Wave,” runs in a Web browser and combines elements of e-mail, instant messaging, wikis and photo sharing in an effort to make online communication more dynamic. Google hopes Wave simplifies the way people collaborate on projects or exchange opinions about specific topics.

Google offered the first glimpse of its latest offering Thursday during the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s annual conference for software developers who build programs on top of its services. The rest of the Web-surfing public won’t be able to hop on Google Wave until later in the year.

By the time Wave rolls out for everyone, Google hopes independent programmers will have found new ways to use the service.

Among other things, Google is counting on outsiders to figure out how to weave Wave into the popular Internet communications service Twitter, social networks like Facebook and existing Web-based e-mail services, said Lars Rasmussen, a Google engineering manager.

Rasmussen and his brother, Jens, helped build Google’s online mapping service, which sprouted a variety of unforeseen uses after its 2005 debut because of the ingenuity of external programmers.

Having learned their lesson from the mapping experience, the Rasmussens wanted to give developers ample time to tinker with their newest creation before unleashing it on the rest of the world.

The Rasmussens broke away from Google’s mapping service in 2006 to concentrate on building a service that would enable e-mail and instant messaging to embrace the Web’s increasingly social nature. They contend e-mail hasn’t changed that much since its invention during the 1960s.

“We started out by saying to ourselves, ‘What might e-mail look like if it had been invented today?’” said Lars Rasmussen, who worked on Wave in Australia with his brother and just three other Google employees.

Wave is designed to make it easier to converse over e-mail by providing tools to highlight particular parts of the written conversation. In instant messages, participants can see what everyone else is writing as they type, unless they choose a privacy control. Photos and other online applications known as “widgets” also can be transplanted into the service.

The service could easily accommodate advertising like Google’s 5-year-old e-mail service already does, but Lars Rasmussen said it’s still too early to predict how the company might profit from Wave.

The Shin Bet security service said in its statement it had “received many reports of terror groups approaching Israelis on the internet offering to recruit them… and possibly kidnap them”. The statement mentioned one incident in which an Israeli citizen had been approached on Facebook by a man who described himself as a Lebanese merchant and then offered to pay for classified information. “The option exists, it’s easy, since many Israelis, not only young ones, sit at the computer a lot,” Elkana Har-Nof of Israel’s counter-terrorism headquarters later told Channel Two television. “It is a weapon for terrorist organisations.” Israel has warned against reprisals from the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah after its military mastermind, Imad Moughniyeh, was killed in a 2007 car bombing in Damascus. Hezbollah blamed Israel for the attack and has vowed revenge. Israel has denied involvement in Moughniyeh’s death.

The Shin Bet said that in the past several years a number of Israeli citizens and residents were arrested after being recruited by terror groups over the internet.