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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"We want a Mexico without fear; we want a free Mexico," President Felipe Calderon said yesterday, regarding the dispatch of more than 5,000 armed servicemen to Michoacan.

The Mexican government is attempting to establish order over a population fraught with organized crime; and while police respond to violence, the government and its law-abiding populace has already begun its response to criminal communications by establishing a nationwide database of prepaid cell phone users.

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Download Google Chrome 3.0.193.1 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Over the last few weeks, Google has been releasing development builds of its Chrome 3 Web browser in a fast and furious pace. And with each release, the browser has been leaping forward in performance, particularly in Windows XP. With yesterday's release of beta build 3.0.193.1, Chrome 3 has given Betanews reason to suspect that these performance gains are no accident.

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In Microsoft's history, it was Windows 95 that had finally confirmed for the entire operating system market that Windows had "arrived," cementing its position as the dominant system for well over a decade to come. The place of Windows Home Server in the market Microsoft has been working to create for it, has been far more tenable -- it doesn't really have competition in its category, but Home Server has yet to prove that it has "arrived." That could change with the forthcoming introduction of Power Pack 3, which will incorporate support for Windows 7, and which also may restore some features which loyal users have, to their surprise, found missing in recent versions.

Early this morning, Microsoft announced the forthcoming availability of the first beta of Power Pack 3 for Windows Home Server. Its key feature is the ability to automatically back up the contents of hard drives elsewhere in the home network, using the same disk imaging system created for Windows Server 2008. The company is signing up participants now through Microsoft Connect, though Betanews confirmed Friday morning that the beta download has not yet been posted.

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A data breach affecting users' contact information has been uncovered at Elance, an online contractor-gig site used by many tech professionals. A notice was sent out to various registered members and reposted to a Trust & Safety page of the site on Thursday.

According to the notice, some of the information in the pilfered data table -- which includes names, phone numbers and the like but not bank information or Social Security numbers -- has turned up on an unrelated site called outsourcingroom.com.

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Mark Loughridge on Thursday dispensed with the introductory pleasantries; the IBM CFO dived right into the Q2 earnings per share with his second sentence. Considering how that sentence panned out, analysts probably would have forgiven him for prefacing his prepared statement with booya!

IBM blasted past expectations, delivering earnings of $2.32 per share -- a company-best EPS for a first, second, or third quarter (adjusting for stock splits), and up 35 cents year-over-year. Q2 net income was $3.1 billion, up 12% year-over-year -- impressive considering total revenues were off 13%, or 7% adjusting for currency fluctuations. Public-sector spending was once again the fastest-growing business sector at 7%.

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Twitter, Google Apps, TechCrunch -- Why can't everyone be to blame for that hack?

The morning after the morning after... • Watching TechCrunch spool out those 300-odd documents lifted from Twitter has been fascinating; the two companies have been talking throughout the process about what is and isn't reasonable to reveal. Very socially-networked of them, as TheNextWeb points out. (Or, says Biz Stone, not.) Now, whom shall we keelhaul for all this?

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A patent war that stretched over two continents and over three years is set to conclude this week as Research in Motion, purveyor of the BlackBerry, agreed to settle a long-running case originally filed by Visto, a wireless e-mail firm based in California.

According to a (rather terse) jointly issued press release, "The key terms of the settlement involve RIM receiving a perpetual and fully-paid license on all Visto patents, a transfer of certain Visto intellectual property, a one-time payment by RIM of US $267.5 million, and the parties executing full and final releases in respect of all outstanding worldwide litigation."

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Since Apple terminated iTunes' compatibility with the Palm Pre this week, there have been a number of services that have rushed to the forefront to make sure users aren't left with an unsyncable Pre for too long. This morning, Web-based syncing service Dazzboard announced its support for the Pre.

"We feel it is very unfair of Apple to penalize Palm and its growing Pre community, and we hope our free application will provide a solution for users are now left in cold due to Apple's decision," said Dazzboard CEO Tera Salonen.

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Admitting after that the fact that "a quarter ago we had no idea where the bottom was," Google said on Thursday that the bottom was apparently a quarter ago. The company reported its lowest ever growth rate for revenues in its recently ended second quarter, expanding just 3% year-over-year.

The company reported revenues of $5.52 billion for the second quarter. Operating income (GAAP) was $1.87 billion, up about $290 million year over year, but representing a larger percentage (34% vs 29%) of revenues compared to the previous year. Net income (again, GAAP) was $1.48 billion compared to $1.25 billion in Q2'08. And EPS was... insert drum roll here... $4.66, compared to $3.92 last year, and about 25 cents/share above analysts' predictions.

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Earlier this month, the first sampling data from Web researcher StatCounter suggested that Microsoft's new Bing search service was gathering momentum, albeit slowly. Today, the first broader-based data analysis from ratings service comScore closely confirms what the early samples were saying: During the month of June, Microsoft-hosted searches including Bing for US customers numbered just 30 million more than for Microsoft-hosted searches including Windows Live the month before. This is during a month when just over 14 billion general searches were processed by the nation's top five providers.

The news looks a little better for Microsoft when you consider that June was a slow month for searches overall -- down by 2% among the nation's top 5 providers, and flat overall when advanced searches and the sites that facilitate them, are entered into the picture. So while Google's general search traffic declined by 2% in keeping with the general trend, its US usage share overall stayed flat at 65%. Bing gained 0.4% of usage share over Windows Live last June -- better than flat, but not the "Bing Boom" that some made it out to be.

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Today, Palm finally made its Mojo SDK available to the public more than a month after the release of the Pre, and more than five months of the Early Access Program, a sort of beta program for devs.

Now, Palm's app store is open to submissions from all developers, and apps submitted after today's SDK launch will start to appear in the app catalog this fall. In the meantime, submissions from the Early Access Program are "already in the pipeline" for release, according to Palm.

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Imagine a peer to peer model where you got paid to seed a torrent, and had to pay every time you leeched. That's what the Pirate Bay could become, and it appears it could be a case of history repeating.

In an article published first in The Music Void, Wayne Rosso, former president of notorious P2P service Grokster and founder of Mashboxx says he has begun working with Global Gaming Factory X, the Swedish firm that recently bought the Pirate Bay, to turn the service legit and legal without changing the user experience at all.

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Download Mozilla Firefox 3.5.1 for Windows from Fileforum now.

After yesterday's discovery of a serious security hole left open by Mozilla Firefox's new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, the organization chose not to wait until next week -- as had been its plan on Tuesday -- to open up availability of its version 3.5.1 bug fix. Instead, the completed build showed up on Mozilla's FTP servers late Thursday morning, although access to that build through HTTP had been sporadic throughout the early afternoon.

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Microsoft couldn't pay for counter marketing as good this. Twitter has officially admitted to a security breach, via personal e-mail account, and the pilfering of confidential documents stored in Google Apps. Can you say, "On-premise computing?"

Based on the cycle of renewals, an unusually large number of Microsoft volume-licensing subscribers must re-up by July 31 or not at all. Given the econolypse's impact on IT spending and, because of layoffs, number of seats to renew, those license renewals may come harder than ever. Then there are all those newfangled hosted applications, some from Microsoft, and Google's push into the enterprise with Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.

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