Apple iTunes sells over 3bn songs

Apple has sold more than three billion songs at its iTunes online store, exclusively paired with its popular iPod MP3 players, reports the Herald Sun.

According to statistics from market tracking firm NPD Group, iTunes is the third-largest music shop in the US, ahead of real-world Target stores and pioneering Internet retailer Amazon.

"We'd like to thank all of our customers who have contributed to this incredible milestone," said iTunes VP Eddy Cue.

Sony has already been slapped with patent suits over the construction of its PlayStation 3 Blu-ray discs and the system's digital security technology. Now the electronics giant is being taken to court over the parallel processing Cell chip that powers its latest console, says GameSpot.

In its suit, California-based Parallel Processing cites a patent for "synchronised parallel processing with shared memory" that was approved on 8 October 1991.

The patent was originally assigned to International Parallel Machines of Massachusetts, while Parallel Processing describes itself as its "exclusive licensee".

Social networks are changing the way people consume music at a time when piracy is on the rise and the growth rate of legal downloads has slowed, says BBC News.

Those are the key findings of a new survey conducted by analyst firm Entertainment Media Research. The survey found 53% of people actively surf social networking sites to find music.

A further 30% said they went on to buy or download music that they had discovered on a social network site.

Still battling vulnerabilities that could allow the Firefox browser to pass dangerous data to third-party applications like Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla this week released Firefox 2.0.0.6 to fix the problem, states InformationWeek.

In mid-July, Mozilla released Firefox 2.0.0.5 with patches for several vulnerabilities, including the "highly critical" security bug that has been plaguing both Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. On Monday, the open source group shipped workarounds and patches for two related bugs.

The fixes come right before the opening of the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas this week. Mozilla is expected to release additional security tools there.