Just days ago, Red Hat publicly responded to a very thinly veiled threat from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer that its Enterprise Linux users might eventually owe Microsoft some money by posting, "We are also aware of no patent lawsuit against Linux. Ever. Anywhere." Today, the company learned one was actually being filed against both it and Novell in the patent trial capital of America: Marshall, Texas.

The plaintiff is a familiar one: IP Innovation, LLC, the very same company that filed an infringement suit against Apple last April. The subject is also the very same patent: an old Xerox PARC filing renewed in 1991, #5,072,412, for "User interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects."

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The friction in the extremely competitive applications server market turned up considerably this week, as one of the companies perceived as tied for third in market share issued a buyout bid on Tuesday for the company it's tied with. That fact might get buried on the back pages were the bidding company not Oracle Systems, the maker of the 10gAS Java Application Server, which late yesterday saw its $17 per share cash buyout bid for competitor BEA Systems rejected as too low.

"This proposal is the culmination of repeated conversations with BEA's management over the last several years," stated Oracle President Charles Phillips this morning. "We look forward to completing a friendly transaction as soon as possible."

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It was not the same as handing advocates of so-called "net neutrality" a complete failure, but then again, nearly every US Federal Communications Commission decision of late has been a split at or near the middle. AT&T's request for forbearance -- for relaxing of regulation -- of some of its broadband services was partly granted late yesterday, with the result being that the company the FCC acknowledges as dominant in its field has a little more leeway now to charge business broadband customers more negotiable rates.

"The Commission seeks to establish a policy environment that facilitates and encourages broadband investment, allowing market forces to deliver the benefits of broadband to consumers," reads a statement from FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, released this morning. "Today, we take another step in establishing a regulatory environment that encourages such investments and innovation by granting AT&T's petition for regulatory relief of its broadband infrastructure and fiber capabilities. This relief will enable AT&T to have the flexibility to further deploy its broadband services and fiber facilities without overly burdensome regulations."

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In what could be an unprecedented patent infringement claim with the capability to shut down the imports of hard disk drives made by Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital, the US International Trade Commission announced yesterday it will take seriously a claim of patent infringement made by the inventors of a circuit board manufacturing process.

By opening a formal investigation into possible Section 337 violations, the ITC sets in motion a process that could lead to the indefinite suspension of a vast number of hard drives into this country, along with computers from Dell and HP that include them.

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When the US Federal Communications Commission last week published its official rules for bidders in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, it postponed the official date of the auction by eight days to January 24, 2008, reportedly as a small concession to companies deciding whether they still wanted to bid. The move led analysts to speculate, would the FCC be willing to budge on other matters, such as mandating all bidders resell portions of their purchased spectrum to wholesale buyers?

The answer that came yesterday was a firm "no" from FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. Reuters quotes Martin as having told a gathering of reporters yesterday, "I don't have any plans to try to revise our open-platform rule the way Verizon wants us to."

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11:20 am ET October 13, 2007 - Late Friday, Microsoft Director of Security Response Mark Miller confirmed to BetaNews that the vulnerability identified in the company's latest security bulletin is identical to the one discovered by security researcher Petko D. Petkov, and originally attributed to Adobe PDF.

3:10 pm ET October 11, 2007 - Adobe spokesperson John Cristofano confirmed to BetaNews this afternoon that the subject of yesterday's Microsoft security bulletin was indeed the same vulnerability affecting Adobe PDF files in Windows XP. This revelation, coupled with the technical details of the problem described by Microsoft's own security team late yesterday, means that the flaw previously attributed to Adobe software is actually being caused by Microsoft Windows XP in tandem with Internet Explorer 7.

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A Reuters story that made the rounds this afternoon picked up on information first reported by BetaNews three weeks ago, regarding a vulnerability in PDF files rendered in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader.

But Reuters' reluctance to mention Windows until paragraph 10 on panel #2 may have been partly responsible today for some security sites reporting that the vulnerability affects Linux and Solaris users as well.

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Late this afternoon, VoIP services provider Vonage announced it had filed a motion for the entire three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to review its own decision two weeks ago upholding Verizon's infringement claims on two of three contested patents.

If the motion is granted, Vonage may be permitted to re-argue its appeal before all three judges en banc rather than just one judge individually.

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A report published today by the global journalists' rights group Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières), written by a Chinese technician writing under the pseudonym "Mr. Tao," reveals the existence of a government bureau there given the authority to designate which news stories are presentable to the public and which are not. The criteria for this bureau's judgment, Mr. Tao writes, are presented to look like "public opinion" played a role; but in one case, the bureau may have intervened to stop the spread of a negative story on a principal supplier of iPod parts.

In June 2006, a report first appeared in China Business Daily on the working conditions of laborers at the Foxconn facility on the Chinese mainland where iPod parts were being made. The report which was translated for the British Daily Mail told the story of a plant that hired mostly women in the mistaken belief that they're "more honest" and less likely to complain, and then forced them to work for 15 hours per day, sleep in barracks housing more than 100 per unit, for wages approximating $51 per month.

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While members of the US House Intelligence Committee debated the language of a bill introduced yesterday to revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act so that it applies, as its title implies, to foreigners, President Bush called on Congress to extend the intelligence gathering provisions of another law due to expire in February. This extension would close what the administration perceives as a surveillance gap opened when a federal judge declared key FISA provisions unconstitutional, especially as it pertains to federal investigations of American citizens.

"The problem is the threat to America is not going to expire in February," the President stated this morning from the White House rose garden. "So Congress must make a choice: Will they keep the intelligence gap closed by making this law permanent? Or will they limit our ability to collect this intelligence and keep us safe, staying a step ahead of the terrorists who want to attack us?"

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The principal reason given for the tremendous under-the-hood changes to Windows unveiled early this year in Vista was the need to overhaul the security model. Indeed, Vista has proven to be a generally more secure operating system, though some vulnerabilities that apply to ordinary software impact Vista users just as much as any other.

But now, software analysts testing the latest build 3205 of the beta for Windows XP Service Pack 3 are discovering a wealth of genuinely new features - not just patches and security updates (although there are literally over a thousand of those), but services that could substantially improve system security without overhauling the kernel like in Vista.

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A team of Microsoft spokespeople have been working throughout the day to devise a plausible explanation for a comment made by CEO Steve Ballmer during a company gathering in the UK, which on its face appears to say it is considering litigation against users of Red Hat Linux for patent infringement.

But one spokesperson acknowledged late this afternoon that multiple sources have yet to come to an agreement over what the company should say.

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The next phase of BitTorrent's amazing transformation from the service whose name legislators made, by accident or design, synonymous with copyright infringement to the engine for a legitimately sanctioned commercial industry, began today.

Brightcove, which provides Internet streaming services to commercial broadcasters including CBS, Fox, and Discovery Communications, will incorporate the P2P streaming technology as "BitTorrent DNA" into its new IP video delivery platform, which it promises will bring broadcast-quality video to Flash-enabled players as soon as next year.

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Early this afternoon, the developers of an all-purpose, presence-providing application for instant messaging, IRC, and other communications services announced it has been acquired by Google.

Jaiku, a messaging application that lets communicators know who's available, what they're up to, and whether they'd really like to speak with you, will soon be part of Google's services, though the company today admitted it wasn't quite sure how it would bring that about.

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In a statement to BetaNews this afternoon, Novell public relations director Bruce Lowry said there may be more for a Utah court to determine than just the $800,000 in SVRX software licensing royalties that both sides agree SCO owes Novell, as part of their original asset purchase agreement.

"There is still a dispute over the SCOsource licenses SCO issues to Microsoft and Sun in 2003," Lowry told us, "which totaled some $26 million between them. The District Court judge [Dale Kimball] ruled earlier that a portion of that money belongs to Novell. What exactly that amount was something the District Court was going to consider in the trial that got postponed due to SCO's bankruptcy filing."

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