Scott M. Fulton, III

As predicted back in March, Microsoft moved forward today with plans to submit its HD Photo image format to the Joint Photographic Experts Group, for consideration as a formal standard. If adopted, Microsoft suggests the format be dubbed JPEG XR.

Like a "patent pending," just the move to get HD Photo considered will lend the format an extra degree of legitimacy. Besides utilizing a new and demonstrably more efficient compression scheme whose permissibility for use by Microsoft may not come under fire in court, the scheme depends upon device-specific color profiles as a way of ensuring the integrity of the original image.

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Citing a recent Supreme Court decision declaring obvious improvements to existing inventions unworthy of patent, Northern California District Judge William Schwarzer ruled entirely for RealNetworks last Thursday in a patent infringement dispute brought in 2003 by a San Francisco technology licensing company.

Friskit, Inc. claimed to be the first innovator of a system "enabling consumers to conveniently find, personalize, and play streaming media over a network." The company says it maintains an active index of over 9 million songs, and licenses that index to companies that provide playlist services. That index was based on a patent portfolio that at one time appeared to protect its streaming search and playback system.

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It was not a room where a professional broadcaster would have found the slightest bit of comfort. At a meeting of the House Subcommittee on the Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property Tuesday morning, a jovial and outright jocular spirit of bipartisanship prevailed, where both Democrats and Republicans spoke at length of what they characterized as the historically unfair treatment of performance artists by broadcasters who refused to pay for the privilege of playing their works over the radio.

No less than Grammy award-winning folk artist Judy Collins literally sang "Amazing Grace" at one point, changing the words to include, "How sweet the free sound," as a parody of the long-standing exemption in US law for broadcasters having to pay performance royalties.

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A regretful comment made by Federal Communications Commissioner Michael J. Copps during his opening remarks this afternoon, served as the first public indication that the text of the 700 MHz spectrum auction order currently under consideration does not contain a stipulation that 22 MHz in the so-called "C-block" must be made available for wholesale access.

A wholesale access provision was one of the terms that Google was lobbying for, in its petition to the FCC in which it said it would be willing to bid $4.6 billion. However, certain so-called "open access provisions" are on the table, as a means for establishing a business model for funding a single, nationwide public safety communications network.

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This morning, Firefox 2.0 users were automatically notified of the availability of version 2.0.0.6, with the promise that this time around, a critical vulnerability concerning how the browser tries to parse malformed resource identifiers, is fixed for good.

In its security advisory this morning, Mozilla credited Windows security expert Jesper Johansson for articulating the original problem, which has hopefully led to this final solution.

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With less than two years to go before the VHF and UHF television spectra in America are handed over to the winners of an upcoming frequency auction, the Federal Communications Commission yesterday issued a call for public comments regarding better informing the public about the meaning of the February 17, 2009 transition date.

"The digital transition will make valuable spectrum available for both public safety uses and expanded wireless competition and innovation," yesterday's public announcement states. "It will also provide consumers with better quality television picture and sound, and make new services available through multicasting. These innovations, however, are dependent upon widespread consumer understanding of the benefits and mechanics of the transition."

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Since the inception of the medium, American radio broadcasters have been exempt from paying royalties to song performers (though not songwriters), on the theory that radio already provided a service to performers in the form of promotion. But with Internet radio, satellite radio, and MP3 distribution having radically reformed the music landscape, Congress is asking whether that exemption remains valid.

At issue is much of the business model of the American broadcasting industry, which has already seen tremendous change over the last decade with the consolidation of station ownership among a handful of companies, such as Clear Channel.

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A 2005 US legislative mandate for states to begin the process of converting drivers' licenses and personally identifying documents lives on, despite measures taken by the Senate last week that were hailed by Real ID's opponents as steps toward its eventual repeal.

Last Thursday, the Senate voted to table an amendment (to set aside from discussion...in this case, indefinitely) offered by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R - Tenn.) to appropriate $300 million in federal funds to assist states in making the long, difficult transition. But a recent revision to a revision of a Dept. of Homeland Security cost estimate for Real ID implementation sets the bar at about $23 million for all 50 states, and presumably US territories including Puerto Rico and Guam, to comply with the federal mandate.

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A report released this morning by the University of California, Davis, which was contracted by the State to investigate the security integrity of three brands of electronic voting machines which the State uses, concludes that all three are susceptible to compromise and tampering, using any number of tools including Trojan Horse programs and simple screwdrivers.

The final report, written by principal investigator Matt Bishop, took great pains to refrain from casting any kind of condemnatory or similar attitude against the three manufacturers whose devices were tested. In fact, it went out of its way to be fair, at one point stating that in many cases, the integrity of the voting machines' software may only be as strong as that of the underlying operating system - which, in all three cases was Windows.

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An exploitable bug discovered earlier this month that was first believed to have been caused by Internet Explorer 7.0, before Mozilla was forced to admit that it afflicted Firefox as well, has apparently been traced back to a Windows API function.

The discovery may have been first revealed through the US-CERT Web site of the Dept. of Homeland Security, which now classifies it as a "Microsoft Windows URI protocol handling vulnerability." The function in question is an old favorite of malware writers: ShellExecute(), which was the subject of a notorious Windows 2000 exploit four years ago.

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The second quarter of 2007 was a terrible time to be in the DRAM business. Tremendous oversupply led to plummeting revenues for all of the world's top 8 and #10 suppliers, even though shipments continued to rise, according to a report released today by technology analyst firm iSuppli.

Hit hardest by the typhoon was #2 Hynix Semiconductor, which saw revenues whacked down 29.7% over the previous quarter to about $1.52 billion, despite unit shipment growth over the previous quarter of 22%.

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Yesterday, publisher Tim O'Reilly broke the news that at his company's own open source convention in Portland, Oregon, Microsoft General Manager of Platform Strategy Bill Hilf is planning to -- if it hasn't already -- submit its existing Shared Source Licenses to the Open Source Initiative, for certification as true "Open Source Licenses." The OSI is the designated caretaker of the legal definition of "open source."

But the question may rightly be asked: Is this a genuine move by Microsoft to enroll its Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) as an official open source license that the community can recognize, or is this more of a symbolic act?

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This morning in Brussels, spokespersons for the European Commission confirmed that Intel was served yesterday with a formal Statement of Objections, charging the CPU manufacturer with paying for exclusivity with cash, incentives, and discounts in order to compel OEMs not to purchase AMD CPUs.

At present, the EC has not made public the names of OEMs with whom Intel allegedly made deals. However, according to spokespersons, the Statement does specifically name AMD as the sole party which Intel allegedly sought to harm.

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In testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday, Gen. Wesley Clark - the former supreme commander of NATO forces and US presidential candidate, speaking as a board member of and advisor to security software company Tiversa - cited a study by his company revealing that in a period of two hours' search time on the P2P file-sharing system LimeWire, over 200 classified US Government documents were discovered.

"If you saw the scope of the risk," Gen. Clark testified, "I think you'd agree that it's just totally unacceptable. The American people would be outraged if they were aware of what's inadvertently shared by government agencies on P2P networks. They would demand solutions."

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The last week of July is often an important manufacturing milestone for computer companies. Earlier this afternoon, Microsoft proved that's still the case with no fewer than five major announcements in the development arena. A few hours later, its communications division said it is proceeding with plans to release to manufacturing tomorrow its ambitious Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 (the client module) - the keystones of its Unified Communications strategy.

But this time around, adopting this new Microsoft product isn't just a matter of ripping out one piece of software and replacing it with another. UC is an entirely new mindset for corporate communications, and whether it's necessarily better than the current mix of landline telephony with cellular communications with instant messaging, may not be proven for at least the next few years. For businesses even considering UC, it's an investment that is certainly bound to become historic no matter what the outcome.

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