Android has been commercially available for a little more than four months, and the completed application store for just over two weeks, and now we're beginning to see desktop theme changes that address a fundamental Android feature: the look of its widgets.

If there's one complaint about Android that you might have heard more often than any other, it's about the clock widget. The most frequently used screenshots of the mobile operating system show the big analog clock face hovering over the still blue waters in the wallpaper. It's a mundane representation of what is actually one of the most tweakable mobile home screens.

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A Microsoft Windows 7 group product manager confirmed in an announcement dated last Friday, though which is only making its premiere appearance over the weekend, that in the latest private beta build, users will be able to "turn off" -- to use his own phrase for it -- a greater number of standard Windows features including Internet Explorer 8.

"If a feature is deselected, it is not available for use. This means the files (binaries and data) are not loaded by the operating system (for security-conscious customers) and not available to users on the computer," writes Microsoft's Jack Mayo. "These same files are staged so that the features can easily be added back to the running OS without additional media."

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For those Microsoft Research staffers who work at the mothership in Redmond, the company's annual TechFest is a festive and busy week of chatting with the people you really meant to spend more time with during the rest of the year. But if you're from out of town -- in from one of Microsoft's five satellite facilities in Beijing, Bangalore, Cambridge-UK, Cambridge-US, or Mountain View -- this may be one of a very few opportunities all year for you to connect with, and very likely show up, your out-of-town colleagues.

Take for instance the UK-based Socio-Digital Systems group, working thousands of miles from the offline conversations that happen on the Redmond campus. Gathered in the "Digital Past to Digital Presence" booth at the recent 'Fest, the gear the UK group had to show didn't make tiny bubbles float in virtual airspace or synchronize several social networks. Actually, its job was to give a place and presence for people's own history in the here and now.

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The buzz online today may have been about Robert Scoble's exit from Fast Company, but there's a major change afoot at the top of the NCSC: Rod Beckström, the director, has submitted his resignation to DHS head Janet Napolitano effective in one week (that is, Friday the 13th). The move comes after rumors of ferocious power struggles at NCSC, which Beckström has led since its inception last year.

The politics at DHS, which oversees NCSC, can't have been much fun for the co-author of The Starfish and the Spider, a book advocating for "the unstoppable power of leaderless organziations." In his resignation letter to Napolitano, Beckström cited his ongoing struggle to keep NCSC out of the clutches of the NSA (which is run by the Department of Defense rather than the civilian DHS and operations from the intelligence worldview rather than that of security professionals or network ops) and noted glumly that "during the past year the NCSC received only five weeks of funding, due to various roadblocks engineered within the department and by the Office of Management and Budget." (Image courtesy beckstrom.com)

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Trend Micro is reporting, and Twitter confirms, that Twitter users are once again under attack by people who need to upgrade their ethics. Targets receive a tweet from someone claiming to be female, 23, and in possession of a webcam. Click the link and you end up on an "adult" site that both attempts to phish your credit-card info and slathers your computer with ads for the same stuff.

Twitter says it has changed the passwords and removed the spam from the 750-odd accounts, none of which were believed to actually be kept by anyone female, 23, and in possession of a webcam. Trend Micro notes tartly that though it's not clear how how the attack was undertaken, "with Twitterers' willingness to enter their Twitter username and password into any number of third-party websites offering Twitter-related services, the opportunities for cybercrime are many."

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The era of the digital machine in human history -- an era which has only spanned the interval of our own lifetimes, if that long -- has seen the difference between a concept and a mechanism narrowed to a barely negligible dividing line. For a concept to be patentable, it need not yet physically exist, yet it must be sufficiently demonstrable -- that is to say, the concept must be so meticulous as to describe something which could, if only for need of a little workmanship, be made real. The legal phrase for this is reduction to practice -- a demonstration of the workability of the concept, which can in most cases (one notable exception being genes) be simply theoretical.

What so few individuals understand about the ideal of the patent is that it is principally an instrument with which you as an individual may attest that a workable concept is yours. It does not calculate a concept's commercial value or practicality or efficiency or usefulness; rather, that as an ideal of a mechanism, it specifies that it is original, that it came from someone in particular, and that it is workable. Ideally, a concept should be attributable to its source, just as this paragraph and this essay will, for whatever it's worth, be attributed to me.

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After Hulu and Boxee were forced to stop working together, I began to feel that it was necessary to look closer and explain how this was one of the rare instances where the loss of Hulu wouldn't be so much of a deal breaker. However, upon closer inspection and with frequent use these last few weeks, the loss of Hulu really did create a big chasm in content.

Boxee is a media center application based on XBMC that awaits a dedicated hardware home. In alpha, this software is already more elegant and fully featured than many set top boxes are after RTM, and that's with such critical features as network drive awareness still disabled. It offers support for most audio, video, and image formats and has streaming audio and video solutions built into its interface. However, due to squabbles with content providers, some of these streaming services, most notably Hulu, had to be temporarily disabled.

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Through methods ranging from blog jottings by Apple CEO Steve Jobs some time in 2008 to press releases issued just this week, Apple is rather suddenly playing up the environmental friendliness of its PCs. In a product announcement this week for its latest consumer line-up, Apple contended that the Mac mini is "the world's most energy efficient desktop, drawing less than 13 watts of power when idle."

Announcements for Apple's new MacBook Pro, mini, and iMac also suggested that the PCs are well ahead of the curve in terms of compliance with Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) and federal Energy Star guidelines.

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Yesterday, Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart filed suit against classified ad site Craigslist in the US District Court of Northern Illinois to shut down the "erotic services" section of the site, and seek redress for all the resources consumed by Craigslist-related prostitution investigation.

"To say Craigslist's 'erotic services' forum makes prostitution accessible is an understatement," opens the complaint, "Advocacy groups consider the website to be one of the largest sources for prostitution in the country."

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Those who were familiar with the Recording Industry Association of America's declaration last December that it was discontinuing its strategy of lawsuits against individuals suspected of illicit song sharing, were puzzled to learn through blog sources late yesterday that the RIAA had filed suit last Tuesday against an individual in Nebraska. Is there a particular reason for this suit; did RIAA members decide to make an exception?

As RIAA spokesperson Jonathan Lamy told Betanews this morning, the true facts are that this is no exception. The filing on Tuesday against Shaun Adams of Grand Island is actually the formalization of action the studios had already initiated against him prior to their mutual December decision.

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Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO and president, has taken up videoblogging. Like FDR before him he's seized the airwaves to dispense wisdom in the face of economic uproar. Of course, he does kicks it off with "joining the chorus of those worried about the global economy," but since when do they do things the easy way over at Sun?

The inaugural video, slated to be the first of four, lays out Sun's strategy for pressing forth with open source as a strategy, philosophy, and business advantage. He's quite confident of getting the company, which has $3 billion in cash, though these days: "I'm not worried about the future; I'm focused on its arrival date."

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The vast Zoho online applications suite is on the march to tab heaven, and the word processor is leading the pack. Version 2.0 of Zoho Writer, unveiled Thursday, throws over its previous chock-full-o'-icons interface for a menu-and-tabs look that's eventually be integrated into all of Zoho's offerings.

Those familiar with previous versions of Zoho Writer are apt to remember the three-row-deep mass of icons at the top of the browser, and may also call some of the more oblique commands in the menus (Name-Name, anyone?). That's gone. The icon stack is replaced by six tab-shaped buttons in the toolbar, each of which clicks into a well-organized menu of choices. At the bottom of the screen, at last, word and character counts join the usual authoring and page count information.

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Just about as soon as we had the latest speed figures from Tuesday's nightly build of "Shiretoko" -- a.k.a., Firefox 3.1 pre-beta 3 -- it appears the Mozilla organization has thought twice about its numerology, and decided that the new edition's upgraded TraceMonkey JavaScript engine makes it at least worth half-a-point rather than a tenth. Just a few hours ago, the organization's interim VP of Engineering submitted to its newsgroup a "proposal" -- which will probably go without opposition -- that after Beta 3 (which is already close to finalized), the next beta round will be given the designation Firefox 3.5.

"The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that's gone into everything from video and layout to places and the plugin service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label .1," wrote Shaver. "3.5 will help set expectations better about the amount of awesome that's packed into Shiretoko, and we expect uptake help from that as well."

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We mentioned back in January that Vivek Kundra, Washington DC's CTO, was a highly plausible pick to take on the top tech job in the Obama administration. Switch that T to an I, please: Thursday morning, before tackling a full day of health-care meetings, President Obama named Kundra the White House's Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO).

In his brief statement, Obama cited Kundra's depth of experience and commitment to lowering the cost of government tech operations, and said that Kundra was charged with a key role in "making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible." In addition to his tenure in DC, Kundra served as Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, taught tech at the University of Maryland, and held executive positions at Evincible Software and Creostar. (Image courtesy dc.gov.)

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Book retailer Barnes & Noble today announced it has purchased Fictionwise, the company which runs the e-Bookstores Fictionwise.com and ereader.com, in its move to launch its own e-book store this year.

Fictionwise is one of the country's largest independent sellers of e-books, and supports a number of formats, including Palm, PocketPC, Hiebook, Mobipocket, eBookMan, Adobe, MS Reader, and WinCE, several of which are supported by Amazon's Kindle. The site also offers free eReader software for Windows and Mac OS, as well as software for Palm OS, Symbian S60 and UIQ, and Windows Mobile devices.

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