An attorney who was at the heart of the US Dept. of Justice's original 1994 antitrust case against Microsoft, arising from its proposed takeover of Quicken manufacturer Intuit, will find himself spearheading a coalition against Google's book scanning policies that includes both Microsoft and Yahoo, spokespersons from both companies confirmed to Betanews this morning.

It was attorney Gary Reback who first called Microsoft to task for using its "embrace and extend" policy in an abusive fashion against competitors, often representing those competitors in legal action, as was the case with Borland International and Sybase in the mid '90s. Currently, he is the author of a book called Free the Market! Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive. His latest confrontation is against Google, whose proposed settlement with book authors and publishers would give Google "non-exclusive" rights to scan their books contents and reproduce them online in the Google Books service. Already, Google has been scanning books that are available in public libraries, and making excerpts of those books available to users -- excerpts, as opposed to the books in their entirety.

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Similar to the inquiry it launched into the iPhone Google Voice rejection, the Federal Communications Commission today announced its intention to scrutinize the wireless telecommunications industry as a whole, to see if it encourages competition, innovation and investment, and if it is fair and open to consumers.

The Commission will take a vote on August 27 to decide whether it will proceed with the investigation, which seeks to "understand better the factors that encourage innovation and investment in wireless;" to determine "the status of competition in the mobile wireless market, including commercial mobile services;" and to "comment on whether there are opportunities to protect and empower American consumers by ensuring sufficient access to relevant information about communications services."

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In the Internet equivalent of the old "whack-a-mole" game, Trend Micro researcher Rik Ferguson -- who helped call attention to the Conficker worm early on -- has this week been calling attention to rogue Facebook applications whose main purpose appears to be to collect users' passwords. Using the usual attention-grabbing headings to grab users (repeating the word "sex" is apparently still effective), these apps redirect users to what looks like a legitimate login page, making users believe they need to log into Facebook again.

The innocuous names lead users to think they point to real Facebook functions like "inbox," rather than third-party apps. When a user clicks on one of them thinking he's using a part of Facebook, the malicious app takes the user to a Facebook login screen, while in the meantime collecting the user's password.

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It's not a nationwide ban like the one now in place in the Netherlands, but it may be a step in that direction. Starting September 1, Irish ISP Eircom will block its customers from accessing torrent indexing site The Pirate Bay.

Eircom started working with the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) last February to crack down on P2P music sharing, the result of an out-of-court agreement between the ISP and the "big four" major labels, in order to avoid litigation.

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A recent Digitimes report told us what we already sort of knew, but phrased it in such a way that the tech media did a huge double take.

It said that Microsoft will launch Windows Mobile 6.5 in October, and then Windows Mobile 7 in the fourth quarter of next year...pretty much a verbatim repeat of what Steve Ballmer said about the platform last March. However, the report goes on to say that Microsoft will be running what it calls
"a dual-platform strategy to allow Microsoft to compete with the Android-based platform using Windows Mobile 6.5 and also compete with iPhones leveraging Windows Mobile 7."

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In the first comprehensive statement representing Mozilla's viewpoint on the issue of Microsoft's compliance with the European Commission's recent Statement of Objections, Mozilla Foundation CEO Mitchell Baker wrote earlier this week that a "ballot screen" giving Windows 7 installers the option of setting up Firefox or another browser instead, is not enough to level the playing field. Internet Explorer, Baker fears, will continue to received favored placement elsewhere in the system, including on the desktop and the taskbar.

"Choosing another browser as a 'default' does not mean that the other browser takes the place of IE," Baker writes. "For example, the IE logo ('shortcut') still remains unchanged on the desktop. The shortcut / logo of the browser the user has selected does not replace this, it is added elsewhere. As a result, the familiar location remains IE, not the user's choice."

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In order to move ahead with the National Broadband Plan, the FCC has to first say exactly what qualifies as "broadband." Today, the Commission has issued a public notice seeking a tailored public comment on exactly what the definition of broadband should be.

Already, the FCC has what it believes to be a definition for the term, presented on its Broadband.gov site inaugurated earlier this week: "The term broadband commonly refers to high-speed Internet access that is always on and faster than the traditional dial-up access." But here's the thing: What, exactly, is "high?"

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I'll begin by saying that Carmi Levy is my very good friend, and I do admit that most of the time, he and I think along the very same wavelength. I met him through our mutual friend Wolfgang Gruener at TG Daily, and we've carried on a very fruitful dialogue about the IT industry ever since. That, and he has this way of making Winnie-the-Pooh berets look really cool.

We do disagree on one point today, and I think the nature of that disagreement would be beneficial to folks who are wrestling with the question Carmi brought up this morning: "To upgrade or not to upgrade." His article is worth reading, so rather than summarize it here, I'll let Carmi speak for himself.

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AT&T's first Android handset, a touchscreen slider from HTC code-named "Lancaster" could face an indefinite delay, according to a DigiTimes report today.

Lancaster was originally slated for a third quarter release, but now could be either delayed or cancelled entirely, according to Digitimes' reliable sources in its native Taiwan, because the phone "has not yet passed AT&T validation."

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By far the strongest feature of any operating system or applications suite -- when its architects bother to include it -- is the ability for its own users to program new and unique features into it. It's also the least appreciated feature on the marketing list; but businesses that have invested heavily in Microsoft Office over the years typically have an extensive library of Excel macros, a war chest of VBA functions built into their Word templates, and a spaghetti tangle of Outlook rules.

Today, Google premiered its approach to user-designed extensibility for its online Apps suite, and so far it's exactly what you might expect from Google: Its Apps Script language doesn't reinvent the wheel, leveraging its grammar completely from JavaScript, which many developers already know. It uses a basic set of terms for representing the graphical objects in the system, and a simple array of methods for making things happen and applying functions to menus. And as for how it can actually improve your work, Google pretty much leaves that up to you.

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To upgrade or not to upgrade: It's the issue of the moment for Windows users everywhere as the hype machine for the October 22 Windows 7 release gathers steam. And as we gaze at our existing machines, either running a snappy but outdated XP or a pokey but still slick looking Vista, and wonder whether we should be planning a late night trip to the big box store for our very own copy, I've got one word for you: Stop.

There are plenty of reasons why you'd want to refresh your existing machine with a cool new operating system. Pre-release versions of Windows 7 have displayed impressive performance, stability, and usability. Device compatibility -- a major bugaboo early on for the ill-starred Vista -- is much improved. It's smaller and lighter than the OS it ostensibly replaces, a nice reversal from the years-long tidal wave of ever-more-bloated products from the world's largest software vendor. Win7 scales better and can take advantage of more memory and multicore processors. That the new OS looks cool enough to not embarrass Windows fans when they run into Mac zealots at parties is an added bonus.

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Let's face it: RealPlayer hasn't been a viable media player for almost ten years. As Technologizer's David Worthington wrote for Betanews in 2000, "A once useful media player's standard installation was transformed into a bloated menagerie of components and add-ons with the release of RealPlayer 7. These needlessly suck away system resources and add useless functionality..."

Today, RealNetworks finds itself competing not so much against Windows Media Player as with the likes of DownloadHelper. Real is now working to generate interest among free media consuming types with the launch of RealPlayer SP, which lets users download unprotected Flash videos to keep.

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Earlier this year, we took a look at a desktop phone running Android built by California startup Touch Revolution. While that device provided a look into the potential application of the OS in fixed telephony, the devices we saw were running a version of Android almost indistinguishable from the publicly available build.

Today, Cloud Telecomputers has debuted a completely unique build of Android as a part of its Glass "telecomputer" platform. The company's reference design has the Android environment running on a TI OMAP processor, and all telephony (VoIP and DSP, SIP Stack and Voice Codecs) being handled by a separate Audiocodes processor.

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The Windows Live team announced this afternoon that Windows Live Movie Maker, the free video editing software component of Windows Live Essentials has come out of beta and is available for download.

Windows Live Movie Maker opened in beta last year, and has been designed to provide a quick and easy method of cutting video clips rather than a full editing suite.

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Since January, when I switched to Windows 7 (Beta and later Release Candidate), I have sought an answer to that question. To my surprise, I have yet to find a Microsoft lifestyle -- not one that fits me. So I ask Betanews readers: What is the Microsoft lifestyle? What is your Microsoft lifestyle? Please answer in comments.

Perhaps Microsoft's lifestyle is enterprise computing, something I don't participate in. I've never worked for a company that required SharePoint and often, because of older deployed software, neither has there been mandate to use Exchange Server. When I was an analyst, writing in Word was a must, but not before or since.

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