Over at Digital Inspiration, Amit Agarwal asserts there is an inner circle of 10 journalists that get advance review access to hot new Apple products -- ah, like iPad. The first iPad reviews appeared overnight, and many of them are quite favorable. The reviews come just days before iPad goes on sale -- Saturday 9 a.m. local time here in the United States.

Agarwal does an excellent job detailing the three-phase process, who is in the inner circle and what are the benefits to Apple. I won't repeat what he so astutely explains. Read his post. Too much Web content is the regurgitation of what someone else reported, rather than bloggers or journalists doing original reporting. However, Agarwal graciously gave me permission to use the inner circle graphic he created. If you don't know who these people are, read Agarwal's post!

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In 2004, American jewelry company Tiffany & Co. sued online auction site eBay in the US District Court for trademark infringement. In the complaint, Tiffany sought to establish eBay responsible for the trade of counterfeit Tiffany goods on its popular site, saying that eBay was "liable for direct and contributory trademark infringement, unfair competition, false advertising, and direct and contributory trademark dilution. "

The suit opened the door for a number of luxury brands to sue eBay on the same grounds. In the years since Tiffany's complaint, Moet Hennesy Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior Couture, Rolex, L'Oreal fragrances, and PPR, the conglomerate that owns Gucci, Yves Saint-Laurent and Stella McCartney all put legal pressure on eBay to curb the trade of counterfeit products.

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Palm hasn't exactly been raking in the dough for the last few years. Quite the contrary, it has consistently posted quarterly losses since well before its switch to webOS last year.

But Palm has so much going for it. Its devices are aesthetically pleasing, they offer a high level of functionality, they're available on three of the four major wireless carriers, and above all, they're cheap.

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The strangest of role reversals is occurring right now as Apple prepares to release iPad on Saturday. In 1984, Apple needed the media and publishers to promote Macintosh. Twenty-six years later, the media and publishers need -- or seem to think they do -- Apple and iPad. How strange is that?

Apple's "1984" Super Bowl commercial is legendary advertising. The commercial aired just once on TV, although it lives online in its original form and in many spoofs. But Apple's Macintosh promotion didn't stop there. For example, Apple purchased all the ad space -- 39 pages -- in the Newsweek 1984 election issue. The Graphical User Interface Gallery has scanned and preserved all 39 pages of ads.

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Last week, Betanews reported on the discovery by two university researchers, made at a recent security conference, that security companies often deal with governments that can compel certificate authorities to produce SSL security keys for them. Those keys can then be used to sign certificates as any other Web site, enabling a law enforcement authority -- hypothetically speaking, of course -- to spoof virtually any other site.

Today, Betanews heard from world-renowned security expert Kurt Seifried, author of numerous books on Linux system administration, network security, and cryptography. In the May 2010 issue of Linux Magazine, Seifried reports on his own discovery, which goes one very critical step further: You don't need to be a government, he found, to compel a certificate authority (CA) to issue an SSL certificate for a major Web mail service of your choice. You just need a valid credit card.

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MeeGo, the mobile Linux project that merges Nokia's Maemo with Intel's Moblin, has officially launched for developers today.

Both the MeeGo core distribution infrastructure and the operating system base are now available as downloadable images from the MeeGo project's Web site, here.

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While most U.S. wireless carriers offer a 30-day grace period where users can return their new phone and cancel their service package without having to pay the exorbitant early termination fee, the subscriber who canceled his plan never really gets all his money back. There are activation fees, restocking fees, and fees for all the minutes/data used during that grace period.

Today, Sprint Nextel announced a new "Satisfaction Guaranteed or Money Back" program which gives users the customary 30 day grace period, but if they decide to cancel their plan and return their phone, they get all their money back. Sprint refunds everything included in its plans, but will not reimburse users for services above and beyond that. For example, if they sent a bunch of text messages without a texting plan, or if they used services with third-party billing, Sprint won't reimburse that.

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Would revised surveillance law protect all personal data?

Recently, content providers including Google and Microsoft have been racing to comply with dueling sets of governments' provisions worldwide: one that mandates how long they must retain information about their customers, and another that mandates they must anonymize that data, or get rid of it, after a given period of time. But as university researchers including Harvard's Christopher Soghoian demonstrated, anonymization with respect to single databases may be pointless, as engineers with only meager knowledge of how databases work could conceivably reconstruct personally identifiable data by linking records from multiple databases.

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Microsoft and Ford have worked closely for more than three years on the Sync in-car communication, navigation, and entertainment system, and today the companies announced their partnership has branched out into energy management for electric vehicles.

At the New York International Auto Show today, the two companies announced that the 2011 Ford Focus Electric will be the first vehicle to utilize Microsoft Hohm for automation and optimization of charging. Hohm is a cloud-based service that provides actionable info on your energy consumption that Microsoft first debuted nine months ago.

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As first reported this afternoon by Groklaw, the publication that made its name covering the ugliest chapter in the history of computing, a jury in Utah district court has found that the copyrights to UNIX were never transferred to the original Santa Cruz Operation by way of a 1995 asset purchase agreement.

The decision may finally put to rest a 15-year-old argument over who, or what, has the rights to UNIX.

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Just four days ahead of the iPad's first day of availability, iTunes has received an upgrade which adds sync for the new device. According to the software updater, the new version of iTunes lets users "Organize and sync books you've downloaded from iBooks on iPad or added to your iTunes library," and "Rename, rearrange, or remove Genius Mixes."

The icon under "Library" which formerly was called "Audiobooks" is now simply, "Books," and Genius mixes can now be re-named and moved. Otherwise, there is not much of an outward difference between 9 and 9.1

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Download Google Chrome 5 Dev build 360.4 for Windows from Fileforum now.

With Google owning YouTube, the Internet's principal delivery system for Flash-based video, it was perhaps inevitable that the company would bundle the Flash plug-in with its Chrome browser. The announcement came today from both Google and the team developing the open source Chromium component on which Chrome is based.

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Back in December, I tried to enable everything I use on my Motorola Droid with text-to-speech, with only limited success. Ideally, I would have been able to have all of my incoming text-based media from Twitter, RSS, e-mail, and SMS read aloud to me so I could use my phone while driving. Unfortunately, Android's built in TalkBack functionality is very limited, and the talking apps I've tried are also pretty limited in what they do.

But with safe driving legislation in committee in Congress, and a growing list of states that have banned texting while driving, the market for eyes- and hands-free phone interfaces is hot.

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There are many reasons why iPod and iTunes Store succeeded where competing products failed. But two reasons stand out: Right price, right rights. If iBookstore is to succeed, Apple must apply the same model to e-books and other publications sold there. CEO Steve Jobs and company must seize control of pricing during content negotiations -- and, more importantly -- rights. There must be a single (and generous), standard usage right for all titles, including magazine and newspapers.

When Apple launched iPod in October 2001, the "right price, right rights" model was the best possible: Free. Music labels hadn't locked down CDs with onerous digital rights management mechanisms. Therefore, people could rip music and make their own "mixed tapes" CDs. Meaning -- people buying iPod already owned content they could put on the device. Apple wisely chose not to restrict music copying to iPod. The price was free and the rights were unrestricted.

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Using a Firefox 3.0 add-on created by developers in Hong Kong, Betanews was able to briefly establish a connection with the Internet via a proxy based in mainland China. With that proxy, we were able to confirm that searches performed using Google's Hong Kong-based page were effectively blocked.

Firefox 3.0 reported the blockage with this message: "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading" -- a message from the browser, not from an ISP. We used version 3.0.16 of Firefox (an older edition) because it is the only version compatible with China Channel, a tool made for the express purpose of testing China's filtering ability. It has not been upgraded for version 3.6.

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