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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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

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?

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."