In what is now indisputably the most important vulnerability addressed during last Tuesday's record round of Windows patches, the two companies most affected by the problem -- Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, Mozilla -- could not help but be caught in a tangle of miscommunication exacerbated to a large extent by overhype from a sea of blogs. As a result, it's everyday users who are left confused and bewildered, even though no known exploit for the vulnerability exists.

The problem involves both the ".NET Framework Assistant" add-on and "Windows Presentation Manager" plug-in made by Microsoft for Mozilla Firefox, both of which are installed automatically -- and without warning -- by Microsoft's .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. One of Microsoft's patches last week, as explained in a Microsoft bulletin, addresses the functionality of 3.5 SP1 that's made available through these Firefox extensions.

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While initiatives at various levels of United States government strive to put current documents and publications online for public consumption, the European Union has been keeping up with new documents and scanning its archives to boot.

As a result, the EU Bookshop opened its Digital Library last week, an online repository of more than 110,000 scanned historical EU documents which date all the way back to 1952.

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Today was the Federal Communications Commission's deadline for public comment on the Berkman Center For Internet and Society's recent study, which examines the growth of broadband Internet access in other countries, along with the factors that have made those markets overseas more competitive than in the US.

"International comparisons...have been a political hot button in the past few years. Because the United States began the first decade of this century with the fourth-highest levels of broadband penetration among OECD nations, and is closing the decade in 15th place in these same rankings, and because, according to International Telecommunications Union measures, the United States slipped from 11th to 17th between 2002 and 2007, many have used these data to argue that the United States, on its present policy trajectory, is in decline," the study says.

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Last night, the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) unanimously agreed on the final mobile broadcast TV standard, the ATSC A/153 Mobile DTV Vestigial Side Band (VSB). This standard lets broadcasters take a portion of their existing DTV band and rebroadcast it as a shortwave sideband for mobile consumption.

But even in places where mobile broadcast television is popular, such as South Korea, it still isn't that popular. In the United States, where the average household watches more than 8 hours of television per day, mobile television remains as unpopular as ever.

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In a blog post yesterday first noticed by Computerworld's Gregg Keizer, a member of Mozilla's user experience team -- stating she was not writing on behalf of Mozilla, as the organization allows -- suggested that Microsoft's revised proposal for a Web browser selection screen for European Windows users still isn't fair enough to the browser market.

Because more computer users are accustomed to the typical ways to install software, states Mozilla UX team member Jenny Boriss, they may assume that the first choice that appears in a list is the preferred choice. In Microsoft's original proposal, Internet Explorer 8 appeared in the leftmost column. But in the company's more neutral alternative as proposed last March, it placed browsers in columns sorted in alphabetical order by their manufacturer. As a result, Apple Safari fell first.

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With the music industry's business model in flux, mostly due to forces seemingly beyond its control, one way of potentially reducing some of the stress from lost CD sales is by Congress lifting terrestrial radio broadcasters' exemption from paying royalties to musical performers -- an exemption that has been allowed since the beginnings of radio. Though a majority of representatives in the US House have voiced opposition to such a measure, a similar majority has yet to coalesce in the Senate.

Yesterday, concerted leadership in the Senate Judiciary Committee passed its version of a bill authored in the house by Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D - Mich.), effectively striking language from US Code granting radio broadcasters exemption from paying royalties to performers. (Broadcasters currently do pay royalties for copyright holders, typically through annual fees.)

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Today, Google said it will launch its own e-book store in the first half of 2010 called "Google Editions." This store will sell in-print books in addition to its archive of public domain titles, and will be accessible to "any device with a Web browser," not just for the dedicated e-readers that have gained so much notoriety in the past few years. Users will reportedly need to be connected to the Web to initially obtain their books, but they are then cached for offline consumption.

Google has long been expected to enter this space, and did not mention this week with whom it intends to partner in the hardware space. But reading headlines today, you'd think this was the first melee in a full-scale war between Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Google. Some have called it an "e-book fight," some an "eReader war," and then there was the inexplicably silly "Google wants you dead, Amazon!"

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System performance is an interesting concept; everyone seems to define it differently. To some, it involves chewing through a complex spreadsheet. To others, it's how fast a 3D video sequence can be rendered, or how easily Web pages are served up.

Call me a rebel, but after years of living off of a BlackBerry, my thinking has evolved. As much as I focused on megahertz and gigahertz for much of my computing life, the most important criteria for me these days are how fast the thing turns on, and how long it stays on before I have to recharge it.

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The part of the movie It's a Wonderful Life that always brought a tear to my grandmother's eye was at the end, where little Zuzu hears a bell ring on the Christmas tree, and pronounces that an angel has just gotten his wings. If a district court had found in favor of ASCAP, the nation's leading performers' rights organization (PRO), it's quite possible that if that bell had sounded like a particular song, someone somewhere might have been owed change.

The question at hand was whether performers' royalties -- the same share of proceeds that rights holders get whenever you play a song on Last.fm or Pandora -- were owed to the performers of the music you hear in wireless ringtones. If so, wireless services everywhere could owe a ton of money. And ASCAP may never have thought so in the first place had Cellco Partnership (a company doing business on behalf of Verizon Wireless) hadn't made an application last January for a blanket license -- in other words, if Cellco hadn't been willing to pay a little something for those rights in the first place.

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Following up on the Federal Communications Commission's continuing investigation into the legality and regulatory positioning of Google Voice, telecommunications giant AT&T addressed the FCC with a document entitled, "The Truth About Google Voice and the Open Internet Principles." (PDF available here, hosted by the Washington Post.) It reads quite like any other publication with a title like "The Truth About..." complete with all the shock and vitriol of a propaganda pamphlet.

AT&T claims that Google needs to stop blocking certain outbound Google Voice calls. Google claims that it blocks certain connections which are too expensive for a free service to connect to; and furthermore, as an Internet-based service, the issue is out of the FCC's jurisdiction anyway.

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Microsoft should be lauded for doing what days ago seem miraculous: The recovery of Sidekick service data lost sometime last week. But Microsoft has failed to take responsibility for the data disaster, in statements issued publicly and given to the Los Angeles Times. The company's pass-the-buck position is simply inexcusable. Sole responsibility falls on Microsoft, because Danger is the company's subsidiary.

As Betanews' Scott Fulton reported earlier, Microsoft took credit for the data recovery, but not its loss. A Microsoft spokesperson told the LA Times that "the Danger Service platform, which experienced the outage, is a standalone service operating on non-Microsoft technologies, and is not related to Microsoft's cloud services platform or Windows Live." She continued: "Other and future Microsoft mobile products and services are entirely based on Microsoft technologies and Microsoft's cloud service platform and software."

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An extra week of quality control testing has been scheduled for the first public beta of Firefox 3.6, which was originally scheduled to have been released today. Wednesday, October 21, at 5:00 pm PDT is the new scheduled release time.

The code freeze for 3.6 Beta 1 took place yesterday. What that means is a bit confusing, but certainly transparent in keeping with open source projects: There is now a Beta 1 release candidate which is undergoing one round of testing in preparation for next Wednesday. Separately, development has begun on 3.6 Beta 2, where testing is ongoing but private. And to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, ther-r-re is a third possibility which no one had counted upon: the beginnings of testing for the 3.6 Release Candidate (not the Beta 1 RC, but the 3.6 final RC).

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A presentation that Google had scheduled for early tomorrow evening at its Mountain View offices entitled "Front End Engineering Open House" will be a discussion about the Google Chrome Web browser, and not a preview of Google Chrome OS as reported by multiple Web sites this afternoon, one example of which appears at this hyperlink.

"This is actually just a small recruiting event and we won't be talking about Chrome OS at all," the spokesperson told Betanews moments ago, "just one engineer talking about UI design for Google Chrome (the browser)." The implication that Chrome OS was the subject was chocked up as a "false alarm."

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As expected, Research in Motion today released the specs for the BlackBerry Storm 2 (9550), and it really does appear to be mostly the same as its predecessor, except with crucial improvements in the areas that disappointed users most.

BlackBerry Storm 2 (9550) BlackBerry Storm (9530) Size 4.43" x 2.45" x .55" 4.43" x 2.45" x .55" Display 3.25" (480 x 360) capacitive multitouch/gestural 3.25" (480 x 360) capacitive touch Memory 256 MB Flash, 2 GB on-board storage 125MB Flash, (192 MB RAM), 1 GB on-board storage Network Support Dual Band CDMA/EV-DO Rev A., Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, single band UMTS/HSPA Dual Band CDMA/EV-DO Rev A., Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, single band UMTS/HSPA Connectivity 802.11b/g/d/i, Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR1) Integrated GPS with A-GPS Capabilities Bluetooth 2.0, Standalone GPS, A-GPS Battery 1400 mAhr Li-Ion, 5-6 hours of talk time, 11.2-12.7 days of standby time 1400 mAhr Li-Ion, 6 hours talk time, 15 days of standby time Imaging 3.2 MP Video/ 2x zoom AF camera with flash and image stabilization 3.2 MP Video/ 2x zoom AF camera with flash Weight

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