EC extends the deadline for Microsoft to defend itself
With two weeks to go before the original eight-week deadline for Microsoft to present its response to the European Commission's latest Statement of Objections, the EC announced late today it has granted Microsoft's request to extend the deadline another three weeks, to April 21. This from EC spokesperson Jonathan Todd, in statements to Reuters and other sources.
Microsoft was ordered to prepare an oral statement for the EC as a defensive response to the Statement. That defense would center on the company's continued bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. How the EC receives that response will determine whether it pursues legal action against Microsoft, the result of which could include a new round of fines. Spokesperson Todd has also intimated to several sources that Microsoft may also be compelled to give customers who are setting up or upgrading to Windows 7, the option of installing alternate Web browsers.
Google's new interest-based ads look less like 'Big Brother' than 'big bother'
This morning, Google's initial experiment with so-called behavioral advertising officially emerges from beta. The company's categorical system for targeting users' interests is now officially under way, with tracking of responses to ads now active by default for all users who read Google AdSense-affiliated sites (including Betanews).
As a video posted to Google's advertising support site explains, Google's system is already maintaining cookies on users' computers that contain codes relating to categories of the users' interests, both ascertained and designated. A user may go to Google's preferences site (linked above) to choose specific interest categories, which are less like department store categories and more like content categories.
Google: Windows 7 users should be able to choose any browser, any time
In its first statement in response to Microsoft's decision announced over the weekend to enable Windows 7 users to deactivate and/or uninstall Internet Explorer 8 after the operating system's setup installs it, a spokesperson for Google, which makes the Chrome browser, told Betanews overnight that not only should Windows users be given the option to choose their browsers during setup, but to do so every time they turn their machines on.
"We have not yet been able to see the planned new features of Internet Explorer but are looking forward to examining them when they are released. The Internet was founded on choice and openness and this requires a level playing field with multiple options for accessing it. From the moment a computer is turned on, people should be able to access a range of browsers easily and quickly," the spokesperson stated.
Nokia disallowed from calling truce in InterDigital dispute
In the latest turn of events in a patent infringement case characterized by strange turns of events, a move by plaintiff Nokia to force defendant InterDigital to settle their unique dispute through arbitration backfired, when a judge said they can't. Last Thursday, as first detected by The Wall Street Journal's Julia Angwin, New York District Judge Deborah Batts ruled that Nokia waived its right to arbitration by essentially making this dispute the court's business in the first place.
It is the weirdest dispute one can possibly imagine, which boils down to this: Nokia claims it bargained for and received VIP status with regard to licensing fees for InterDigital's patents. But Nokia's complaint is that when InterDigital settled with Ericsson on another matter related to the same patents, the amount of the settlement gave Ericsson the better deal. After what appeared to be an initial settlement, suddenly InterDigital complained that Nokia was using its patents without license during the settlement period itself.
Helmut Buhler's big day: An everyday programmer finds a critical Windows hole
The typical security vulnerability and patching story paints security researchers as the good guys in the white hats, the straight shooting style, and the soda pop. But on this particular Patch Tuesday (a lighter one than most) Microsoft is crediting not some white-hat researcher but a really good guy -- a fellow who's the author of a simple Sidebar gadget that displays the contents of your clipboard -- as having done the right thing and notified Microsoft of a critical hole.
German developer Helmut Buhler, whose other claim to fame is a portable wrapper function that makes dialog boxes in Windows 95 and XP look like those in Vista, was credited by Microsoft today for discovering one of the critical vulnerabilities being addressed by the March edition of its Patch Tuesday bug fixes.
Hitachi pleads guilty in US LCD price-fixing bust
This afternoon, the US Justice Dept. announced that Hitachi would be the fourth company to plead guilty in a TFT-LCD price fixing investigation that has already seen LG, Sharp (now becoming part of Panasonic), and Chunghwa pay collectively over half a billion dollars in fines.
Hitachi would pay the least of the four companies thus far: $31 million. In turn, the Antitrust Division said today, it will agree that it participated in meetings with representatives of its competitors in which they conspired to set the price that Dell Computer would be charged for TFT-LCD displays. From April 2001 through March 2004, Hitachi then quoted Dell the agreed upon prices, the DoJ said, and then reported its progress back to other cartel members.
Nvidia offers to invest something in GPU-interested startups
In a statement this morning, graphics chip maker Nvidia said it is willing to join with others in investing in early-stage companies that seek to produce general computing software products that leverage graphics processor technology. It's the manufacturer's latest step in drumming up support for CUDA, the library that enables developers to offload heavy mathematical functionality away from the CPU and onto the GPU.
"These companies are the innovators that will fuel the continued growth of the GPU platform," reads a prepared statement this morning from Nvidia VP for Business Development Jeff Herbst. "Through this program we will provide financial, marketing and other support to help start-up companies realize their full potential and we strongly encourage interested entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others to reach out to us with their ideas."
Obama: White House will no longer ignore established science
A memorandum published by the White House this morning made good on a campaign promise by President Obama to discontinue the Oval Office practice of disregarding or even suppressing certain scientific and technological information when crafting executive policy.
"Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security," reads the President's memorandum this morning. "The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public."
Opera CEO von Tetzchner: Microsoft's IE8 'turn-off' is not enough
Over the weekend, Microsoft revealed that in its latest private beta build of Windows 7, it will allow users to uninstall the Internet Explorer 8 Web browser front end -- a choice it has never offered to consumers since version 3.0. The fact that since 1996, the presence of IE in Windows was elevated to such an extent that users could not completely uninstall it, nor could they ever entirely avoid it, has been credited by many as the real reason for Microsoft being perceived as having won the browser war against Netscape.
While Microsoft credits "user feedback" as having driven the need for this feature -- or actually, something like this feature but maybe more up-front -- the truth is, users have been supplying that feedback now for more than a decade. Most likely, it was the European Commission's latest objection which finally drove Microsoft to institute what some are seeing as the first crack in the dam. But is it enough to let any light break through for the other browser manufacturers desperate to gain more than a toehold on the Windows desktop?
Ballmer: Yes on Windows 7 for netbooks, but maybe not a specific SKU
Once again, comments made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer during an analysts' briefing two weeks ago are being bandied about by the press as "confirmation" that the company plans to produce a slimmed-down, netbook-ready SKU of Windows 7. However, a complete read of Ballmer's comments, as transcribed by Microsoft (Word document available here), indicate that this isn't what Ballmer said at all. In fact, he seemed intentionally vague on the topic, making clear the company was certainly thinking about the prospect of a netbook Win7 SKU, but confirming nothing.
"I think we have an opportunity when we ship Windows 7, which will fit on a netbook, we have an opportunity to rethink the product lineup for netbooks, product lineup and price lineup, and we get a chance to engage in that dialogue, both with the OEM, and potentially with the OEM and the end user," stated Ballmer last Tuesday, in response to a question from a J.P. Morgan analyst. "Today when you buy a netbook with XP you don't really get a full XP version, you get some restrictions on XP. Some people might say, hey, look, I'm happy with the restrictions, some people might want Windows 7 instead of XP, some might be happy with the restrictions, some end users might not be happy with the same restrictions.
Google Docs security hole may have exposed private documents
Over the weekend, some -- though not all -- users of Google Docs received notifications in their Gmail inboxes stating that some of their cloud-based documents marked as private may have been sharable with other users anyway. The problem apparently concerns marking multiple documents as private with a single command, which ended up not fulfilling that task.
Here is the text of the letter Google Docs users received, which was published over the weekend independently by multiple bloggers who use the service:
Internet Explorer 8 can be turned off in Windows 7
A Microsoft Windows 7 group product manager confirmed in an announcement dated last Friday, though which is only making its premiere appearance over the weekend, that in the latest private beta build, users will be able to "turn off" -- to use his own phrase for it -- a greater number of standard Windows features including Internet Explorer 8.
"If a feature is deselected, it is not available for use. This means the files (binaries and data) are not loaded by the operating system (for security-conscious customers) and not available to users on the computer," writes Microsoft's Jack Mayo. "These same files are staged so that the features can easily be added back to the running OS without additional media."
Will patent reform diminish or restore the value of originality?
The era of the digital machine in human history -- an era which has only spanned the interval of our own lifetimes, if that long -- has seen the difference between a concept and a mechanism narrowed to a barely negligible dividing line. For a concept to be patentable, it need not yet physically exist, yet it must be sufficiently demonstrable -- that is to say, the concept must be so meticulous as to describe something which could, if only for need of a little workmanship, be made real. The legal phrase for this is reduction to practice -- a demonstration of the workability of the concept, which can in most cases (one notable exception being genes) be simply theoretical.
What so few individuals understand about the ideal of the patent is that it is principally an instrument with which you as an individual may attest that a workable concept is yours. It does not calculate a concept's commercial value or practicality or efficiency or usefulness; rather, that as an ideal of a mechanism, it specifies that it is original, that it came from someone in particular, and that it is workable. Ideally, a concept should be attributable to its source, just as this paragraph and this essay will, for whatever it's worth, be attributed to me.
Why did the RIAA sue one Shaun Adams of Grand Island, Nebraska?
Those who were familiar with the Recording Industry Association of America's declaration last December that it was discontinuing its strategy of lawsuits against individuals suspected of illicit song sharing, were puzzled to learn through blog sources late yesterday that the RIAA had filed suit last Tuesday against an individual in Nebraska. Is there a particular reason for this suit; did RIAA members decide to make an exception?
As RIAA spokesperson Jonathan Lamy told Betanews this morning, the true facts are that this is no exception. The filing on Tuesday against Shaun Adams of Grand Island is actually the formalization of action the studios had already initiated against him prior to their mutual December decision.
So much for 'Firefox 3.1:' Mozilla gives its next browser an early promotion to 3.5
Just about as soon as we had the latest speed figures from Tuesday's nightly build of "Shiretoko" -- a.k.a., Firefox 3.1 pre-beta 3 -- it appears the Mozilla organization has thought twice about its numerology, and decided that the new edition's upgraded TraceMonkey JavaScript engine makes it at least worth half-a-point rather than a tenth. Just a few hours ago, the organization's interim VP of Engineering submitted to its newsgroup a "proposal" -- which will probably go without opposition -- that after Beta 3 (which is already close to finalized), the next beta round will be given the designation Firefox 3.5.
"The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that's gone into everything from video and layout to places and the plugin service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label .1," wrote Shaver. "3.5 will help set expectations better about the amount of awesome that's packed into Shiretoko, and we expect uptake help from that as well."
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