The most heated intellectual property debate perhaps in the history of telecommunications will not be fought with either side being allowed a handicap.

Today, Federal Judge Rudi Brewster denied a motion by defendant Qualcomm, in its patent infringement case brought forth in May 2005 by competitor Broadcom, which would have enjoined Broadcom from being able to sell certain 3G cellular chips in the US. The technology in those chips, Qualcomm alleged in its countersuit, infringe upon seven of its patents.

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Independent security developers, including the one that had a brief window of opportunity to patch Microsoft's VML flaw before Microsoft beat its own deadline, are now scrambling for their share of the spotlight in the wake of the re-emergence last week of an ActiveX control flaw.

Over the weekend, the Zero-Day Emergency Response Team -- which produced a third-party patch for the VML exploit -- released a program it's calling ZProtector, whose job is not to patch the operating system, ZERT says, but instead to track down the signatures of disobedient controls and disable them.

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In a move engineered by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R - Tenn.), the United States Senate on Saturday passed legislation, by a voice vote, that ostensibly would tighten security restrictions on cargo shipments from overseas. But attached to the tail end of this bill was language from an earlier House bill that was going nowhere since last July, which effectively makes it illegal for a bank or other institution to transfer funds to organizations that are involved in so-called "unlawful Internet gambling."

Although the measure does not render Internet gambling in the U.S. unlawful, it may as well have, since the new language makes it tremendously more difficult, if not impossible, for banks to process online gambling transactions even when they may be permitted.

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An overflow of stories concerning an alleged Firefox 1.5 exploit hit the Web over the weekend, emerging from an underground users' conference in San Diego. But after the dust has begun settling, evidence of the exploit's severity and even existence has yet to materialize from official sources, including the Mozilla organization responsible for Firefox's development.

A few weeks ago, a series of exploitable bugs involving Firefox's JavaScript interpreter were reported by Secunia in an official advisory, which continues to rate these flaws this morning as "highly critical."

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Putting the final touches on a deal announced last week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- the company that delegates authority for the IP address scheme and namespace -- formally unveiled today a three-year extension of its current agreement with the US Dept. of Commerce.

Last week, ICANN CEO Dr. Paul Twomey announced during testimony before Congress that it had entered into a five-year extension with the government, with the terms to be announced later. Evidently, the terms of that agreement had since been modified.

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Early Thursday afternoon, Intel spokesperson Chuck Malloy told BetaNews his company is pleased with Judge Joseph Farnan's decision on Friday to dismiss a major portion of AMD's antitrust case against it. That much is not a surprise. What we learned today from Malloy is that Intel is now anxious to begin the discovery phase of the trial - the part where both sides are allowed to pursue investigations that may turn up evidence.

Up to now, a protective order had been imposed by Judge Farnan upon both parties, until a trial date was set and a formal itinerary decided upon. That happened yesterday, but it almost didn't.

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The scope of security vendor Symantec's recent set of complaints against Microsoft concern a future feature of Windows Vista entitled PatchGuard, which Microsoft describes as a facility that protects the operating system kernel against being patched or rewritten by an outside, unauthorized source - for instance, a rootkit.

"Patching fundamentally violates the integrity of the Windows kernel," reads an August 11 blog post by Microsoft kernel security architect Scott Field, "and is undocumented, unsupported and has always been discouraged by Microsoft." Without explaining exactly how PatchGuard will do this - for obvious reasons - Field makes the promise that, "If the operating system detects an unauthorized patch of certain data structures or code it will initiate a shut down of the system."

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Though the details remain sketchy at present, officials from the BBC and Microsoft at a high-profile, if low-detail, press tour conducted yesterday, signed what's being described as a "memorandum of understanding" that may spell out the terms under which the two companies work together to build what the BBC describes as a "radically re-invented Web site in the Web 2.0 world."

"To ensure that the BBC is able to embrace the creative challenges of the digital future," BBC director-general Mark Thompson stated this morning, "we need to forge strategic partnerships with technology companies and distributors for the benefit of license payers."

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During hearings before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee this morning, former HP general counsel Ann Baskins -- who resigned her post earlier today -- refused to answer questions, citing her rights under the Fifth Amendment of the US constitution. Kevin Hunsaker, former HP senior counsel, immediately followed suit, followed by former HP security manager Anthony Gentilucci, and likely beginning a string of likely refusals from seven other witnesses closely tied to the HP "pretexting" investigation.

Former HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn and current HP chairman and CEO Mark Hurd were scheduled to make opening statements before the committee later today. BetaNews is monitoring the hearings and will have further reports throughout the day.

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In an effort to clarify some of the rough edges that have separated IBM's corporate policy as an open-source advocate, and its policy towards enforcing patents on its own intellectual property, the company Tuesday announced a change to its policy on applying for and enforcing patents on its intellectual property.

Most importantly, the company said it intends to reduce the number of patents it applies for in the field of business methods and will make the content of its patent applications public.

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Judge Joseph Farnan ruled this afternoon that AMD may seek reconsideration for its claim that Intel's allegedly anti-competitive conduct outside the U.S. directly impacts AMD's business inside the U.S. The claim is key to AMD's case, which alleges that Intel's business practices with international partners harmed its ability to do business here.

An AMD spokesperson told BetaNews this afternoon that AMD counsel Chuck Diamond made the case that 70% of the entire microprocessor market lies outside the U.S., implying that by that preponderance, almost any corporate conduct in this market can be construed as, at least, partially "foreign conduct."

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U.S. Federal District Judge Joseph A. Farnan has dismissed a key portion of AMD's antitrust lawsuit against Intel, evidently agreeing with Intel's motion, stating that many of the claims for which AMD seeks redress take place on foreign soil, outside U.S. jurisdiction.

As a result, an AMD spokesperson told BetaNews today that the company is considering its options with regard to how the case should proceed. AMD is holding a status conference outside the District Court in Delaware, the outcome of which could determine how -- or whether -- AMD intends to proceed with its lawsuit. Further comment from AMD is expected later this afternoon.

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In a federal district court in Seattle last Friday, IDG News Service is reporting, Microsoft filed suit against ten "John Does," one of whom goes by the screen handle "viodentia," for allegedly using stolen Microsoft source code as a means to make corrections to a utility called FairUse4WM, whose purpose is to strip Microsoft copy protection from media files.

The suit seeks a permanent injunction against the group, and contends Microsoft has suffered more than $75,000 in damages - a legal milestone.

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UPDATED The proprietors of the P2P file-sharing program LimeWire, who were sued last August by a coalition of the major names in the recording industry, has filed a countersuit in the U.S. District Court in New York, claiming that the RIAA is using its copyrights over recorded works as a weapon to disable competition from anyone in the Internet distribution business.

But anti-competitive behavior is not the counter-claimant's principal defense. First, Lime Group argues that LimeWire is unlike Napster -- whose original incarnation lost its legal battle and was forced to shutdown -- in that Lime's software does not rely on a centralized server to warehouse its directory of sharable files.

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At an early morning keynote address to open the semi-annual Intel Developers' Forum in San Francisco, CEO Paul Otellini confirmed what hardware industry resources had already known for weeks: A Core 2 Extreme quad-core processor is coming this November for the enthusiast segment of the PC market, with Core 2 Quad processors for the mainstream segment and Quad-Core Xeon server processors soon to follow in the first quarter of next year.

It will be Intel's best opportunity in years to effectively grind competitor AMD's nose into the silicon dirt, if you will, with regard to both price and performance. Last July's introduction of the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme desktop PC processors, based on Intel's Conroe architecture, saw a dramatic leap in both performance and power efficiency in a category that AMD had dominated for the past few years.

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