Nagging Capital One credit card commercials ask, "What's in your wallet?" Perhaps for the connected age, the question should be "What's in your digital wallet?" If the answer is a password used at Windows Live Hotmail and pretty much everywhere else online, your wallet may have been stolen.

As reported earlier today by Neowin, on October 1st someone briefly posted online thousands of Hotmail (e.g., Windows Live) account passwords. The number of pilfered accounts could be much higher. The source of the accounts information remains uncertain, although Microsoft claims they were gathered through phishing expeditions. I decided not to wait to find out.

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As Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress after the 2006 mid-term elections, they enacted a strategy of shifting the authority for implementing and regulating so-called net neutrality to the Federal Communications Commission, where Republican opposition was less likely to forestall it. Now that the FCC itself is under Democratic control, and its new chairman Julius Genachowski comes into the job already having been recognized as the nation's leading net neutrality advocate, Republicans in Congress have little else to do but voice their opposition from the sidelines.

That's exactly what they're doing today, in a concerted effort whose timing is curiously in sync with the publication of a position paper on net neutrality from leading service provider Verizon.

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After enduring patent infringement lawsuits from AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint in 2006-2007, Vonage lost its commanding position in Voice over IP telephony (also known as digital voice) to cable companies such as Comcast and Qwest. Today, the company looks poised to make a comeback with its new Vonage Mobile app for iPhone and BlackBerry.

The free application lets subscribers place packet-based calls over Wi-Fi or circuit-based calls over cellular networks. It ends up being similar to the Skype iPhone application in that it will only use VoIP if the mobile device is within range of a Wi-Fi signal. Otherwise, it will make traditional wireless calls over AT&T's GSM network. Furthermore, when connected to a Wi-Fi signal for a VoIP call, and a call comes in through the cellular band, Vonage Mobile reportedly drops the VoIP call.

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Two months ago, Google announced its intention to purchase On2 Technologies, the producer of the technology behind the Ogg Theora codec that was the prime candidate earlier this year to become the open video solution for HTML 5. Google's engineers had come out in opposition to Ogg Theora, and that fact was cited by the HTML 5 working group as reason for its suspending efforts to incorporate open video for this version.

Whatever Google's reasons may have been for purchasing On2, not everyone in the company appeared to be interested in advancing the format. Today, that sentiment appears to have been made official, with the announcement during Adobe's MAX conference in Los Angeles that Google is joining Adobe's Open Screen Project, established last year.

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With a network that is already overloaded with data traffic, AT&T has enlisted the help of Opera Software's server-side compression technology to help bring mobile Web access to even more subscribers.

Today, AT&T debuted four new feature phones, two from Pantech (Reveal and Impact) and two from Samsung (Mythic and Flight) which the company touts as "Full Web Browsing Phones," equipped with a new att.net branded HTML browser that "utilizes advanced data compression from Opera Software, allowing for much faster delivery of HTML Web pages."

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I've decided I won't be part of the 100,000 or so special folks who are already rolling up their sleeves and digging into the guts of Google's newest uber-desirable online application, the private beta of Google Wave. This will give some poor fellow extra opportunity to troll eBay, bidding $100 or so for an invitation.

It's not like I'm eschewing some exclusive community. Like Gmail before it, Google Wave accounts will eventually be freely available to anyone with a pulse. But unlike Gmail -- which remains in the limelight with regular updates delivered to a widespread base of users who passionately use the service -- Google Wave's lifespan likely won't be as charmed.

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In a unanimous vote this morning, the US Federal Trade Commission has decided to enact changes to federal code regarding truth in advertising and in product endorsement, including the first such extensions to regulate the activity of bloggers. Acknowledging that bloggers may be individuals who publish their opinions online without compensation, but with a wide audience, the FTC voted to enact new regulations beginning December 1 to compel bloggers to reveal all material connections that may have led them to endorse a product, even if that endorsement honestly reflects how bloggers feel about it.

The amendments will come in the form of changes to the FTC's Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, last amended in 1980. During a public comment period, the FTC acknowledges it received several comments from unnamed citizens arguing that the nature of new online media makes it impossible to draw a distinct dividing line between, say a "blog" and a "publication," or a "commercial blog" and a "personal blog" (both may include advertising).

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It's quite easy for Adobe to throw around statistics about Flash, and you'll frequently hear members of the Adobe team say such things as "Adobe Flash is installed on 99% of PCs," or "75% of all online games are built in Flash," or "80% of all Web video is encoded in Flash." Though these statistics are dubious, there is little doubt about Flash's ubiquity.

But as mobile Web consumption has dramatically increased, mobile Flash technology has been struggling to deliver the full Web experience to resource-constrained devices. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously commented in mid-2008, the full version of Flash was too big, and Flash Lite was too small. What Flash lacked was a product "in the middle" that could fully deliver rich Internet content without also consuming a lot of CPU cycles.

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A single stalled router is being blamed by Verizon officials for a service outage that impacted customers of its high-speed Internet service, including fiberoptic FiOS, in New York and Massachusetts.

The outage occurred at approximately 3:15 pm EDT, according to a message Friday afternoon from the company's chief PR executive, Eric Rabe. He acknowledged that routers typically fail over to adjacent ones, but in this instance, this one didn't.

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T-Mobile, Microsoft and Danger have confirmed a major data service disruption affecting an unspecified number of Sidekick users that could last more than three days.

In an official announcement in T-Mobile's support forum Saturday evening, the network operator said, "We expect data services to begin gradually returning in the next couple of hours (Saturday evening), Web browsing capabilities should be accessible first; additional functions such as IM, social networking applications and email will then follow. While we anticipate a significant portion of data services to be restored by Monday, some richer data services may lag. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and appreciate your patience as we work hard with Danger/Microsoft to resolve this issue."

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This October has been declared National Cyber Security Awareness Month, a month in which Americans are encouraged to learn more about the "national security priority" that is the US communications infrastructure.

"Cyber attacks and their viral ability to infect networks, devices, and software must be the concern of all Americans," President Barack Obama said yesterday. "This month, we highlight the responsibility of individuals, businesses, and governments to work together to improve their own cybersecurity and that of our Nation. We all must practice safe computing to avoid attacks. A key measure of our success will be the degree to which all Americans educate themselves about the risks they face and the actions they can take to protect themselves and our Nation's digital infrastructure."

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According to a DigiTimes report today, newcomer to the smartphone market Acer will concentrate on releasing more Android devices. The source said it expects "at least half" of Acer's new smartphones to launch with the open source mobile operating system next year, even though the company actually showed off mostly Windows Mobile 6.1 devices earlier this year.

Acer first announced support for Android earlier this year, and President and CEO Gianfranco Lanci said it was being tested on several different hardware solutions. Acer's first Android device, the A1, is expected to come to market next month, but still has not been officially announced or specced.

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Perhaps the most oft-used defense by defendants charged with the proliferation of unauthorized files -- including some which actually belonged to them or were entrusted to their care -- by way of P2P file-sharing programs has been, "I didn't know." That was the defense invoked by US government employees, and even their direct reports, when classified documents turned up on LimeWire two years ago.

If P2P technology truly can and should be used for legitimate purposes, as many of its engineers and practitioners believe, then the very least it can do for users is inform them of what and where files will be shared. That's the aim of a House bill re-introduced last March by Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack (R - Calif.), the widow of entertainer and Congressman Sonny Bono. After over a year's deliberation (taking the bill's predecessors into account), Rep. Bono's bill -- the Informed P2P User Act -- passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee yesterday, and is on its way to a full House floor debate.

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Just days prior to the expiration of the final Joint Project Agreement between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the US Dept. of Commerce, effectively letting the DOC's oversight over ICANN lapse, the CEO of ICANN, Rod Beckstrom, informed ranking Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee and its key Subcommittee on Courts and Competition, that ICANN had no intention of terminating its long-term relationship with the US Government. But Beckstrom's lack of detail in response to a direct question from Reps. Lamar Smith (R - Texas) and Howard Coble (R - N.C.) suggested that neither he nor ICANN was in a mood to extend -- or in the congressmen's words, "memorialize" -- the relationship between the private, non-profit entity in charge of the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), and the government body that gave rise to it.

"It is important to note that the conclusion of the [Joint Project Agreement] is not a termination of ICANN's relationship with the United States Government," Beckstrom wrote the congressmen (PDF available here, courtesy Domain Name Journal), "nor is ICANN an advocate of that possibility. I am in discussion with the NTIA [division of the DOC] to establish a long-standing relationship to accommodate principles including the beliefs that ICANN should remain a non-profit corporation based in the United States, and should retain an ongoing focus on accountability and transparency."

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Acacia Research has been deemed a frivolous patent litigator for its repeated attempts to have its broad streaming media patents enforced in court. The holding company owns several patents on the process of transmitting compressed audio and video, a technique practically built into online multimedia; and it has been trying for the better part of the decade to license these patents out to a laundry list of multimedia companies, adult sites, and satellite and cable network operators.

Finally, after more than seven years in litigation, US District Court Judge James Ware invalidated the last of Acacia's claims, and called for a hearing on October 9 to close out the case and officially bust the patent. Acacia has been able to secure settlements and licensing agreements from hundreds of businesses, including a significant number of huge companies (Walt Disney, Playboy, T. Rowe Price, Bloomberg).

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