The number of political parties doing business in Congress was nearly called into question today, as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D - Vt.) railed against Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman - and fellow Democrat - Jay Rockefeller (D - W.V.) for, according to The Hill this afternoon, "caving" to the wishes of the President. Sen. Leahy's comments come following the announcement that Republican and Democratic senators including Rockefeller had reached an agreement with Mr. Bush late last night on substitute language for amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

As senators announced this morning following a White House meeting, a bipartisan agreement would amend the Senate's version of the RESTORE Bill. One new provision would grant telecommunications companies immunity from prosecution by individuals who believe their personal data may have been inadvertently turned over to US government officials, in the course of federal investigations. During a press conference on Wednesday, the President stated he would veto any FISA legislation that omitted such a provision.

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In a letter issued yesterday to US Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman took issue with the findings of an FTC staff report issued last July, suggesting that P2P file-sharing use may only be as dangerous as any other form of Internet activity.

Rep. Waxman cited testimony in a committee hearing last July in which Chairwoman Majoras took part, which provided evidence that secret government documents found their way - along with the mixed bag of other questionable material that makes the rounds - into the hands of private citizens through P2P networks.

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In a symbolic victory for advocates of patent reform, a part-time motion-capture actor who has appeared - albeit masked by CGI animation - in the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films, has succeeded in striking down Amazon's patent claim of having invented the single-click purchase procedure.

Auckland, New Zealand resident Peter Calveley petitioned the US Patent and Trademark Office back in November 2005 to re-examine the 26 claims made by Amazon in what had been called, "Method and System for Placing a Purchase Order Via a Communications Network." By the following February, by soliciting private donations through his blog, Calveley had raised the nearly $2,500 necessary to fund the full re-examination. In May, his case was under way.

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It is one of the crown jewels of what is known in Japan as "Silicon Island" - a major processor fabrication facility on Nagasaki, where employees are said to take lunch breaks by walking out the front gates, through the private golf course, and alongside the ocean. In 2001, it was part of Sony's multi-billion-dollar consolidation of three of its manufacturing entities into what was planned to be a single, global powerhouse, setting new standards for efficiency and quality control.

This morning, as part of a different kind of corporate consolidation altogether, multiple Asian news sources report that Sony's Kyushu semiconductor division has agreed to sell 60% of its 300 mm Nagasaki fab -- the key facility in the manufacture of the Cell BE processor that powers the PlayStation 3 -- to Toshiba.

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In Yahoo's third-quarter performance call yesterday, investors and analysts heard for the first time the lower-key, back-to-basics approach of co-founder and re-installed CEO Jerry Yang, and newly elevated president Susan Decker. There's evidence their strategy is already working, but the next move involves a carefully calculated approach to attracting customers that goes against the current trend.

It was the first quarter of doing business as Yahoo, the online search and advertising services company. Gone was the company's blind persistence in building a content generation and entertainment empire. Missing were most of the unique figures hailing from realms outside of digital information. It was Jerry Yang, the once and future CEO of Yahoo, and newly installed, back-to-business company president Susan Decker, without fanfare or grand accompaniment, representing the backbone of their redefined company, during yesterday's third-quarter financial performance call.

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Since the number of "principal" or "participating" (P-class) voting members of the International Organization for Standardization's JTC 1 SC 34 working group increased by eleven prior to last month's preliminary ballot on the approval process for Microsoft's Office Open XML format suite, participation by nearly all members on important matters other than OOXML appears to be waning.

Of the three non-OOXML ballots that were voted on since September 2, ISO documents reveal, Poland was the only new member to vote yea or nay, while Colombia voted twice to abstain, and all other new members failed to cast ballots at all.

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Stepping up his rhetoric against Yahoo yesterday, the chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Tom Lantos (D - Calif.), said he has issued requests for CEO Jerry Yang and senior vice president and general counsel Michael Callahan, to appear before the committee on November 6. Their purpose there will be to answer allegations and respond to evidence Rep. Lantos says he will present that Callahan made false statements to Congress in February 2006, regarding whether Yahoo turned over private customer data about a Chinese journalist to Chinese government authorities.

"Our committee has established that Yahoo provided false information to Congress in early 2006," reads a statement from Rep. Lantos last night. "We want to clarify how that happened, and to hold the company to account for its actions both before and after its testimony proved untrue. And we want to examine what steps the company has taken since then to protect the privacy rights of its users in China."

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A bill intended to grant journalists the right to protect the identity of their sources when questioned in court passed the US House of Representatives yesterday, by a vote of 398 to 21. The version as passed contained much clarified language, closing a legal loophole that might have enabled courts to compel journalists to divulge their sources anyway.

But another late addition to the House version of the Free Flow of Information Act altered the extent of its coverage to professional journalists only - specifically, those who make money. Specifically, it narrowed the scope of protection to "a person who, for financial gain or livelihood, is engaged in journalism and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person."

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In a move which officially inaugurates Microsoft as a member of the open source community, the Open Source Initiative - designated the official caretaker of the concept of open source - late last week officially approved the language of two licenses submitted by Microsoft for inclusion with its open source software. However, Microsoft admitted today, the OSI did have a hand in changing their names.

Now officially part of the open source library of licenses is the Microsoft Public License which grants the licensee the right to use copyrighted and patented material expressed in the software royalty-free; and the Microsoft Reciprocal License, which extends the public license by stipulating that licensees who distribute any derivative of the program must also distribute its source code. The news that Microsoft had submitted these licenses for OSI approval came in late July.

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At the Symbian Smartphone Show in London this morning, Nokia showed a video depicting a model with a screen larger than the one on its current N95, and without its pivoting thumb controls. This model was running applications on the Symbian S60 platform using a new touch-screen interface that was similar to Apple's iPhone in one respect, and dissimilar to it in another: It provides tactile feedback.

Nokia confirmed the development in a press release issued later in the day. "S60 touch user interface comes with support for tactile feedback," the company stated, "which means that there is a physical pulse and feedback when the user taps on the screen. This provides better awareness of the device's response improving the user experience."

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"The milestone that we're at," announced Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates at his company's campus this morning, "is that we're finally bringing to this idea of trying to get in contact with somebody, knowing what number to call, knowing how to connect many people together, knowing when they're available...the magic of software." With those words, Gates officially launched his company's Unified Communications platform, which will include a new class of telecommunications server product whose objective is to replace the office PBX.

"In fact, this is a complete transformation of the business of the traditional PBX," Gates continued. "The PBX in some ways is almost like the mainframe was many years ago, where all of the functionality was there in that one piece. And the way that you add flexibility, add value, to customize, to bring in third parties, to do new things, it just isn't there in that structure. So by moving phone calls onto the Internet using the powerful industry standard servers, we've got a very different way of being able to do things. And that can lead not only to lower costs, but far more effectiveness in how your employees work within your company, or with customers and partners outside your company."

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Of the three major telecommunications companies sent questionnaires two weeks ago by leaders of the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce, only Verizon answered in detail, with AT&T and Qwest citing pending lawsuits as their reason for declining. Those questionnaires were intended to determine these companies' understanding of federal law as it was explained to them, and how they believe they're complying with the law, in cases where national security officials seek private customer data without a court order.

Currently, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits information from communications of non-US citizens to be collected without court order. However, in recent years, the Dept. of Justice and the National Security Agency have made numerous requests for customer data citing FISA as legal foundation, even though the citizenship status of individuals being investigated is unclear.

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In its regular prediction of future milestones at the opening of a major annual magnetic recording conference in Tokyo, Hitachi raised the bar yet again: This time, the company is promising to reach the one terabit per square inch milestone commercially by 2011. First, that might be too late to beat its competition; second, Hitachi may have to show more proof it can reach that goal even that soon.

The goal is a fairly simple one, and sometimes it has to be simple in order for engineers to be able to fathom all that's required of them bending the laws of physics to reach it. In the case of magnetic disk drive technologies, the problem is being able to store data magnetically in a space smaller than electrons themselves should typically allow for.

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Just as in the microcomputer industry, the key to widespread dissemination of a design is mass production of its underlying technology. Standard chipsets are what make varieties of motherboards possible; and in the mobile phone realm, where form factors are much smaller, miniaturization demands that more basic features get crammed onto a single chip.

Today, Broadcom announced it appears to have overcome the myriad of timing issues associated with such amalgamation, and has begun sampling a system-on-a-chip (SoC) that combines all the underlying communication features phone manufacturers demand along with HSDPA/HSUPA high-speed data transfer.

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Just when it seemed Microsoft had averted a PR debacle after an update to its Automatic Updates service in Windows installed itself into users' computers even when they thought it was turned off, now it appears something is turning back on many users' Automatic Updates.

Late Friday night, Microsoft Update Program Manager Nate Clinton denied having discovered anything in his company's software that could be causing the problem. "We have received some logs from customers, and have so far been able to determine that their AU settings were not changed by any changes to the AU client itself and also not changed by any updates installed by AU."

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