You know the odds are stacked against you defending your case that you didn't provide false testimony to Congress when the hearing you're invited to attend is entitled, "Yahoo Inc.'s Provision of False Information to Congress." Though official transcripts or video have yet to be made public, based on written testimony entered into the record, it's clear that House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D - Calif.) turned the heat up to high in grilling Yahoo's chief attorney Michael Callahan and his boss, CEO Jerry Yang, for what Lantos described as conduct before Congress that warranted an apology to the nation.

"If you think our witnesses today are uncomfortable sitting in this climate-controlled room and accounting for their company's spineless and irresponsible actions," reads Rep. Lantos' prepared opening remarks for this morning, "imagine how life is for Shi Tao, spending ten long years in a Chinese dungeon for exchanging information publicly - exactly what Yahoo claims to support in places like China."

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Last July, an agreement was reached between Kaleidescape - a manufacturer of a hard-drive-based DVD content copying device for consumers - and a group representing the rights holders for key DVD copy protection provisions. That agreement presumably enabled licensed copies to be burned through services such as Kaleidescape, which themselves would require licenses.

Despite that agreement, and despite a California court decision last April in Kaleidescape's favor, the DVD Copy Control Association will meet tomorrow with representatives of three movie studios to debate whether to amend their existing licenses in such a way that Kaleidescape's service would be disallowed by other means.

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Nearly a year after Sun Microsystems first announced it would be releasing a build of Java to the open source community, Red Hat has apparently signed on. In an announcement this morning, the company said it has licensed Sun's Java SE Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK), with the objective to produce an optimized Java for its Enterprise Linux that will drive JBoss applications.

"Red Hat customers will benefit from a highly optimized, accelerated runtime for JBoss Enterprise Middleware in a Linux environment," reads a Red Hat statement this morning.

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A few hours after Google's dramatic announcement which some sources had still been anticipating as a mobile phone bearing the Google brand, we actually know less about Android than we did -- or thought we did -- at 11:00 this morning when it was announced. During a midday press conference featuring key Google executives including CEO Eric Schmidt, reporters called into question most of the principal facts surrounding the new Open Handset Alliance - most importantly, the ingredients of the Android platform.

"One of the key differences in what we're developing is the reality of it," responded Google's Director of Mobile Platforms, Andy Rubin, to a question Om Malik asked about how handset manufacturers who joined the Alliance will be expected to distinguish their Android-based products from one another. "Within one week's time, this software will be in the hands of developers, and developers will be able to create applications, and those applications will be able to be included in handsets that are available in the second half of 2008."

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In a somewhat successful marketing ploy that shows Google has indeed learned something from Steve Jobs after all, the company lifted the veil on what was anticipated to be a cell phone with Google's logo on it. Instead, it's a software platform, which should not have been a surprise from a company that's in the business of making software platforms. What's more, it's an open source Linux kernel for cross-branded third-party apps...that omits the Google brand.

"Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices," stated Google's director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, in a blog post this morning. "It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications - all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation."

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At the TechEd conference in Barcelona earlier this morning European time, Microsoft developer division corporate vice president S. Somasegar told attendees to expect the final Visual Studio 2008 to be shipped sometime in late November 2007. Since it is now early November 2007, that gives the company a pretty narrow RTM window.

But the "marketing launch" for the product is described as being set for February 2008, which means all the big parties will be delayed until after the holidays. Microsoft may have chosen to follow a Vista-like rollout model, making the next edition of its development suite available to volume license customers and MSDN subscribers first. The company had already slated a rollout party for SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 for February, and VS 2008's contribution to the champagne will apparently wait until then.

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In a gamble that is certain to receive stiff opposition from both sides of the aisle, Reps. Gene Green (D - Texas) and Mike Conaway (R - Texas) offered to the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday a draft resolution opposing the imposition of royalties on terrestrial radio broadcasters for the use of sound recordings.

"For more than 80 years, Congress has rejected repeated calls by the recording industry to impose a performance fee on local radio stations for simply playing music on the radio and upsetting the mutually beneficial relationship between local radio and the recording industry," reads one clause of the draft for House Concurrent Resolution 244, which thus far has garnered 50 co-sponsors.

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"Months after I testified before two House subcommittees on Yahoo's approach to business in China," reads a statement released this morning by Yahoo Senior Vice President and General Counsel Michael Callahan, "I realized Yahoo had additional information about a 2004 order issued by the Chinese government seeking information about a Yahoo China user."

That user was Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist about whom his government sought private information from Yahoo, his Internet service provider. The Chinese government used that information as evidence against Tao, eventually sentencing him to 10 years' imprisonment for divulging state secrets.

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As Microsoft sources first quietly noted on its product teams' blogs on Monday, and as the company is making clear today, one of the roles that had been planned to ship as part of Windows Server 2008, and that was being tested with the current Release Candidate 0, now will not be shipped with the final product. Instead, admins will be able to download the SharePoint Services 3.0 directly from Microsoft for no additional charge.

"As we're getting closer to release, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is returning to how it was previously available to Windows Server 2008 customers," wrote senior product manager Julius Sinkevicius on Monday. "Specifically, we are going back to making it available as a separate download that is available to customers at no additional charge."

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In advance of its likely acceptance by JEDEC as an international standard for memory implementations, Qimonda said today it is now sampling the first Graphics Double Data Rate 5 memory in 512 Mb modules.

It is graphics memory that analysts attribute to the stellar rise of Qimonda, the Infineon division yet to be spun off, into the global #3 supplier position on iSuppli's list, behind Samsung and Hynix Semiconductor. Having been on the crest of the GDDR3 wave put Qimonda there, and now the company and its parent are taking a gamble on hopping directly over one generation of memory and riding the GDDR5 wave at its outset.

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Setting up more guns on its side in its all out brawl against global #1 PC seller Hewlett-Packard, global #3 Acer - now with Gateway under its belt - filed amendments to its countersuit on Tuesday, alleging HP infringed on patents held by Acer. It's a serious battle, as Acer fights to prevent a federal judge from imposing an injunction against the importation of Acer PCs from Taiwan into the US.

Acer completed the transition of Gateway into its portfolio on October 17, so the timing of this countersuit is probably not coincidental. A check of the US Patent and Trademark Office database this morning revealed no fewer than 323 patents were assigned to Gateway, Inc. of Irvine, California. Though the amended lawsuit filing has not yet been made public, so the new patents in question have not been revealed outside of court, Gateway's patent portfolio included chip designs such as digital audio controllers, and practical designs such as a slot for holding a stylus on a portable PC.

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At a meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in Los Angeles, another discussion about possible changes to a fundamental Internet process has been tabled. The implications of those changes would be substantial, and the implications of declining to make those changes may also be substantial.

It involves the Whois database - the registration of responsible authorities for the maintenance of services at designated IP addresses. Currently, the names of those authorities are typically available in the clear, and are publicly searchable. While online scam artists easily work the system to obfuscate their true identities, legitimate Web site proprietors would like some legitimate means for them to keep their public information - including their telephone numbers - out of the public view.

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An apartment landlord cannot enter into an arrangement with a cable TV or broadband service making it the exclusive provider for an apartment complex or duplex, as a result of a ban on such arrangements yesterday by the US Federal Communications Commission, by a 5-0 vote.

But the extent of the ban may not have a measurable impact on apartment dwellers' options, as it merely invalidates exclusivity clauses. It does not mean that landlords must enable tenants access to the service provider of their choice - just that landlords can't be given price breaks for choosing one provider over another.

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It might be a more embarrassing position for Dell Inc. to find itself in if it were alone: a multi-billion-dollar US manufacturer having to restate earnings after having had to admit it made certain adjustments to its books. An FTC investigation begun two years ago initially looked into the possibility of backdating options to maximize their value on-paper, but later turned up an even uglier truth: From 2003 up until the middle of last year, Dell's fiscal managers adjusted their books by shuffling amounts between accounts, in order to shore up the appearance of better performance.

Now we know the extent of the damage. After having submitted five amended or updated 10-Q reports with the US Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday, and after all the adjusted math is done, the difference between what Dell said it earned and what it actually earned was $92 million over a nearly four-year period.

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A move by AT&T last week to delay the planned initial rollout of its US mobile TV service, based on the MediaFLO platform, until "early 2008" at the earliest, is bringing up old questions about not only whether American consumers are ready to embrace the technology, but whether the infrastructure is there to support it.

The news was first reported by RCR Wireless and later confirmed by Reuters, and comes as bad tidings for Qualcomm, the key stakeholder in mediaFLO. When all is said and done, that company could have spent close to a billion dollars since 2004 on the establishment of an infrastructure for streaming full-length, broadcast quality TV programming to cell phones. For all that investment to make sense, customers have to want it, and not having it this holiday season won't help them to conjure a want for it.

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