Software giant Microsoft Corp. is setting up a research and development center in Shanghai for its online MSN service, its first such center outside the United States, sources familiar with the plan said on Wednesday.

The move came after Microsoft saw setbacks in its online services in China, including the resignation of a top executive responsible for the company’s Windows Live unit in China late last year.

“It’s a clear signal that Microsoft won’t give up its online MSN service in China even though it may have some problems in its local operations,” one source, who declined to be identified told Reuters.

“Twenty million dollars is really small money to Bill Gates, but it’s important to notice that Microsoft has chosen Shanghai for its first overseas MSN R&D center,” the source added.

Legitimate e-mail now constitutes a rounding error when compared with spam, thanks to a standing army of more than a million zombie PCs waging war on in-boxes worldwide on any given day.

Some 94% of all e-mail last December was spam, according to Postini’s annual communications intelligence report, which the managed e-mail security company released today.

In 2006, the volume of spam rose 147% by Postini’s measure. The company attributes the surge in spam to PCs that have been commandeered by cybercriminals without the knowledge of their owners.

In and of itself, this sounds like the same mixture of marketing and reporting that messaging security firms have engaged in for years. And it is that. But that doesn’t diminish the real difficulties businesses face in coping with spam.

Trend Micro, a leader in anti-virus and Internet content security, is making the latest version of its trademark all-in-one defense against Web-based threats available Jan. 29.

Trend Micro Client Server Messaging Security 3.5 is aimed specifically at meeting the security needs of SMBs (small and midsize businesses), company officials said. Offering protection against spyware, rootkits and bots, the new product also features automated checks to identify outdated Windows machines, without the added requirement of visiting individual desktops.

The program allows users to manage security for the entire network by looking at a single console, said Raj Ventak, Trend Micro’s director of small business marketing, in an interview with eWEEK.

News Corp. studio Twentieth Century Fox subpoenaed Google Inc.’s YouTube video service to learn who uploaded pirated copies of episodes of television shows “24″ and “The Simpsons,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The subpoena, filed January 18, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, asks YouTube to hand over information to identify the subscriber so Fox can stop the infringement, the Journal reported.

The four-episode season premiere of thriller show 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland, appeared on the site ahead of its TV broadcast, and 12 episodes of the Simpsons were being distributed on YouTube by a subscriber called “ECOtotal,” the subpoena’s declaration said, according to the paper.

Fox said it officially notified YouTube about the episodes and requested immediate removal or to disable access to the service, the Journal said.

News about the subpoena filed surfaced on the blog, Google Watch.

The list of Internet domain names just got shorter.

The Internet’s key oversight agency decided recently to yank “.um” — for U.S. “minor outlying islands.”

No one was using it anyhow, and the organization that has run “.um” — the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute — no longer wanted to bother.

So the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers decided unanimously last week to eliminate it entirely, bringing the list of domains to 264. There are still separate domains for larger U.S. territories, including “.gu” for Guam and “.vi” for the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The Internet has seen new domain names such as “.eu” for Europe and “.travel” for the travel industry in recent years, and ICANN is reviewing a proposal to create an online red-light district under “.xxx.”

Last month, it began accepting public comments on how best to pare the list by revoking outdated suffixes, primarily assigned to countries that no longer exist.