Gripe Line: Why would Microsoft use a customer’s credit card number as ID for an E-Learning account? Good question, indeed. “The reader contacted Microsoft to see how to let the client’s user take the course without having access to his credit card,” Ed Foster reports in Microsoft’s E-Learning needs a lesson in security. Only way to change the ID was to delete the account and that, of course, defeats the whole purpose. “I find it disturbing that a major vendor would use credit card numbers for anything except billing,” the reader writes. Pop quiz: Nine Inch Nails, Alice in Chains, AC/DC and Whitesnake. They’re all in the first question of this week’s InfoWorld News Quiz. Also, Steve Ballmer is itchin’ to buy a lot of something, Comcast has been up to nasty business, and phishers try to steal from Supervalu. Think you know tech? Prove it. Notes from the field: Another Friday, another geek week in review. Leading off, Oracle’s gesture of granting BEA a deadline to accept its acquisition offer. “I understand if that tactic doesn’t work, they’re threatening to airlift Larry Ellison’s ego and drop it onto BEA’s corporate offices, covering the building in a warm gelatinous ooze,” Cringe writes. AT&T joins the fun this week by inking a deal by which it will charge customers $2 each to download songs to handsets. And Microsoft aced out Google when it took a stake in Facebook. The news beat: Oracle’s president says that BEA’s counteroffer is “impossibly high” and for any company, not just Oracle. Startups are vying for position in the mobile search market, while stalwarts Google and Yahoo meet resistance from U.S. operators. Microsoft says that it has sold 88 million copies of Vista despite being largely snubbed by enterprises. And Acer eclipses Lenovo as the third largest PC vendor and, now, sets its sights on Dell. Security