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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Initial development is nearly complete on an entirely new kind of Web browser code execution policy management system, which may yet become part of Firefox 3.7 (the point release following the next one in line), a Mozilla spokesperson informed Betanews. When implemented, browsers such as Firefox will be capable of restricting certain classes of embedded code from execution, and Web sites can advertise to browsers in advance which classes of code its pages contain.

The end result, the developers of Mozilla's Content Security Policy (CSP) hope, is that policy-enhanced browsers will be completely immune from cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks from malicious sources, by virtue of restricting themselves to either only executing inline code from trusted, certified sites, or not executing any such code at all.

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Well over seven years since work began on the standard, and four years since the first draft of the proposed standard was published to vendors -- and subsequently rejected by them -- there is at last a process in place for wireless networking equipment vendors to get their products formally certified using a certification that means the product is certified. If that last sentence sounded redundant, believe it or not, it wasn't: Since 2007, some Wi-Fi products have been certified using a certification that did not mean the product was certified.

Huh? Some products that adhered to so-called "draft-11n" standards (in this case, "Draft 2.0") were allowed to carry a logo that said "Wi-Fi Certified 802.11n Draft 2.0," with the latter two terms in smaller print. At the time, the Wi-Fi Alliance described this certification as "the consumer's indication that a product has passed rigorous testing and can deliver the very best user experience." More than 700 Wi-Fi products received the right to bear this logo. But among professional network engineers, there was no doubt that this "mark of excellence" was perhaps the world's most definitive maybe.

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If the last two months should be interpreted as Microsoft suggests, with Bing's gradual ascent in usage share against Google as a sign of Bing's inevitably catching up, then a similar interpretation of September's numbers from live analytics firm StatCounter should be taken as a sign of Bing's ultimate demise. A sampling of five billion or more US page views from Web sites accessed by StatCounter in September reveals that, of the world's top three search services, Google's usage share has climbed back just above 80%, and is flirting with last November's peak of 81.14% -- meaning Google is back to serving four out of five US-based general queries.

Bing's usage share in the US descended by 1.13% to 8.51% for the month of September, while Yahoo's dove 1.1% to 9.4%. Google's share among the top three has now climbed above where it stood in May (78.72%), when Microsoft changed the name of Windows Live Search.

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Sony's latest handheld game console, the $250 PSP Go hit retail today -- the first major video game system that does not support physical media, with games offered only via download.

To kick start the device's life today, Sony has beefed up the catalog of downloadable games in the PlayStation Store with more than 100 titles ranging from $5 all the way up to $39.99, including the highly hyped Gran Turismo PSP. Sony will be giving away one copy with every PSP Go for the first ten days of its availability.

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Even though collective analysis shows that the iPhone hasn't done as well as peer marketers would have us believe, the iTunes App Store undoubtedly has. In the first nine months the App Store existed, more than a billion apps were downloaded. Five months later, another billion were downloaded. Naturally, less than half of this vast quantity is thanks to the iPhone, as Apple combines the tens of millions of iPod Touch users downloading apps with iPhone downloaders.

But regardless of the device doing the downloading, the app store model has proven sound and has created a multi-million dollar business. This "app gold rush" has compelled thousands of developers to try their hands at creating software for the iPhone and iPod Touch in hopes of making a fortune.

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