Up front: World awaits WWDC, will Jobs reboot?

One way or the other, Steve Jobs will likely be the story of this year's WWDC. The keynote is to be led by senior marketing VP Phillip Schiller, but if The Jobs is to appear anywhere, our bets would be on the "one more thing' spot about 45 minutes into the presentation. With whispers of his return to health spreading through the usual channels, it's difficult to imagine him not, at the very least, leaving a taped message. If there's no word from him at all, that will still be the story as the faithful will probably speculate about his poor condition. More on WWDC in What's Next, as we move forward on this Monday.

Pre-verts dissect new phone for your amusement

Last Saturday morning • The wait is over, the reviews are in, the phones have been activated, and there's just one thing left to do as we mop up after Palm Pre-mania: vivisections! The folks at IFixit waited on line all night and, when they got their Pre Saturday morning, hustled off and took it down to the chips. Oh, they did some testing of the phone before slicing and dicing -- activation only a little glitchy, EV-DO working great, WebOS great too -- but it's step-by-step teardown you want, and it's step-by-step teardown you shall have, with plenty of photos.

Meanwhile, Ubergizmo iFixit also tore down the Touchstone inductive charger and found its component parts to be worth a bit less than the $70 price tag. Like, about $65 less. And Jon Lech "DVD Jon" Johansen was out ahead of everyone with a look at the USB hack that disguises the Pre as an iPod for MediaSync purposes. Pre Central has an idea about how Apple can shut that down, assuming Cupertino chooses to.

Another Firefox 3.5 release candidate

5:00 pm PDT June 5 • Two things can happen when you hold a massive testing event for a piece of software. Number two is that it uncovers a whole lot of bugs. We noticed one ourselves last week with a daily build of RC1 of Firefox 3.5 in Windows 7: Sometimes the Back button stays grayed and doesn't work.

So after purging as many as eleven late-breaking "blockers" that kept Mozilla from cutting the ribbon on its latest Web browser last week, the organization held a second "Test Day" among its internal developers and contributors last Friday. Unless the group sees a recurrence of "number two," Mozilla may be ready to launch the release candidate of 3.5 for public testing as soon as this Wednesday.

Remembering Rajeev Motwani

Friday morning, June 5 • We need not only all the brainpower we can muster to get us through this next round of tough times, but also strength of spirit. After this weekend, that's a bit harder to do, as the man who guided Google's founders to love a topic as esoteric as data mining, and to embrace the concept of privacy while they were at it, has died of an accidental drowning. Dr. Rajeev Motwani was a Stanford professor and angel investor responsible for, among other things, shaping Larry Page and Sergey Brin's thinking. He was only 47.

The Mercury News has, inevitably, the best coverage in the mainstream press, but tributes have poured in from around the blogosphere. Brin, with whom Motwani, Page and Stanford computer-science professor Terry Winograd co-authored the 1998 paper "What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket" (which describes both Google and PageRank), wrote in his blog that "Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly. Yet his legacy and personality lives on in the students, projects, and companies he has touched. Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it."

Om Malik, a friend and fellow New Delhi native, was clearly shaken, writing on GigaOm that "My day is ending with a broken heart and tears in my eyes." Malik spoke of a meal he'd had at the Motwani house a few weeks ago and shared a few stories from other enterpreneurs, noting that "There wasn't a startup he didn't love."

Dr. Motwani is survived by his widow Asha and their two daughters.

Monday's tech headlines

New York Times

• The best way to screen out video porn is to have actual humans look at it, writes Virginia Heffernan, though companies such as VideoSurf are working on the problem.

• Jenna Wortham finds that the best way to make money selling mobile applications is to write a good one, then sell the entire company.

Ars Technica

• ARRRRR and avast, scurvy knaves of the European Parliament! Sweden's Pirate Pirate is boarding as we speak, with more than enough votes to secure a seat among the new crop of MEPs. Elsewhere, the German incarnation of the party made enough of a showing to qualify for government funding next time around. Want to bet these legislators will be more Web 2.0-friendly?

• Also winning a round last week: low-power FM stations, when an appeals court tossed a suit that would have forced the FCC to stop protecting those stations from interference by more powerful broadcast signals. Matthew Lasar does a nice job explaining the long and complicated history of this battle; current NPR donors may, however, find that reading it saves them some money, as one mightn't much feel like donating when you hear what the lawyers have been up to.

• The RIAA has fired back at Jammie Thomas' lawyer, saying that Kiwi Camara's request to toss the MediaSentry evidence used to "prove" Ms. Thomas' peer-to-peer usage was "premised on an entirely fictional set of facts and law." Based on the tone of the music industry's response, Ars' Nate Anderson predicts "this case will be a fiery one." (The defendant is, by the way, now Ms. Jammie Thomas-Rasset; congratulations are due on the recent marriage.)

Wall Street Journal

• Some people still remain unprepared for the digital TV switch on Friday. Amy Schatz managed to write her entire story without calling those people idiots.

• Carolyn Cui has a fascinating piece on how analysts make up for the dearth of useful financial information released by China with old-fashioned research, much of it online.

• Loretta Chao, on the other hand, has a frightful depressing (though also fascinating) piece on how the Chinese government will require that all computers sold in the country as of July 1 be fitted with Web-blocking software aimed at "constructing a green, healthy, and harmonious Internet environment, and preventing harmful information on the Internet from influencing and poisoning young people." In other words, the likes of H-P and Dell are about to go through what Yahoo and Google went through a couple of years ago. Who'll be the moral midgets this time?

The Register

• A group of crackers claims to have well and truly owned up T-Mobile -- corporate data, user accounts, infrastructure, the whole thing. When they couldn't find anyone to sell it to at T-Mo's competitors (um, duh, you jackasses -- try not to derive your profit model from bad movies next time, mmkay?), they went to The Reg, which is pursuing the story as we speak. Stay tuned.

• The draconian German law that criminalized the creation or distribution of certain kinds of security software hasn't been used in any prosecutions since it was signed into law two years ago, and seems only to have succeeded in driving legitimate researchers out of the country. Nice one, Germany.

• President Obama hasn't even gotten that new deputy CTO post filled yet and already some consumer-watchdog groups are terrified that it's going to be Andrew McLaughlin, the just-resigned director of global public policy at Google. Beat the rush, one supposes, though with some of the "watchdogs" one is pretty sure that snarling at Google is simply a reflex by now.

Wired

• Is steampunk less cool now that steam's a going technology concern? Combined heat and power (CHP) aficionados think we've got a lot to learn -- or, rather, re-learn -- from our past, suggests Alexis Madrigal.

• Sixty years ago today, George Orwell's 1984 is published. Once upon a time, people used to debate whether Orwell's vision of a future dystopia was more accurate that that of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. However, thanks to the wonders of the Internet and similar tech advances, we have settled the debate by proving both men right. Progress!

WWDC -- what would Steve Jobs do?

10:00 am PDT, June 8, 2009 > With Apple out of Macworld, this is it -- the biggest show of the year for Cupertino. The San Jose Mercury News and Macworld.com both caution readers not to expect much in the way of hardware news from a software developers' conference, though that hardly keeps AppleInsider from disseminating one last rumor re announcements concerning the next iPhone. BusinessWeek's Arik Hesseldahl, meanwhile, has a fine article on how the transition back to a Jobs-run Apple might go down.

Today, 10:00 am EDT > Representatives from nine of the nation's leading civil-rights organizations will gather in DC to reveal the findings of the Broadband Opportunity Summit, held back in February, and to announce the formation of the Broadband Opportunity Coalition. The members have a plan for improving broadband adoption and literacy among minority, disability, low-income and other disadvantaged American communities -- a plan that meshes with the goals of the administration's American Recovery & Reinvestment Act's Broadband Technology Opportunity Program, from which the group hopes to receive funding support.

June 9, 2009 > Get ready, patchmeisters: Not only has Microsoft got a bumper crop of fixes to Windows, IE, Word, Excel, and Office slated for Patch Tuesday (six of them rated critical, three important, one moderate), Adobe will launch its quarterly scheduled patch distribution with a critical-level update for versions 7.x, 8.x and 9.x of Adobe Reader and Acrobat for both Windows and Mac. (Unix users get a reprieve of unknown duration, though that's hardly comforting when it's a critical-level patch.)

And beyond > Not that the efforts of privacy-protection groups aren't general welcome and smart and necessary, but your reporter's got to wonder if protesting Andrew McLaughlin's potential deputy-CTO nomination isn't a sign of a certain monomania with a few of these groups. Yes, Google's big and increasingly scary; yes, the White House has made a vocal commitment to barring the door to lobbyists. But speaking as if McLaughlin is simply a lobbying wedge for his former employers goes a bit far; frankly, smart techies would be at least as concerned about his role in the increasingly shifty ICANN.