Perhaps Microsoft's most effective competitive effort to date against Linux has been its recent moves directly into the open source arena, fuzzifying the boundaries between open source and commercial software efforts and playing more like a participant than a conqueror. If it does anything at all, it makes efforts to continue characterizing Microsoft as an evildoer look like recent right-wing efforts to paint the Obama administration as the re-emergence of Joseph Stalin.

Those broad-brushstroke efforts will become even more difficult after today, now that the company has announced it has funded an independent organization -- an offshoot of its Codeplex counterpart to Linux' SourceForge -- to nurture and facilitate efforts for private software companies, including itself, to contribute intellectual property to open source development efforts.

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With ID theft reaching increasingly alarming proportions, Symantec this week rolled out a battery of new tools geared to helping PC users fight victimization, at a press event Wednesday in New York City.

The company's latest round of heavy artillery includes new Quorum technology, integrated into the now available Norton Internet Security 10 and Norton Antivirus 10, plus a free tool known as the Norton Online Risk Calculator.

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In a response this week to a questionnaire from the Newspaper Association of America earlier this week, obtained by Harvard University journalist Zachary M. Seward (PDF available here), Google told newspaper publishers it is implementing an infrastructure extension to its Google Checkout service, for implementation sometime within the next 12 months, that may enable news sites and other publishers whose content is located via Google to receive payment for that content from users.

It's being called a "micropayment model," and it's similar in concept to the one being proposed by the Journalism Online coalition, which is led by former executives from Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, and endorsed by their parent company News Corp. And like the Journalism Online model, publishers may make their products more attractive by coalescing and offering them in bundles, according to the most rational interpretation of Google's questionnaire response.

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The iPhone has proven to be a strong content creation tool, with applications that allow the user to create graphics and presentations, record video, sequence audio, or draft compositions. But while it gives users plenty of tools to create, it doesn't exactly have a uniform tool to let users manage, move, and share their creations: some apps are integrated with some services, others are integrated with different ones...some aren't integrated with anything at all.

Cloud-based storage and collaboration service Box.net claims to provide an answer to this problem, but it needs the apps behind it to make it come true.

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Largely by virtue of its support from YouTube, which some say supplies four-fifths of the Web's streaming video, Adobe Flash is the de facto delivery standard for video through Web pages. While content creators have been urging Google and other video hosts to implement better controls over how unauthorized content can become so freely distributed, Adobe is now working on a way to enable those creators to post or host their own Flash video, in a way that they and only they are in control of the distribution process -- including, who gets to see those videos and for how much.

The next edition of Adobe's rights management server, now called Flash Access 2.0, was unveiled today at a broadcasting conference in Amsterdam. This while Silverlight -- perhaps Flash's most direct competitor in the functionality department, but still representing a very small slice of the global viewer base -- demonstrates its next version as well, with very similar goals. Today, Adobe said its next version of the Flash Player will be required for Web users to view videos that content owners produce specifically for customers.

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Not to be confused with HTC's Android-based Tattoo, which was known as "Click" before it was released, Motorola today debuted the latest T-Mobile Android called Cliq.

As expected, Cliq is an HVGA touchscreen QWERTY slider with quad-band GSM, WCDMA/EDGE/GPRS and HSPA 7.2, A-GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity. It offers up to 32GB of storage via microSD, but the speed of processor and amount of RAM were not announced today.

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The central question with regard to the i4i patent infringement case, which Microsoft is now appealing, is whether the Canadian software firm and one-time Microsoft partner had a legitimate and exclusive right in 2001 to produce XML authoring tools that enabled markup code to be distinguished from content. In its response to Microsoft's appeal filed Tuesday (PDF available here), as first reported by TechFlash blogger Todd Bishop, i4i says it knew Microsoft had been trying to build an XML authoring tool for Microsoft Word, but in the absence of one had deferred to i4i as a preferred provider.

Only during an April 2001 joint presentation of Word's and i4i's functionality to a US government customer, i4i says, did Microsoft learn that i4i had a patent on its metadata/content separation technology. And only after that time did Microsoft apparently pursue a course to compete with i4i using the basic concepts of that technology.

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Yesterday was a big day for both Palm and Apple, with Palm debuting its newest WebOS handset called the Pixi, and Apple refreshing its iPod line, iTunes, and iPhone OS.

All the while, though, the cat and mouse game between the two companies over connectivity was continuing. The Palm Pre was launched with the "unofficial" ability to sync with iTunes; and as most people expected, it was blocked by Apple in an incremental iTunes update. Just nine days later, Palm issued the WebOS 1.1 update which, among other things, brought the iTunes media sync functionality back.

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China Mobile, also known as the mobile network with the most subscribers in the world, has put its considerable weight behind the open source mobile environment, first by offering its own Android-based Open Mobile System "OPhones," and now by teaming with The Symbian Foundation.

In a joint statement with the Symbian Foundation yesterday, China Mobile announced they will now encourage developers to create Symbian apps by including Symbian Signed services in the China Mobile Market submission process, and to support Symbian's app publishing software called Horizon. The addition of both of these services makes the submission and approval of Symbian apps much easier.

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Earlier this year, AT&T announced its 7.2 Mbps HSPA upgrade, as a part of a plan to improve it wireless data services. The plan included the addition of new cell sites, more 3G spectrum, and thousands of additional fiber backhaul connections on old sites to help manage AT&T's massive wireless traffic driven by the popular and data hungry iPhone.

Today, the wireless network operator announced the HSPA 7.2 rollout will begin in six major US markets this year: Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Miami, where six compatible handsets and two LaptopConnect cards are expected to be available to customers.

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During a public memorial event in tribute to the life and career of the late CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, who passed away in July, President Obama spoke in an almost candid fashion about the evolution of news media in the age of the Internet. Specifically, he wondered aloud -- and with surprisingly stark honesty that might have even raised Cronkite's celebrated bushy eyebrows -- about whether the legendary news anchor would be able to perform the same job, in the same manner -- managing editor of a globally respected news service -- with the challenges posed by the nature of today's media.

"He was excited about all the stories that a high-tech world of journalism would be able to tell," the President said, "and all the newly emerging means with which to tell it. Naturally, we find ourselves wondering how he would have covered the monumental stories of our time. In an era where the news that City Hall is on fire can sweep around the world at the speed of the Internet, would he still have called to double-check? Would he have been able to cut through the murky noise of the blogs and the tweets and the sound bites, to shine the bright light on substance? Could he still offer the perspective that we value? Would he have been able to remain a singular figure in an age of dwindling attention spans and omnipresent media?

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A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed to Betanews that the company is planning to demonstrate technology currently being planned for version 4 of Silverlight, its media distribution platform based on .NET, designed to provide both an interactivity layer and digital rights management services for movie studios and other content providers. These services, the company now says, are intended to "enable movie studios and retailers to provide the same rich interactive experiences via digital copy and Internet distribution as consumers get with DVD or Blu-ray."

As many DVD and Blu-ray Disc collectors already know, "digital copy" in this instance refers to a separate file distributed with a disc that usually plays in ordinary DVD or BD players, but which plays interactively on PCs. If Microsoft's plan as it currently describes it becomes successful, movie discs produced in the near future could bear the Silverlight logo.

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Steve Jobs triumphantly returned to the spotlight to present this year's lineup of new iPods, iPhone OS 3.1, iTunes 9, and improvements to the iTunes store. In iPhone OS 3.1, a free incremental download that goes live today, the App Store has Genius recommendations, and a ringtone store with over 30,000 ringtones from all of the "big four" major labels priced at $1.29 each.

iTunes 9 also goes live today, receiving improved Genius functionality as well. Here, it applies to "Genius Mixes," a Pandora-esque playlist feature where songs of a similar nature are played sequentially. The database for Genius Mixes currently contains over 54 billion songs. iTunes syncing has also been improved, rather than only being able to sync content by playlist, all of the content going to your iPhone or iPod (apps, music, events, photos, etc.) can be arranged.

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Two of the most popular iPhone apps, Pandora and Facebook, have finally been brought to the Android platform. These apps place increased emphasis on one of Android's strengths that really makes the user experience different from the iPhone: homescreen presence.

Last week, Apple rolled out Facebook 3.0 for the iPhone which improved upon the previous app by adding new features such as Facebook Events and direct-to-Facebook video uploading. It was received with great praise by the iPhone crowd.

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A security advisory issued by Microsoft late yesterday takes to task a security consultant for a British ISP who apparently, and possibly even accidentally, discovered a way that the Server Message Block 2.0 driver can trigger an instant Windows crash. Rather than report the incident directly to Microsoft, Laurent Gaffié went public with his findings first, in such a way that appears to have triggered the enthusiasm of the black-hat side of the security community.

"Microsoft is concerned that this new report of a vulnerability was not responsibly disclosed, potentially putting computer users at risk," reads yesterday's Security Advisory 975497. "We continue to encourage responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities. We believe the commonly accepted practice of reporting vulnerabilities directly to a vendor serves everyone's best interests."

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