Confirming a statement made by Petko D. Petkov on his GNUcitizen.org blog over two weeks ago, almost in passing, Adobe has released a security advisory warning of a potential exploitable flaw in its Acrobat and Adobe Reader software. While Petkov has never made the exploit itself public, Adobe's suggested system registry fix suggests a maliciously crafted PDF can be made to send e-mail undetected.

Instructions posted to Adobe's security site tell Acrobat and Adobe Reader users where they should edit a particular entry in the Windows System Registry. That entry contains a list of protocol identifier stubs that PDF files may typically find embedded. There, users will find a long string terminated by zero (REG_SZ), which lists several URI stubs followed by digits evidently denoting how the PDF handler should process them.

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Confirming speculation published in this morning's New York Times, the Sprint executive largely responsible for guiding his company through the merger with Nextel has been ousted this afternoon by Sprint's Board of Directors. Gary Forsee is out as chairman and chief executive officer, and an upheaval of the board is necessary to keep Sprint going in his absence.

The explanation for Forsee's ouster speaks for itself: Sprint admitted after the close of business this afternoon that it is adjusting its guidance for fiscal year 2007 lower than its previous estimate, and that it lost approximately 337,000 post-paid subscribers in just the third fiscal quarter alone.

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On the recommendation of the US Director of National Intelligence, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission last week declined to open an investigation into evidence that the National Security Agency may have received more information from US telecommunications carriers than it actually requested, in conjunction with federal terrorism investigations, and that it may have investigated innocent civilians as a result.

"The Director of National Intelligence concluded that the United States '[has] consistently asserted the military and state secrets privilege in litigation concerning allegations of an alleged NSA records program,"' cites FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's quote of Director J. M. McConnell, "because disclosures regarding such intelligence activities could cause 'exceptionally grave damage to the national security."'

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The president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters is urging Congress to open an inquiry into the long-standing relationship between recording artists and their record labels. David Rehr's objective is to determine whether the reason artists claim they've been treated unfairly over the past several decades is not because terrestrial doesn't pay them, but because someone else doesn't.

Last July 31, in one of the more extraordinary exchanges to take place in a US House of Representatives conference room in recent memory, a single spokesperson for the broadcasting industry found himself debating giants of American music. There, ICBC Broadcast Holding's Charles A. Warfield, Jr., told the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property that radio was largely responsible for the popularity of most American recording artists since the 1920s -- a fact that, for a time, was actually in dispute -- and that radio broadcasters should not have to pay the recording industry for the right to popularize its artists.

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While countless observers of the absurdly long SCO trials against IBM and Novell have already stuck their proverbial forks in the matter, after SCO's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing last month, Novell filed a motion in Utah District Court last week arguing that lifting a stay of SCO's lawsuit against it would not only be beneficial in the long run, but may actually be beneficial to SCO's survival.

"The District Court Order has special importance for SCO's attempt to reorganize," argued Novell's attorneys. "It already makes SCO's current business model questionable. The only periods in which SCO appears to have been profitable are those periods in which it generated substantial one-time revenues through transactions wrongfully based on Novell's property [licensing of its UNIX trademarks and copyrights for royalties]. When not based on Novell's property, SCO's historic business model does not appear to be profitable or provide SCO with reasonable prospects for reorganization."

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Forestalling a possible injunction of the sale of its voice-over-IP services that would likely have crippled the company, Vonage agreed this morning to pay Sprint Nextel a one-time fee of $80 million, for a license covering all past and future usage of Sprint's intellectual property. Two weeks ago, a jury found Vonage infringed upon Sprint's patents in the VoIP field, and had been ordered to pay $69.5 million plus 5% of its future revenues.

The deal effectively ends one of two disputes with major patent holders with whom Vonage has been competing for business. The other is with Verizon, and the judge in that case may yet issue an injunction unless Vonage has an inclination to settle there as well.

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A bill attempting to reconcile a journalist's right to protect its sources with the federal government's need to know timely and critical information, passed the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, but not without more exceptions having been added to the original House version. Still, the bill continues to define journalists rather loosely, leading some to believe federal protection could yet extend to independent, often solo bloggers.

Specifically, S. 2035, the Free Flow of Information Act, doesn't even use the word "journalist." Instead it refers to a person covered by protections of the Act, and defines that person as someone engaged in journalism. It then defines "journalism" as "the regular gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public."

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With the next wave of interactive features having been added to 20th Century-Fox's latest Blu-Ray Disc releases, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Day After Tomorrow, there was always a certain level of anticipation that some existing Blu-ray consoles would have trouble, especially the first-generation editions. Surprisingly, it's the second generation which is seeing some early problems, with reports from owners of Samsung's BD-P1200 that they can't play either of these titles.

"You know, this really sucks...how much did we pay for the freaking things?" asked one AVS Forum member on Tuesday. "It's bad enough you have to choose sides to play certain movies, but now some don't even work."

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It isn't really a new version of WordPerfect, and in more than one way, that fact is starting to show. But for the product that still purports to be the world's #2 commercial word processor, just behind Microsoft by about 85 points give or take a few, even the smallest change may as well be a monumental shift. This week, Corel released to selected beta testers an updated version of its WordPerfect Office X3 suite, which still features the Quattro Pro spreadsheet, and which now places the OpenDocument Format on an equal standing with Microsoft Word formats.

"At the end of the day, customers don't care about formats - they shouldn't have to," remarked Corel's director of product management Jason Larock in an interview with BetaNews. "I think for a consumer or small business customer, I don't want him thinking, 'Should I be ODF or should I be OOXML or WordPerfect format?' I just want him to work with his documents, work with them correctly."

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As first reported by the Duluth News Tribune, local resident Jammie Thomas was found guilty by a jury in US District Court of having pirated 24 specific audio files, and was order to pay plaintiffs from the recording industry a total of $222,000.

It could have been much worse, with evidence presented that the Kazaa client on Thomas' system had been responsible for the proliferation of as many as 1,702 tracks. At $9,250 per track, she could legally have been liable for as much as $15.74 million.

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On the very same day that the president of Matsushita Electric, the parent company of Panasonic, proclaimed at the CEATEC electronics show in Chiba that the format war for high-definition recorders was already over in Japan and customers there had already overwhelmingly chosen Blu-ray, Toshiba showed a prototype of an HD DVD recorder capable of burning up to two hours of 4 Mbps MPEG-4 high-definition video. That video is apparently being burned using a red laser -- not blue -- to an ordinary DVD-R, DVD-RW, or DVD-RAM disc.

As first reported in English by CDRinfo, Toshiba's RD-X7 would not be the first high-def recorder to support DVD - Sony has a handful of Blu-ray recorders planned for this holiday season. But it would be the first to support a new file format adopted just three weeks ago by the DVD Forum, caretaker of the HD DVD format, called "HD Rec."

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Apparently as part of a separate effort from the HD DVD Promotional Group, Toshiba and Microsoft announced tomorrow morning Asia/Pacific time (this afternoon US time) they will form a new coalition dedicated to promoting the HDi interactive layer used in HD DVD.

The charter members of the Advanced Interactivity Consortium will consist of Paramount (along with its DreamWorks Animation unit), Warner Bros., and Universal Studios. These well-known studios have apparently made a commitment to release HD DVD titles in the near future -- a timeframe has not been publicly specified -- that will feature advanced overlaid menuing, bookmarking, Internet connectivity including download capability, and online shopping.

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A security update released by Apple this morning for users of QuickTime for Windows appears to eradicate the exploitable hole discovered last month by GNUCitizen.org developer Petko D. Petkov.

That exploit enabled the Web browser to pass JavaScript code to the QuickTime plug-in, which it then passes back to Firefox when it's the default Web browser. The code could then run unchecked, theoretically enabling a malicious user almost total access to a client's system, including his file system and command line.

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In a speech yesterday before a summit organized by the US Chamber of Commerce, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker was quoted as proclaiming his industry and legislators are jointly losing the war against intellectual property piracy - a fight which impacts him personally as the chief of one of the world's principal content creators.

Though a complete transcript has yet to be made available, Broadcasting & Cable reports Zucker essentially drew an outline around both physical pirates and P2P file sharers, in an attempt to shame them all with an "axis of evil" style metaphor.

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As part of an effort to make debugging code at the granular level more feasible with its new Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft today said it will be making the source code for its .NET Framework available under its royalty-free, "read-only" Reference License.

Why would Microsoft want to reveal the inner workings of .NET without allowing others to contribute to it? The answer may be self-evident to developers who work on a daily basis with the problem of examining program behavior, especially using Visual Studio's common tools like breakpoints and watches (alerts which pop up under certain specified conditions).

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