On the eve of easily the most important Federal Communications Commission open hearing since being sworn in as its chairman, Julius Genachowski is taking the strong personal stand he was expected to take, in favor of equal and open access to Internet services. Returning to the heart of the original debate from which the term "net neutrality" was coined, Genachowski told the Capitol Hill daily The Hill yesterday that he remains committed to enforcing net neutrality principles, assuming they actually become law.

"One thing I would say so that there is no confusion out there is that this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles," the FCC Chairman told The Hill.

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For the last few months, there's been a steady stream of rumors about Motorola's forthcoming Android handsets; speculating on form factor, carrier and OS version. Earlier this week, the Schaumburg, Illinois telecommunications company sent out invitations to a San Francisco press event on Thursday, September 10 adorned with the lime green Android logo.

Since the invitations didn't contain many details, the rumors have thusly picked up steam. It is widely expected that the two devices shown on September 10 will be the "Morrison" on T-Mobile, and the "Sholes" on Verizon.

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Like Sony Pictures and Lionsgate Entertainment before it, Paramount Pictures has agreed to supply its films to Redbox DVD rental kiosks. The $1 per night rentals that Redbox offers have caused a good deal of controversy among motion picture studios and has resulted in legal actions on the part of 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros., both of whose opinions are clearly on record: Cheap rentals devalue their DVDs.

Paramount's availability on Redbox will only be a trial, where the studio receives detailed rental metrics from the kiosks until the end of 2009. The studio will then evaluate the impact and viability of Redbox, to decide if it wants to stick with the program. At the end of the four-month trial, Paramount will have the option to extend it to 2014, with an "out clause" after two years.

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If you're collecting reasons people have given for avoiding Windows 7 purchases and upgrades, add this one in a little shelf all to itself: It is a threat to your civil liberties, according to the Free Software Foundation.

Today is the official launch day of an FSF fundraising campaign whose stated goal is to bombard employees of 499 of the world's Fortune 500 companies (the one they left out probably wouldn't make any difference) with letters claiming, among other assertions, that Microsoft is engaging in a clandestine spy operation, masquerading under euphemistic names such as "Windows Genuine Advantage" (one example the FSF lists), invading homes, offices, and even schools.

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The e-reader market is hot, and everyone loves the competition. Thanks to the heightened activity in the sector, market research group NPD's DisplaySearch this morning forecasts an astonishing growth in e-paper displays.

This year, 22 million units were shipped, resulting in $431 million in revenue. E-paper displays aren't limited to the Kindle/Reader set either, they're being used in cell phones, watches and clocks, advertisements, and more. Because of this, NPD forecasts a 64% compound annual growth rate in unit sales and a 41% growth rate in revenues. By that formula, the market will be worth $9.6 billion by 2018, with 1.8 billion e-paper displays shipped out for use.

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Download Opera 10 for Windows Release Candidate Build 1733 from Fileforum now.

"At Opera, we love speed," reads the beginning of a March 2009 blog post from Opera Software Product Analyst Roberto Mateu. "We work hard to make our browser faster with features that speeds you up."

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The world's largest torrent indexing site Mininova is the next site to fall to anti-piracy group Stichting BREIN, Dutch news services are reporting today.

A civil court order handed down today has given Mininova three months to remove all copyrighted works from its servers or face a €5 million fine. Stichting BREIN (lit: "The Brain Foundation"), which represents copyright holders, took action against The Pirate Bay earlier in the summer and won on similar grounds. However, that particular case is in appeal and awaiting its retrial on October 5.

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Nokia has been quite busy this week. In advance of Nokia World 09, the company introduced its first PC in more than 18 years and two new handsets (the 5800 navigation edition and the 5230.) Today, the Finnish mobile phone leader introduced Nokia Money, a mobile banking platform that will continue the company's advancement into the "wallet phone" model.

Working in cooperation with Obopay, Nokia Money will let users buy merchandise and pay bills with their mobile device.

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Skype's connection fee for placing calls to landline and mobile phones in certain countries will increase 100% on September 6th, the company's site now says.

For Skype users who are not on an unlimited calling plan, calls that connect to landline or cellular numbers incur a one-time connection fee and a per-minute charge.

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Google is not saying much today about a flaw discovered in the V8 JavaScript engine of its Chrome 2 stable Web browser, one which triggered an update that is being rolled out to Chrome users today. Amid what it is sharing today, however, is a surprising fact: Mozilla Security is being credited with the discovery.

Malicious JavaScript, Google says, can cause the Chrome browser to run arbitrary code, although that code may still be protected by the browser's "sandbox" -- its protected area of memory where running code has no access to system resources. However, it's conceivable that code running within the sandbox could provoke the user (by social means, perhaps by feigning a crash or system bug) to perform an action that may trigger a more damaging process delivered through a different payload, so Google treated the issue with a "High" severity rating.

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Foxit Reader, a free, lightweight PDF viewer and printer popular in our FileForum, has an evil twin.

Today, the Foxit Corporation warned that a malware claiming to be Foxit Reader for Macintosh has been perpetrating attacks on users thinking they were downloading an official version of the free PDF reader. The thing is, there is no Foxit Reader for OS X. The software is available for Windows, Windows Mobile, Embedded Linux, Desktop Linux, and U3.

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Microsoft's most recent Web-driven database technology is ADO.NET, although only the first three letters of its name have been a throwback to its predecessor: There's nothing "ActiveX" about ADO.NET whatsoever. Up to now, its purpose has been to expose data through HTTP Web services that can be utilized by JavaScript clients (read: common Web pages) as well as by .NET applications including Silverlight.

But that fact has kept the pairings of ADO.NET with ASP.NET, and PHP with MySQL, separate and distinct from one another.

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Even though Blu-ray player sales are on a rapid climb, and Sony's new PS3 Slim and cheaper PlayStation 3 are expected to cause an explosion in Blu-ray penetration, market research company iSuppli says the drives haven't even begun to break the PC market.

According to the firm's tallies of the global PC market, only 3.6% of all computers shipped this year were equipped with Blu-ray drives, and the growth rate will remain low.

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For the last two years, there really hasn't been much of an SCO Group left, although the company remains in business. The biggest question facing the continued existence of that company in recent days has been whether to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy (it filed for Chapter 11 in October 2007), after which its remaining assets could be sold off.

But while many think the company is on its last breath, a possible reprieve has come in the form of a reversal of what many felt was the only truly scoring blow in its interminable Linux copyright deathmatch against Novell, the company that sold its Unix and Unixware properties to SCO's predecessor Santa Cruz Operation in 1995. SCO accused Novell of sullying the value of the Unix intellectual property it was sold, by becoming a vendor of Linux. Two years ago, the judge in the case -- who, by that time, may have wished he'd taken up a safer, quieter job managing an ammunition testing facility -- ruled that Novell could do anything it wanted because it never ceded control of its Unix copyrights.

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This week, Google is expanding the traffic layer in Google Maps to cover all US highways, and to determine the flow of traffic, its own users are anonymously supplying the data.

In Google Maps for Mobile with "My Location," phones with GPS (excluding iPhones) send their speed data to Google so it can determine the overall speed at which traffic is flowing. Traffic flow is not uploaded in a social way. That is to say, a single user does not simply flick on his GPS to show other users that he's stuck in traffic. Rather, Google pulls the speed data off of every phone with Google Maps and GPS and combines it to arrive at an average.

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