Up front: Persistent bugs set back Firefox 3.5 RC

Tuesday's tech headlines

Ars Technica

• In Stockholm, the District Court has answered charges that the judge who heard the recent Pirate Bay was biased, since he belonged to two copyright organizations. The Swedish court claims that Tomas Norström was simply undertaking what we over here would call continuing professional education. Perhaps the Pirate Party needs to offer similar education opportunities for legal professionals...?

• The Coalition for ICANN Transparency has been trying since 2005 to advance their antitrust suit against VeriSign. The Ninth Circuit ruled late last week that the suit can proceed at last. CFIT, which is made up of DNS registrars who are not VeriSign, says the 2006 contract by which ICANN awarded oversight of the main .COM registry to the Mountain View-based company, violates the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and has kept domain-registration prices artificially high.

• Ars puts forth its port-mortem of E3, naming the best and worst of the show. Great writeup, but must their excellence award be called the Golden Ars? That just sounds wrong.

New York Times

• The venture-cap firms that made the big moves during the first Internet boom may not have the right stuff this time around, Claire Cain Miller writes. Speaking at a conference last week, Judith Elsea, co-founder and managing director of Weathergage Capital, said that age, shifts in interests, and a lack of "sophistication" mean that "the top firms might not be who you think they are." Oddly, Miller did not provide Elsea's age in the article.

• The Times' Gadgetwise blog is wall-to-wall WWDC, if you must.

Reuters

• A Clinton-era Commerce Department official is leading the Technology CEO Council, a group of tech firms (including Intel and HP) that doesn't like President Obama's plan to boost taxes on certain overseas profit. Interesting, but Kim Dixon points out that the group appears to be working from a different set of numbers than those in the actual proposal.

• We're less than a year away from ICANN's liberalization of the top-level domain space, but a lot of companies that might like to run their very own TLD (and have $185,000 to put toward the privilege) have no idea the change is afoot.

The Register

• A suspected zero-day vulnerability in HyperVM may have been the vector by which hackers smoked as many as 100,000 sites hosted by UK-based Vaserv.com late Sunday. Company officials say that any user information breached was encrypted and therefore protected.

• We're all still waiting for Apple to patch its Java vulnerability, but Securosis' Rich Mogull says Cupertino's problem is much more extensive than that. "Based on a variety of sources," the head of Securosis wrote recently, "we know that Apple does not have a formal security program, and as such fails to catch vulnerabilities that would otherwise be prevented before product releases." The Register's Dan Goodin takes a look at five suggestions Mogull makes to help the company get up to speed on security matters. (One in particular has to sting: Mogull suggests that Apple follow Microsoft's lead and develop a Software Development Lifecycle plan.)

• Ready to shell out for Windows 7? A memo allegedly leaked from somewhere in the bowels of Best Buy says the mega-retailer will begin pre-sales of the operating system on June 26.

Thursday, June 11, 10:00 am EDT > Well, you knew change was really coming round about last November, and now we know it's here at long last: Later this week, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce will hold a markup hearing to discuss HR 1084, the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act of 2009.

It's just a few paragraphs, but it would require the FCC to enact regulation that would mandate that both broadcasters and cable operators keep the volume down on TV ads, so that "such advertisements shall not be presented at modulation levels substantially higher than the program material that such advertisements accompany." On the whole, that sounds reasonable enough, but expect dissent from lawmakers who would rather not create new reasons for the FCC to oversee broadcasters.

Not today > The O'Reilly Found Conference should be starting today in Burlingame, but Current Conditions required the company to suspend the SEO conference for now. SEO-heads are encouraged to follow janeandrobot.com's Twitter feed to keep up on the SEO scene in the meantime.

June 9-10 > The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) sponsors the World Copyright Summit at the Ronald Reagan Center in DC today and tomorrow. The event's web site says that stakehoiders will be represented: "Creation, Licensing, Usage, Collective Management, Legislation and Dissemination, Trade Press and Media," and attendees include Christine Albanel, the French Minister of Culture and Communications who spearheaded the recent HADOPI legislation in that country.