There's a strange foreshadowing in Microsoft naming its social mashup service Popfly. In baseball, pop fly is a ball hit straight up that comes straight down, usually into the catcher's mitt and to an out. Popfly is out, with Microsoft's decision to close down the service on August 24th.

I'm really bugged about the shutdown, because of what it represents:

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I'll fess up now and admit I'm a space head.

I always have been and, much to my wife's chagrin, probably always will be. I've been heading into my backyard over the last few nights to catch a glimpse of the combined International Space Station/Space Shuttle Endeavour complex as it flies overhead at five miles a second. There isn't a whole lot to see, frankly. Just a white dot that moves through the sky for a couple of minutes before winking out unceremoniously somewhere near my neighbor's maple tree. The kids occasionally come along, if only to make sure I don't get lost in the thorny bushes in the corner of our yard.

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The principal spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America -- whose name, for all who are interested, is correctly spelled Jonathan Lamy, not "Larry" -- denied telling an SC Magazine reporter, even off the cuff, that "DRM is dead," calling it a "blatantly inaccurate quote."

Lamy provided Betanews with an excerpt of his actual e-mail with the reporter, Deb Radcliff. As part of a discussion about consumers' continued willingness to bypass digital rights management schemes for digital music, for a story Radcliff was writing for SC, Lamy said, "There is virtually no DRM on music anymore, at least on download services, including iTunes." He went on to state that MP3s today tend to be sold without any DRM included anyway, with the interest of consumers being able to play tracks on any device.

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Toshiba may finally be surrendering to the power of Blu-ray, if anonymous sources to Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun are to be believed.

The paper says that Toshiba will release its own Blu-ray player by the end of 2009, a move that would be the clearest call of Blu-ray's success since Toshiba ceased HD DVD production early last year, and ended the long high definition format war.

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Today, Universal announced that its upcoming Blu-ray title Fast & Furious will include bonus features that can only be accessed through an iPhone/iPod Touch app.

Of the hundreds of titles now available on Blu-ray, only a fraction are furnished with BD-Live bonus material -- that is, bonus material that exploits a player's Internet connectivity and onboard storage. Because the Blu-ray spec wasn't fully complete when Sony launched the format in 2004, it has had to incrementally roll out certain features. When Blu-ray profile 1.1 (or "bonus view") was rolled out, it was given picture-in-picture, and it wasn't until last year that Blu-ray profile 2.0 (or BD-Live) titles began coming out.

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While it hasn't been able to get a street view car up there yet, Google has launched Google Earth with 3D moon surface maps to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first manned lunar expedition. The Google Earth team announced in its blog today that current Google Earth 5.0 users can re-start the program and browse the surface of the moon with layers providing more information about the Earth's largest satellite, and even an Apollo 11 guided tour narrated by Space Journalist Andrew Chaikin and former astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Google actually announced that it was mapping the surface of the Earth exactly four years ago, on the less ceremonious 36th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission.

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All P2P networks must go "establishment" someday, and today another formerly popular P2P service rended by courtroom battles announced it has turned around. Like P2P pioneer Napster did six years ago, this morning, Kazaa (now with just one capital letter) has come back as www.kazaa.com, a subscription-based music service with all of the "big four" major labels in its corner.

For $19.98 a month, Kazaa.com users get unlimited music downloads on up to three PCs, and unlimited ringtone downloads on one mobile phone, but that's it. The service does not support portability and tracks cannot be moved onto MP3 players.

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If a bug in a program makes it possible for that program to crash, is that a vulnerability? Mozilla is saying "no" to that this morning, claiming that recent warnings, including one issued Friday by the US Dept. of Homeland Security, are exaggerations.

"While these strings can result in crashes of some versions of Firefox, the reports by press and various security agencies have incorrectly indicated that this is an exploitable bug," reads a blog post yesterday from Mozilla Vice President of Engineering Mike Shaver. "Our analysis indicates that it is not, and we have seen no example of exploitability."

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Microsoft-Yahoo: Carl Icahn weighs in

Morning of July 20, 2009 • Still no official word on that rumored deal between Microsoft and Yahoo on the advertising front, but Reuters phoned up one of the heavy hitters and asked him for his thoughts last week. It's probably no surprise that principal Yahoo investor Carl Icahn, though not willing to discuss anything current, still seems inclined to make a deal -- even if it wasn't the deal he tried to broker for the two companies in 2008.

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He would insist on the truth, so I won't embellish anything here: Walter Cronkite was not my hero growing up, but the guy playing for what I -- a boy trying to make sense of my world -- perceived as the other team. My hero was David Brinkley, one of only two other men I knew of besides myself (the other being Chet Huntley) who could command my mother's attention. As a toddler in the 1960s, my assessment of the true value of that feat alone may have actually directed me toward a career in journalism. So while my classmates' idea of a rivalry was between the Sooners and the Longhorns, or between the Beatles and the Monkees, the rivalry that gave me cause for excitement every day was between NBC News and CBS News. And Walter was the competition.

Later, as I truly studied electronic journalism, I would understand what it was that Cronkite had created and had contributed to the craft, early enough for me to use it in forging my career. Unlike most people in this business who wear the moniker "Managing Editor," Cronkite not only steered the ship of his news organization, but developed the principles by which a complete news product is expertly produced. He created the system of priorities by which news "packages" were conceived, organized, and delivered. And he would be the one reorganizing and reconfiguring that sequence, sometimes as late as seconds before air time, and on certain days literally in-between commercials. He saw his broadcast as a "front page," and he adapted it to the importance of the moment. He created the system of flexibility that should, if we were smart, be applied to the business of Internet journalism -- he knew the weights and measures that were necessary to obtain a balance between the stories people needed to know, and the stories people wanted to know.

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UPDATE: Amazon issued a statement Friday night saying, "When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances." However, the company did not touch on whether it would monitor more closely what books get uploaded as part of its self-serve system for publishers to avoid such circumstances altogether.

The press loves a juicy story, and Amazon served one up on a silver platter this morning by automatically deleting certain copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from customers' Kindles. But many facts were left out of this media frenzy, namely that the ebooks were essentially pirated copies sold for 99-cents by a company that had no rights to the material.

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This episode of Recovery is brought to you by caffeine, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems (with apologies to Homer Simpson).

Fun fact: The Simpsons -- the longest-running sitcom in history and arguably one of the most formative -- has never been nominated for a Best Comedy Emmy. I've got a theory that if the television voters had done so about 18 years ago, they wouldn't currently be in the embarrassing position of nominating for their awards "shows" that don't give a damn about television. Hear me out.

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In May, Verizon announced that it was selling its landline business in 14 U.S. states to Frontier for an approximated $8.6 billion. When the transaction closes next year, Fronter will be the largest rural triple play provider in the United States, with more than 7 million access lines in 27 states.

But all is not well in the Mountain State, West Virgina, where both the state legislature and communications union laborers are skeptical about the deal.

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The stable channel for Google's Chrome Web browser (Chrome 2) has not seen a lot of action in recent weeks, perhaps indicating just how stable it has been. But a pair of exploitable defects that Google's engineers rate as "high" and "critical" have prompted the company to issue an automatic update to its deployed Chrome 2 Web browsers, beginning after midnight last night.

Although code running in Chrome is supposed to be tightly sandboxed, as engineers admitted very early this morning, the possibility existed for a maliciously crafted regular expression (RegEx, used in local searches) to generate a heap overflow, creating a situation where arbitrary code could be executed without the need for privilege. That was the "high" problem, which could lead to the ability to trigger the "critical" problem: An already compromised browser could then be maliciously maneuvered into allocating inordinately colossal memory buffers, thus slowing down the computer (denial of service) and possibly crashing the browser along the way.

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Now that the wireless telecommunications industry is under scrutiny by Congress and the US Department of Justice over handset exclusivity agreements and their effect on the industry, Verizon Wireless has yielded slightly to political pressure and eased up on its exclusivity. We emphasize slightly.

In a letter to congress, Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam said, "Any new exclusively arrangement we enter with handset makers will last no longer than six months -- for all manufacturers and all devices."

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