With a motion by Rep. Linda Sanchez (D - Calif.) to suspend the rules, the US House of Representatives agreed today to accept Senate language approved last week, extending the ban on both state and federal taxes on Internet use until November 2014.

"The seven-year time frame will allow Congress to revisit the moratorium and consider developments in the States or in technology," stated Rep. Sanchez on the House floor this morning. "It will also provide businesses sufficient time to plan, and ensure that consumers benefit from tax-free access to the Internet."

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A mere day after Adobe made available a patch for its Reader and Acrobat software that plugs a vulnerability in how that software is leveraged to exploit Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7, technicians at Symantec and elsewhere noticed active exploits in the wild.

"So far we have seen a fair number of emails containing this new Trojan in the wild," wrote Symantec engineer Hon Lau last week. "It is likely that Trojan.Pidief.A has been spammed out in targeted attacks on specific business organizations."

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A presentation made two weeks ago by two members of OASIS' OpenDocument technical committee, and founding members of the OpenDocument Foundation, made it clear that the foundation would be turning its attention away from developing the ODF format and translators for it. Instead, in a course change instigated as far back as last May, the Foundation is steering back toward a project launched in 1995 by the World Wide Web Consortium, in hopes of recapturing the momentum toward document interoperability for all existing word processor users.

"This conversion to XML must be non-disruptive," reads a memo circulated early this month among attendees of the Government Open Source Conference, which included Linux World reporter Brian Proffitt. The memo's author is Gary Edwards, co-founder of the OpenDocument Foundation and one of its earliest contributors, who now believes it has been steered away from its original goals by vendors in the interest of competing with Microsoft.

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As first reported by the Associated Press, two key sponsors of legislation that would effectively codify the meaning of "net neutrality" asked the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee to hold public hearings into the motivations of Comcast and other broadband service providers in filtering certain categories of traffic.

"The phone and cable companies have previously stated that they would never use their market power to operate as content gatekeepers and have called efforts to put rules in place to protect consumers 'a solution in search of a problem,"' reads a citation from a letter to Chairman Daniel Inouye (D - Hawaii) co-authored by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D - N.D.) and Olympia Snowe (R - Maine).

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As first reported by reporter Tim Logan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, AT&T has called off its ambitious plans to roll out free municipal WiFi service over a 62-square-mile area covering St. Louis County. While AT&T had been wrestling with the problem of how to build a business model around this lucrative service, what may have ended up scuttling the deal was an unforeseen technical difficulty.

"City hereby authorizes Company to place System Equipment on City Property," reads part of the agreement reached between the City of St. Louis and AT&T last February, "all as further provided in the Pole Attachment Standards Document. Company shall use and access City Property in such manner as not to interfere with other services provided from or on such City Property."

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As part of a settlement in a class-action settlement announced over the weekend, customers of Sprint Nextel's CDMA service in California and parts of Florida will be given the code and instructions needed for them to unlock their phones from the Sprint network.

The extent to which Sprint plans to share unlocking code with its customers is in question, however, as different press sources have given conflicting information. BetaNews awaits clarification directly from Sprint representatives on this issue, and we'll give it to you the moment we have it.

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It was indeed an astounding quarter for Microsoft, with operating income having grown last quarter at an annual rate of 32%. A big part of that growth is attributable to Windows Vista. But does the fact that customers are adopting it truly signal that customers are embracing it? Yesterday, the company's chief financial executives offered some very revealing data.

What recession? Since Chris Liddell's arrival as Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer, the company's timing and execution have been impeccable. He has five business divisions whose books he manages, but the weight of capital expenditures in the revenue of at least two divisions have been more than offset by gains in the other three that help Microsoft to cruise right along.

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After an amendment offered by Sen. John Sununu (R - N.H.) made it feasible to extend a four-year extension on the existing ban on Internet-related taxes to seven years, the US Senate yesterday passed the Internet Tax Freedom Act Amendments Act of 2007, reportedly by another overwhelmingly positive vote.

The existing federal moratorium on any state or federal tax on Internet use was set to expire next Thursday, after which time legislators were worried that states could be gearing up to create new broadband usage taxes that could be applied to users' ISP bills.

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It's another humbling admission that would have been distinctly uncharacteristic of Microsoft just years ago. But this morning, the company's security response communications manager, Bill Sisk, told customers on the MSRC blog that recent "third-party" efforts to plug a potentially serious vulnerability between Internet Explorer 7 and Windows XP can't go far enough to solve the underlying problem.

"Third party applications are currently being used as the vector for attack and customers who have applied the security updates available from these vendors are currently protected," Sisk wrote, alluding to a recent patch from Adobe without referring to the company by name. "However, because the vulnerability mentioned in this advisory is in the Microsoft Windows ShellExecute function, these third party updates do not resolve the vulnerability - they just close an attack vector."

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After having explained away a problem with Windows Server Update Services yesterday as a problem with administrators not understanding the "applicability rules" for patches to updated software, a Microsoft product manager today acknowledged there was indeed a problem with how WSUS pushed a patch for Windows Desktop Search onto enterprise networks, calling it a "publishing process error."

"I want you to know we are working now to correct the issue and have temporarily suspended the distribution of the Windows Desktop Search through WSUS," reads an explanation published at around midnight last night by WSUS product manager Bobbie Harder.

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The cost of Vonage's VoIP technology development policy - build now, ask questions later - hardened a bit more after the close of stock trading this afternoon. Vonage has agreed to settle with the first of its three aggrieved parties, Verizon, in an unusual deal that hinges upon a forthcoming ruling from an appeals court and a separate injunction ruling from a district court.

Earlier this month, Vonage filed a motion with the DC Court of Appeals for a rehearing en banc (all three judges in session) of an earlier appeal of that court's Verizon decision, which Vonage had lost. That rehearing is a long shot (even more so now), so if the Appeals Court decides to deny Vonage's motion, it has agreed to pay Verizon $117.5 million. This after a jury had already awarded Verizon $58 million in damages, in a ruling which was partially remanded last month.

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In early numbers from Microsoft prior to its quarterly financial results call to analysts this afternoon, the company reported revenue gains of 27% annually to $13.76 billion, and net income nicely higher by 23% annually to $4.29 billion, in what the company is calling its fastest first quarter of growth since 1999.

In the early afternoon statement, the company is crediting increased consumer demand for Windows Vista, primarily the Premium Edition, though analysts are likely to ask whether the Vista "sales mix" is actually weighted more toward pre-installations. The release of Halo 3 will also have played a factor, but certainly not to the tune of several billion more dollars in revenue in three months. All that means the company's stellar performer could turn out to be, once again...SQL Server, which has blossomed to becoming a principal profit center whose growth rivals its applications division.

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The second of four production facilities for Intel's 45 nm semiconductors is now online, with the opening of the company's entirely new Fab 32 in Chandler, Arizona. Built specifically to use the company's breakthrough HK+MG manufacturing process that miniaturized the transistor all over again, Fab 32 represents the beginning of the big payoff of Intel's restructuring, establishing what it hopes to be a substantial and permanent "generation gap" between its CPUs and AMD's.

The building's million-plus square feet of space includes 184,000 square feet of dedicated clean room. By comparison, the company's D1D 45 nm facility in Oregon contains 176,000 square feet of clean room, and AMD's Fab 30 facility in Dresden, Germany is said to contain 120,000 square feet. There are two more 45 nm facilities under construction for Intel, including the colossal Fab 28 facility in Kiryat Gat, Israel, which will house over 200,000 square feet of clean room.

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At least two independent, private network administrators have reported on their blogs since yesterday that their Windows Server Update Service has downloaded and deployed to their network clients the most recent update to Microsoft's Windows Desktop Search engine, even though those services are set up not to deploy updated software automatically.

"Thank you Microsoft, for once again bypassing my Windows update policies," wrote admin Robert Kloosterhuis this morning. "I can now go explain to my managers why 500 workstations and 12 servers have ended up with Microsoft Desktop Search, without anyone's explicit approval."

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Following in the wake of Verizon and AT&T, whose chief executives have both made comments in the past seven days that were interpreted by analysts as either saying they would bid in the FCC's upcoming auction of the 700 MHz broadcast spectrum or would not bid - depending, one supposes, on which side of the room they were listening on at the time - Google CEO Eric Schmidt added fuel to the fire by making the same kind of bipolar comments.

Indeed, some sources who attended Google's analyst conference in Mountain View yesterday quoted Schmidt as clearly saying his company would "probably bid" in the auction, now set for next January 24. But others who followed Schmidt out the side door to ask more questions, according to MarketWatch, heard Schmidt say his company would most likely want to partner with someone else to place that bid.

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