Fulfilling the promise it made in February, Nokia has opened its Ovi Store to most of the world before the close of May. Users of any of 50 different Nokia handhelds can either download the Ovi Store mobile app by selecting the icon in the device's Download Folder, or by navigating to store.ovi.com in their browser.

Like the app stores of competing devices, The Ovi Store offers both free and paid content such as games, videos, podcasts, productivity tools, as well as web-based and location-based services and applications. Apps can be purchased either through operator billing or through direct credit card billing.

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Yesterday, Google traded development track 1 of its Chrome Web browser for track 2, making the latter effectively the "stable" edition of the browser, even though it's still officially under development and not yet feature-complete. Many users of version 1 found themselves automatically upgraded to version 2, and may very well have noticed a subsequent speed increase from the JavaScript interpreter.

In a blog post yesterday, Google said that speed increase would be about 30%. But is that an accurate assessment, especially given that Google's V8 JavaScript benchmark was devised by Google to test its V8 JavaScript interpreter?

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Memorial Day weekend starts off summer in Geek America, when the human impulse to be out and about runs headlong into the common refrain of THE YELLOW FACE! IT BURNS! IT BURNS, MY PRECIOUS! Here in Seattle, where the geeks roam freely and the Yellow Face more or less leaves us alone most of the time, many of our kind will make for Folklife, a four-day arts festival held downtown.

The relationship in the geek (nerd, dweeb) community between gearheadedness and a love of Ye Olden Tymes is tenuous in the 21st century. Years ago, Ren Fayre attendance, a fondness for filk, and a tolerance for girls wearing twirly dresses and flower garlands was more or less required for admittance to the computer lab. Cyberpunk, thankfully, drove a wedge into that relationship; steampunk attempts to re-knit it somewhat, but these days a working knowledge of morris dancing or ownership of a 20-sided die is strictly optional.

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In 2007, RealNetworks began to develop a set-top DVD archiver/player similar to Kaleidescape under the project name "Facet." It was this idea that spawned the creation of RealDVD, a piece of software that allows copy-protected DVDs to be copied, compressed, and saved on a user's hard drive. However, that software was temporarily pulled off the market thanks to a copyright infringement suit from the DVD Copy Control Association and six major Hollywood studios (Disney, Paramount/Viacom, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros.).

The suit began last October and has involved relentless mudslinging between the parties. In the beginning, the studios claimed the product should have been called "StealDVD," and that it "clearly violate[s] the law." Most recently, RealNetworks called the six Hollywood studios "an illegal cartel," and charged them with antitrust violations.

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The pocketable Internet has created an insatiable need for bandwidth. 18% of total Internet traffic in 2008 came from mobile devices, and it's only increasing. In fact, a national tier one mobile network operator (MNO) (that preferred to remain nameless) participated in Yankee Group research that recently projected its data consumption would grow by a factor of six in the next three years.

Here is what that means: In 1995, there were about 9,000 cell sites in the United States. Today, there are more than 228,000, or an average of 80 thousand new sites every five years. Each one of these sites serves about a thousand users, and the backhaul is provided mostly T1 and E1 lease lines, with an average of 3 T1's per site and an average bandwidth capacity of 4.62 megabits per second. The maximum speed is generally around 10 Mbps, and Yankee Group research showed that it cost MNOs about $6.1 billion to provide that much bandwidth in 2008.

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Decades from now, when our descendants' implanted heads-up displays are implanted in their heads, and their instant messages and points-of-presence (phone service? what's that?) are controlled directly by their brainwaves, they'll look back on all of us who painstakingly suffered through the smartphone era, wondering how we managed to get so worked up over hunks of silicon and plastic. And I, very old by then and loudly eccentric, will shake my bony fists and yell at the whippersnappers:

"BECAUSE SOME OF THEM WERE FUN, DAMMIT! NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!"

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This week in As The HADOPI Turns: Socialists! Frenchmen suing France! An estimate of takedown numbers that'll make you glad Christine Albanel isn't doling our your online time! Plus, evidence that it really can get worse. Très worse.

When last we saw France's Création et Internet law, which gives ISPs there the power to block access to the Internet for anyone accused three times of illegal file-sharing, it was on its way to the Senate and onward to the desk of President Nicolas Sarkozy. On Tuesday, several Socialist members of the French Parliament took their case to the nation's Constitutional Council, raising eleven points of possible conflict with the country's laws.

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A virus infection of unknown type and origin necessitated the partial shutdown of computer networks belonging to the US Marshals Service on Thursday. The FBI was also believed to have been infected, and other Justice Department agencies were taking precautions Thursday as well.

Nikki Credic, a spokesperson for the US Marshals Service, provided very little data about the nature of the problem, but she did state that no data was known to have been compromised. The agency took down its net access and shut down some parts of its e-mail service while tech folk got to the source of the problem.

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Once upon a time, Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation started a conversation with Cisco about playing nicely with other people's software licenses. Five years later, that conversation hadn't gotten much traction, so the FSF applied lawyers to the problem. Five months later, Cisco appears to have gotten the message.

Cisco and the FSF made official this week what had been whispered in certain circles earlier in the month: There will be peace in our time, as Cisco revamps how it works with free software licenses such as the GNU General Public License.

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Up until today, Google had been distinguishing between development tracks 1 and 2 of its Chrome Web browser. Track 1 (last known build version 1.0.154.65) was the company's production edition, though a link on the same page where you could download 1.0 could take you to the "test" version instead, version 2.0.177.1. Google's always had interesting variations on the "beta" theme.

Anyway, today the company stated on its blog that it's "updating to a faster version" of Chrome, quoting an internal benchmark score giving its JavaScript processing 32.1% better speed in the new version over the old version. Well, that new version -- as Betanews verified today -- is actually 2.0.177.1, which is the same "new version" it's been for a few weeks now. Users of version 2 -- which other services had been distributing as the "most recent release" -- will notice no difference in performance.

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During the era of Office 2000's dominance in the desktop applications market, Microsoft was frequently criticized for forcing businesses into supporting a document format that was, by design, a moving target. Whenever the company added features to its Office components, support for those features had to be retrofitted onto the document format. That often made archives of thousands of older documents difficult for companies to manage.

It was a situation which many thought would enable Microsoft to self-perpetuate, creating dependencies from which businesses couldn't escape, forcing them to invest in whatever new versions that came along just to maintain their efficiency. Whether it was attained by accident or design, it was such a prime market position for the company that when it announced in 2005 that it would sacrifice its own Office document formats for an entirely new, publicly viewable, XML-based scheme originally entitled Office Open XML, even Betanews asked the question, "Is It Truly Open?" To this day, even now that Microsoft's efforts led to the publication of an international standard based on OOXML, now called ISO 29500, people are wondering -- often aloud -- where's the string that's attached to this rug that Microsoft will eventually pull?

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The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees on Thursday made official the previously expressed wishes of the user community, passing a resolution that swaps out the project's previous GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) for the Creative Commons Attribution / Share Alike License.

The Creative Commons version -- CC-BY-SA, in that system's nomenclature -- will, according to Wikimedia representatives, allow for greater reuse and legal interoperability with other projects offering the CC-BY-SA, including Yahoo's Flickr service, a variety of archives and libraries, and innumerable independent creative folk. Greater legal compatibility leads to greater reuse opportunities, which leads (the involved groups believe and hope) to further acceptance of the greater-freedom approach (a.k.a., copyleft) to copyright.

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What will happen to the video game rental trade and companies like GameFly and Blockbuster when the market changes, and when the more direct channel -- downloads over the net -- takes over? Sony looks to be thinking ahead to that point, as evidenced by its own recent survey.

The handheld market it going to be the first to drop hard copy and go fully downloadable. With the iPhone unexpectedly proving itself a viable outlet for small-footprint, small-price tag games, Nintendo dropping its customary cartridge slot upgrade on its DSi, and rumors of a new disc-less PSP, the changeover is imminent.

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"There is little benefit for end users (i.e., business) to upgrade to [Windows Mobile] 6.5," stated Adam Leach, London, UK-based principal consumer wireless analyst for Ovum, in an e-mail to Betanews this morning.

It's a sharp condemnation coming from the oft-cited telecom analyst and contributor to BBC Radio 4, and it's sounding more and more like Leach is not alone. Although there had been a buzz since last February around the upcoming revision to Microsoft Windows Mobile, it has noticeably died down. This even though Windows Mobile 6.5 was supposed to be launched on May 11, the first day of TechEd 2009. As it turned out, the system was only "announced," after having already been "announced" at Mobile World Congress back in February.

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When you're a developer with Mozilla Labs or another open source laboratory, one of the things you'll often find yourself doing is "launching" a project before it's anywhere near complete. That's what it means to be truly open. In the case of Aza Raskin and his design team, last night, he "launched" (that's Mozilla's term for it) a project to encourage Web site developers to build simpler but more accessible add-ons for the Firefox browser, by means of a JavaScript API and Firefox plug-in called JetPack.

Although Firefox is itself an exercise in JavaScript, crafting plug-ins to do simple things is not a simple matter. There's actually a cottage economy developing already around plug-ins, which Jetpack could disrupt merely by giving everyday programmers simpler means to make additions to the browser.
"Specifically, Jetpack will be an exploration in using Web technologies to enhance the browser (e.g., HTML, CSS and JavaScript)," wrote Raskin late yesterday in his Call for Participation, "with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play."

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