This morning, Google's initial experiment with so-called behavioral advertising officially emerges from beta. The company's categorical system for targeting users' interests is now officially under way, with tracking of responses to ads now active by default for all users who read Google AdSense-affiliated sites (including Betanews).

As a video posted to Google's advertising support site explains, Google's system is already maintaining cookies on users' computers that contain codes relating to categories of the users' interests, both ascertained and designated. A user may go to Google's preferences site (linked above) to choose specific interest categories, which are less like department store categories and more like content categories.

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The new iPod Shuffle was introduced today, revealing a device completely free from buttons and measuring only 1.8" (45mm) x .7" (17mm) x .3" (7.62mm) in size. Jacobim Mugatu would approve. To shrink down the device to half of the size of the last generation Shuffle, the controls have been moved to the headphone cord. A simple three-button switch allows for play, pause, skip, volume, and activation of the new 4 GB USB Shuffle's banner feature.

VoiceOver gives the Shuffle the ability for it to speak song titles, artist names, and playlist categories in any of 14 languages.

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In its first statement in response to Microsoft's decision announced over the weekend to enable Windows 7 users to deactivate and/or uninstall Internet Explorer 8 after the operating system's setup installs it, a spokesperson for Google, which makes the Chrome browser, told Betanews overnight that not only should Windows users be given the option to choose their browsers during setup, but to do so every time they turn their machines on.

"We have not yet been able to see the planned new features of Internet Explorer but are looking forward to examining them when they are released. The Internet was founded on choice and openness and this requires a level playing field with multiple options for accessing it. From the moment a computer is turned on, people should be able to access a range of browsers easily and quickly," the spokesperson stated.

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Number one mobile phone maker Nokia has been fleshing out its portfolio of services since late 2007 with its Ovi portal, resurrected N-Gage mobile gaming platform, and most recently with its Comes with Music initiative. The latter, which now has a slogan as unwieldy as its name ("Your Music Player is Ringing!") has been expanded into more markets and onto more devices.

The Nokia Music Store is currently available in 15 markets. The United States still has not yet gotten the service, but is expected to "later this year." Today's announcement added Mexico, Portugal, Norway, and South Africa to the Comes With Music roadmap. Through the software, users can rip or burn CDs, browse the online store, stream, purchase, organize, and sync their music collections with compatible devices.

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A Russian official speaking on an infowar panel last week revealed that his assistant was responsible for the 2007 cyber-attacks that crippled the nation of Estonia. The only person surprised was Nargiz Asadova, the moderator of the discussion.

Sadly, the statement by Sergei Markov, an official from the pro-Kremlin Unified Russia party, has garnered only mild interest in the general press. (Almost no one I queried Tuesday even remembered the attacks, which knee-capped financial and government institutions as well as the nation's Internet traffic. It was started over the proposed relocation of a statue. Seriously.) Markov claimed that the assistant, whom he refused to name lest it imperil the man's visa applications, undertook the act as a patriotic gesture against perceived fascism (in, again, the relocation of a statue).

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What a great world we'd live in if legitimate businesses were as eager to save us trouble as toil as the malware guys are, right? A critical zero-day flaw in Adobe Reader and Acrobat can be used to attack a Windows machine without even opening the infected file -- the height of convenience indeed.

A buffer-overflow flaw is news to nobody familiar with Windows, but the service targeted, the Windows Indexing Service, may not be familiar to all. That service provides an index of files on the system -- it's how you can see the title and author and so forth for a PDF document in Windows Explorer, or how you view thumbnails if that's your Explorer preference.

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The trickle of information about Microsoft's Windows Marketplace for Mobile increased substantially this morning as the company unveiled its developer program for the mobile app store. Microsoft today opened the Windows Mobile 6.5 developer program.

Developers will pay an annual registration fee of $99 which covers five submissions (selling more than five apps will cost an additional $99 each), and will receive 70% of the revenue drawn from sales in the Windows Marketplace for Mobile. The fees and revenue share are in the same league as those laid down by Apple with its iPhone Developer Program.

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IT really is getting greener, notes a new report out from Forrester Research, and now it's time for the green effort to get, well, IT-er. Forrester researchers suggest that the stimulus may spur plenty of advances to business process and strategy as well as public policy and infrastructure.

The "Mapping IT's Green Opportunities" report, released last week, doesn't dismiss what it calls "Green IT 1.0" -- the efforts to improve the energy and carbon footprints of corporate IT departments with virtualization, improved power management and the data-center-centric like. But, say the analysts, there is "a new horizon of green IT 2.0" ahead, involving both business and public concerns.

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After first cutting deals with the likes of Apple and Sprint, developer Judah Klausner has now added four more big names to his list of legal settlements. On Tuesday, Citrix Systems agreed to license Klausner's "Visual Voicemail" -- a technology that sends visual alerts about voice messages -- for use on IP-based phones such as Cisco's that utilize Citrix' Visual Voicemail software.

Klausner Technologies arrived at a similar deal on Monday with Google, covering Android-based phones along with VoiP services offered by Google-acquired Grand Central.

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In the latest turn of events in a patent infringement case characterized by strange turns of events, a move by plaintiff Nokia to force defendant InterDigital to settle their unique dispute through arbitration backfired, when a judge said they can't. Last Thursday, as first detected by The Wall Street Journal's Julia Angwin, New York District Judge Deborah Batts ruled that Nokia waived its right to arbitration by essentially making this dispute the court's business in the first place.

It is the weirdest dispute one can possibly imagine, which boils down to this: Nokia claims it bargained for and received VIP status with regard to licensing fees for InterDigital's patents. But Nokia's complaint is that when InterDigital settled with Ericsson on another matter related to the same patents, the amount of the settlement gave Ericsson the better deal. After what appeared to be an initial settlement, suddenly InterDigital complained that Nokia was using its patents without license during the settlement period itself.

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The Enterprise Agreement (EA) product promotion is one of a wide range of customer pricing incentives for businesses of various sizes now highlighted on the Microsoft Incentives Web site.

Under the EA promotion, customers can get 25% off the cost of the License and Software Assurance (L&SA) contract on subscriptions to the enterprise editions of Windows Server, Exchange Server, Office Communications Server (OCS), and Server Management Suite. Microsoft is also offering 15% discounts on the L&SA for standard editions of nine server software products.

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The first American woman to earn a Ph.D in computer science has won the Association for Computing Machinery's AM Turing Award. Barbara Liskov, who currently heads the Programming Methodology Group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has helmed innovations in software design that provide the underpinnings of every significant programming language introduced since 1975 -- not to mention much of the Internet as you know it.

Dr. Liskov's earliest work brought the concept of data abstraction into a central role in software engineering, making development and maintenance a much easier proposition; she created the CLU proto-OOP programming language as part of her teaching workload at MIT in 1974 and 1975. Her later work on distributed system design makes possible scalable systems with millions of concurrent users -- a crucial component of the very largest Web sites (think search engines). Currently, she's pondering ways of improving system fault tolerance, especially as it relates to arbitrary failures, including such problems as errors and intrusions.

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The typical security vulnerability and patching story paints security researchers as the good guys in the white hats, the straight shooting style, and the soda pop. But on this particular Patch Tuesday (a lighter one than most) Microsoft is crediting not some white-hat researcher but a really good guy -- a fellow who's the author of a simple Sidebar gadget that displays the contents of your clipboard -- as having done the right thing and notified Microsoft of a critical hole.

German developer Helmut Buhler, whose other claim to fame is a portable wrapper function that makes dialog boxes in Windows 95 and XP look like those in Vista, was credited by Microsoft today for discovering one of the critical vulnerabilities being addressed by the March edition of its Patch Tuesday bug fixes.

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An undue amount of attention is being paid to BlackBerry App World's "overpriced" $2.99 minimum charge in the soon-to-be-released app store, when there's the specter of PayPal and eBay lurking just behind it.

And where they go, dissatisfied users follow.

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This afternoon, the US Justice Dept. announced that Hitachi would be the fourth company to plead guilty in a TFT-LCD price fixing investigation that has already seen LG, Sharp (now becoming part of Panasonic), and Chunghwa pay collectively over half a billion dollars in fines.

Hitachi would pay the least of the four companies thus far: $31 million. In turn, the Antitrust Division said today, it will agree that it participated in meetings with representatives of its competitors in which they conspired to set the price that Dell Computer would be charged for TFT-LCD displays. From April 2001 through March 2004, Hitachi then quoted Dell the agreed upon prices, the DoJ said, and then reported its progress back to other cartel members.

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