Up front: Another no-go for Adobe Flash on iPhone, and does Google beat the Pre?

What's Now | What's Next main bannerHere's an idea, see what you think: You remember that big Domain Name System cache poisoning warning we faced last year, the one where the whole Internet was threatened and every major vendor acted swiftly to prevent it from happening (with Apple bringing up the rear, again)? Well, even Microsoft was on top of this one, with the idea that if DNS servers used authentication, they could encrypt communications between each other and secure DNS servers from being spoofed or from having false entries inserted into their lookup tables. Not that it was Microsoft's idea, engineers had actually been considering it since the 1980s. So what if the US Government got in on the act? Maybe that might prevent a telecommunications disaster! Do you think?... The government gets wise later in WN|WN, but first, Adobe and Apple aren't getting any wiser.

Even now, no Flash for iPhone

Afternoon of June 4, 2009 • The actual work involved in getting Adobe Flash to work on the iPhone is probably not only minimal, it's likely already been done. The only thing really holding back progress would appear to be internal politics. Over a year ago now, Adobe was telling its public that it would press ahead with its goals, despite the statements of Apple CEO Steve Jobs telling his loyal followers that he had seen Flash and it did not pass muster.

But in a statement to The Wall Street Journal yesterday, Adobe CEO Kevin Lynch was forced to acknowledge the obvious: that not a shred of progress whatsoever had been made at breaking the logjam. After having started out the session apparently bragging about how "the game" has moved over to smartphones, and how Adobe is all over that, reporter Ben Worthen likely asked the obvious question, "What about iPhone and BlackBerry?" Worthen spared us the probable 15-minute gap between the question and the only answer he could squeeze out, which was, "We need to have Apple's agreement before we can do it." Once again, someone's personal pride prevails over progress.

And the smartphone winner is... Google?

Afternoon of June 4, 2009 • Some of the All Things D collective are clearly students of history, or know a few. After a hard day of rounding up the significant Palm Pre reviews -- "to a one, glowing," as Digital Daily's John Paczkowski puts it, though one could certainly read the Reuters review differently -- MediaMemo's Peter Kafka concludes that the winner in the current smartphone war isn't going to be Palm, or Apple, but Google. And not with Android either, but with the usual core-competency search stuff. Those who know how the California or Klondike gold rushes worked out should now nod sagely.

Speculation builds for WWDC

Next Monday > Apple's big conference next week -- a new iPhone, a tablet, the return of Steve Jobs? Maybe it'll be all three. Or some. Or none. The Wall Street Journal ponders Jobs' apparently imminent return -- some sources say he will, The New York Times thinks he won't, and Computerworld's Gregg Keizer suggests everybody just calm the heck down.

Digg to charge less for well-liked ads

July 2009 > On Wednesday, Digg announced it will augment its platform to allow readers to digg or bury ads just as they do stories. "The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay," wrote Digg's Mike Maser on his company blog. "Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system."

It's an interesting innovation on ad pricing, sure, but as Chadwick Matlin at The Big Money points out the social ad units plan also has the genius effect of forcing advertisers to be more entertaining and creative. (It's for the advertisers' own good; who wants to look at a boring ad? More on this in What's Next.) Meanwhile, Mashable takes the opportunity to note that Facebook's ads are by and large lame.

Nineteen years later, the government gets serious on DNSSEC

End of 2009 > Or maybe I should just say, "within our lifetimes, at last." In an amazing announcement yesterday, the US Dept. of Commerce said it will... after nearly two decades of essentially tabling the matter for further discussion by our offspring... begin adopting the IETF standard DNSSEC for securing the Internet's root domain name servers.

National Institute of Science and Technology director Cita Furlani stated yesterday that it may just be time to start securing DNS servers handling the .gov domain. "Signing the root will significantly speed up the global deployment of DNSSEC and enhance the security of the Internet," she said. Maybe, just maybe, change is coming.

After the jump: Tech headlines from around the net...

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