LOS ANGELES (AP) — Microsoft is expected to make a "major" announcement after the market closes Monday.

Speculation about the Los Angeles media event has ranged from an unveiling of a new tablet computer that uses low-power chips to a new system that will use an upcoming version of Windows to help people access TV shows and movies across a range of devices.

Microsoft announced a $300 million, 17.6 percent stake in Barnes & Noble's Nook e-book business in April, so a tablet-focused update is also expected.

The Windows 8 system is expected to be released in September or October, in time for devices that will ship for the holiday season. Windows 8 is considered to be the biggest change in decades to the widely used operating system from Microsoft Corp. It has been designed so that it can run desktop, laptop and tablet computers, giving PC makers a better chance of competing with Apple Inc.'s iPad.

"This will be a major Microsoft announcement — you will not want to miss it," the company said in an email invite to the media on Thursday. A company spokesman declined to comment further.

The event, set to start at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, is being kept under such tight wraps that the company has declined to provide its location until Monday.

Toronto: Need an energising playlist of songs for your morning workout or perhaps one that will improve your focus at the office later in the day? A new iPad app streams music tailored to your current situation and mood.

Songza, a Internet radio service since 2007, launched its iPad app earlier this month following success with iPhone and web apps. It aims to help people find the perfect playlist for what they're doing at the moment - whether it's unwinding after a hectic week, reading the morning newspaper or hosting a cocktail party.

"We're trying to make the world's greatest collection of amazing playlists and long-form listening experiences", said Elias Roman, co-founder of Songza, a web radio company based out of Long Island City, New York.

The app's core feature is its "concierge service" that suggests situations or activities in which a user might be involved based on several factors such as day of the week, time of day, the device being used and previous behavior that the app learns over time.

For example, if it's a Saturday morning, Songza might suggest music for cooking breakfast or songs to help the user fall asleep again. If it's a weekday evening, the app might suggest music for working out or commuting home from work.

"We change the situations, filters and playlists based on things we start to learn about you," said co-founder Peter Asbill.

Upon selecting a situation, the app screens for genre, decade and mood, and for each filter, it provides three different playlists, created and curated by a team of critics, journalists, DJs, musicians and ethnomusicologists.

"The idea is (to) get people to just three playlists really quickly that they're going to love and are going to be perfect for whatever situation they're in and whatever type of music they love," explained Asbill.

The app, which aims to please many different types of users, includes more than 100,000 playlists, encompassing 18 million songs.

Despite competition from music streaming services such as Pandora, Spotify and iHeartRadio, Roman said Songza has seen its user base grow 50 percent monthly since they introduced the music concierge feature to their iPhone and web apps in March.

Asbill attributes the success to their focus on designing for mobile devices first. Within five days of its June launch, the iPad app was downloaded more than 700,000 times. 

 Two of the most pervasive and dangerous types of software for stealing money from bank accounts have been improved and can now transfer money out automatically, without a hacker's supervision, researchers said.

The latest variants of the widespread SpyEye and Zeus programs have already stolen as much as 13,000 Euros at a time from a single account and are in the early stages of deployment, according to investigators at Trend Micro Inc, a Japan-based security company that has many banks as customers.

Trend Micro Vice President Tom Kellerman told Reuters that his company's researchers had seen the new attacks on a dozen financial institutions in Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy. That is troubling because European banks generally have greater technology defenses than those in the United States, and Kellerman said it is "inevitable" that the variants will cross the Atlantic.

The new code has the potential to dramatically escalate the amount being stolen from accounts and a years-old arms race between the banks and criminal groups that are often based in Eastern Europe.

"This has tremendous implications," especially as Americans move toward banking by phone, said Kellerman. "This attack toolkit ushers in a new era of bank heists."

Like other security companies, Trend Micro profits by selling software and services to institutions and consumers worried about online spying and account takeovers.

Though written and controlled by different groups, SpyEye and Zeus share the ability to be installed on computers that visit malicious websites or legitimate pages that have been compromised by hackers. Both programs are sold in the burgeoning underground hacking economy, where they can be customized or improved with additional modules like those just discovered.

The programs already have used a technique called "web injection" to generate new entry fields when victims log on to any number of banks or other sensitive websites. Instead of seeing a bank ask for an account number and password, for example, a victimized user sees requests for both of those and an ATM card number. Everything typed in then gets whisked off to the hacker, who later signs in and transfers money to an accomplice's account.

Those transfers can be time-consuming, and the hacker has to think about how much can be sent out at once without drawing attention. Multiple, smaller transfers are preferable but take more time.

For the past year or more, some variants have also captured one-time passwords sent from the banks by text messages to client cell phones as an added security measure. But in those cases, a hacker had to be online within 30 or 60 seconds in order to use the one-time password.

The new software allows the criminal to siphon money out while he sleeps. It could significantly increase the number of hacked accounts and the speed with which they are drained.

Brett Stone-Gross, a senior security researcher with Dell Inc unit Dell SecureWorks, said thieves "will be able to extract more money" with automation.