Up Front: Jammie's still not sure what the 'Z' in 'KaZaa' stood for

Perhaps you've noticed that the world is becoming more global? It seems that everywhere you go these days, you're reminded that America is no longer necessarily the center of the universe. This morning's WN|WN takes you through Taiwan where Acer may become the world's #2 PC supplier, through mainland China where our emissaries would like a word with the government about filtering, through Iran where a lady named Neda has instantly become the symbol of a revolution thanks to technology (though we may have to revoke our thanks from Nokia), and back to a little out-of-the-way part of the planet called Bozeman, Montana.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset: The aftermath

Morning of June 20, 2009 • Jammie Thomas-Rasset's sticking with her story about never hearing of KaZaA before this whole RIAA mess blew up. Speaking to reporters from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in the aftermath of her trial, she spoke of how it feels to have a $1.92-million judgment against her for something she claims she didn't do.

So what about that $1.92 million, anyway? CNET's Greg Sandoval thinks that thanks to varying legal interpretations of the word 'willful," bankruptcy just might get her out of this mess if she so chooses. Ars Technica's Nate Anderson breaks down six possible paths for her: Pay the sum, settle, declare that bankruptcy, make a constitutional challenge concerning the damages, appeal, or get the law changed. (Feel free to arrange those in your own hierarchy of unlikelihood.) The recording artist Moby, meanwhile, expresses a lovely thought on his own blog: "i'm so sorry that any music fan anywhere is ever made to feel bad for making the effort to listen to music. the riaa needs to be disbanded."

Dell's market share slips severely in Q1

Afternoon of June 19 • At this time last year, when the bad economy started to turn worse, it looked like Dell's recovery plan was succeeding, pulling close to even with PC market leader HP in the US. But that trend began unraveling later in the year, and now as hardware analyst iSuppli has confirmed, Dell's market status is in free fall.

For the first time this century, Dell is in danger of slipping to the #3 position worldwide behind Acer, which is absorbing Dell's losses along with Toshiba. While HP's PC shipments in Q1 2009 remained about flat on the year at just over 13 million units, Dell shipped about 2 million units less worldwide, losing about 1.7% in global market share.

All this while all the world's manufacturers combined shipped 8.22% fewer PCs in the previous quarter than the year before -- 66.5 million versus 72.3 million. You could say it's the bad economy (in fact, iSuppli analyst Matthew Wilkins did blame the economy) but three of the world's top five suppliers weathered the storm fairly well this past quarter. Number 5 Toshiba gained 0.9% of market share at 5.2%, and #3 Acer has found happiness in the double digits with a 1.8% share gain. But HP held onto the lion's share with 49.2% more units shipped worldwide than Dell, which eked out below 8.8 million units compared to Acer's 7.4 million.

US wants a word with China about filtering

Afternoon of June 19 • Because we haven't got enough drama in Asia right now, the United States has lodged an official complaint with China about its new Green Dam filtering efforts. The Financial Times reports that representatives of our embassy met with Chinese officials from the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

FT also notes that China executed a classic misdirection campaign as unrest about the filtering increased, accusing Google China of linking to porn and such and demanding that the site suspend international searches. (The paper goes on to say that Baidu, the Chinese-grown site, links to the same stuff.) The People's Daily has a nice recap of what's happening, including tales of a government intern's attempt to discredit Google by blogging about how one of his classmates got into the pr0ns and went all wrong.

Montana town doesn't need applicant passwords after all

June 19, 12:00 pm PDT &bull We mentioned Friday morning in this space that the city of Bozeman, Montana was asking job applicants for their usernames and passwords on a wide variety of online services. Well, that's over now -- after word got out and the tide of public opinion washed over the town of about 30,000, city officials have thought better of the idea, saying in a prepared statement, "We appreciate the concern many citizens have expressed regarding this practice and apologize for the negative impact this issue is having on the City of Bozeman."

Bozeman's own KZBK has details and the full statement from City Manager Chris Kukulski, who frankly does sound genuinely embarrassed about the whole thing...but, as the Bozeman Daily Chronicle's Amanda Ricker points out, it's really just suspending the practice pending "a more comprehensive evaluation." (Fun comments area on that story, by the way.)

New Android phone misplaces its keyboard

July 2009 > Hello summer, hello more smartphones: T-Mobile's finally announced a followup to the "Android" G1. The myTouch 3G will be ready for pre-order in July and on sale in August... and it appears to have lost its keyboard.

AndroidCommunity.com's Chris Davies immediately identified the handset as the HTC Magic. At CNET, Marguerite Reardon (who didn't get the best of her editor's attention on this piece) recaps some of what's expected for the phone, and attracts a number of comments from people who are less than pleased at the "step backward" represented by the virtual keyboard.

Morning of June 22, 2009 > Today's the kickoff day of the AJAXWorld conference (there's an entire world of AJAX now) in New York City. The keynote speaker this year is a guy who's familiar to folks who deal with Fusion middleware: Oracle's Ashish Mohindroo, Senior Director of Product Marketing. But what will be especially interesting to hear from Mohindroo this year is the degree to which he incorporates Sun Microsystems technologies -- now becoming part of the Oracle portfolio -- in his discussion on Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and collaboration.

Most specifically, will he touch more on Java (the foundation of Oracle Fusion) or Solaris (believed to be one of the key elements in the company's collaboration vision). Expect to see an updated roadmap for Oracle's Application Integration Architecture (AIA), and the part that will be most interesting is, what gets integrated most: Solaris or Java?

AFTER THE JUMP: Monday's tech headlines from around the net...