According to the Guardian, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling told MPs today that “

[a]round 80,000 [UK] business owners and investors will benefit from a new capital gains tax ‘entrepreneurs’ relief.’  They will pay just 10% on capital gains up to the first £1m, instead of the 18% originally proposed when Darling first announced CGT reforms last autumn.  Darling said the concession, which will be available to owners or investors with a minimum 5% stake in a business, would cost the Treasury £200m a year.”  However, “[t]he shadow chancellor, George Osborne, said Darling had offered a ‘text-book example’ of how not to introduce tax changes and that, despite today’s announcement, Darling’s plans would still amount to a £700m tax increase.”

The Register reports that “Mozilla’s chief of security has confirmed a vulnerability that could cause fully patched versions of Firefox to expose a user’s private data.  The confirmation, which was posted here by Mozilla’s Window Snyder, follows the release of proof-of-concept code by researcher Gerry Eisenhaur.  The bug resides in Firefox’s chrome protocol scheme and allows for a directory traversal when certain types of extensions are installed. Attackers could use it to detect if certain programs or files are present on a machine, gaining information to use in perpetrating another, more malicious exploit.”

The New York Times reveals that “John Donahoe wasted little time as the new chief executive of Internet giant eBay before announcing big changes.  Less than an hour after being named to the top spot at eBay by the departing chief executive Meg Whitman, Mr. Donahoe said in a conference call with analysts that the company must move more quickly and aggressively to make eBay more appealing to buyers and sellers.  In an effort to reinvigorate growth of the core eBay site, Mr. Donahoe said he would shift eBay’s emphasis from auctions to fixed priced listing, which could make the experience of buying on eBay more like the one customers have come to expect from sites like Amazon.com.”

According to Businessweek, “Michael Bloomberg has been quietly courting Silicon Valley regarding a possible run at the US presidency—and that Silicon Valley, or at least a few of its moguls, is impressed.”  The publication claims that “[f]or the most part, it was a fact-finding mission by Bloomberg.  ‘He wasn’t asking for anything. He was there to meet people, and understand how people on the West Coast [were] thinking about life,’ [said] [Businessweek’s] source.”

The Mercury News writes that “Facebook, owner of the second-most-popular social-networking Web site, will offer translations into Spanish, French and German by the end of March. Facebook members will be able to translate some of the site’s pages from English into the three languages, the Palo Alto company said Wednesday in a statement. Users also will be able to vote on the quality of translations. The site is expanding internationally as it gains ground on larger rival MySpace. Facebook’s unique visitors grew more than fourfold last month to 97.8 million from a year earlier. MySpace’s audience grew 19 percent to 107.2 million, according to Reston, Va.-based researcher ComScore. The company announced plans in October to more than double its workforce to 700 in 12 months to develop new features and sell more advertising.”