Guests of recent Microsoft seminars and conferences who received copies of Windows Vista Ultimate will be delighted to know the Web site for registering their copies and receiving their product keys, is now fully operational.

In Betanews tests this morning, the registration site did require us to fill out a brief survey, which was understandable and not at all out of the ordinary. Upon entering our valid promotional code, which we received with a Vista Ultimate giveaway during a recent conference, we did immediately receive a product registration key via e-mail.

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Prosecution of a once-notorious warez ring ends with a flicker, not a flash, as the last defendant in the "Operation Safehaven" and "Operation Higher Education" investigations pleads guilty of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.

Wired's 27bstroke6 blog on Monday broke the news of Greg Hurley's guilty plea, entered last week in US District Court in Connecticut. Hurley, who lives in Orlando, Fla., was a supplier in the warez network -- the first link in the chain, the guy who can get the not-yet-released movie or album or software title.

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GoDaddy's Super Bowl ads may have gotten predictably saucy, but the response to them on Twitter Sunday night led to something the company couldn't have been expecting: A win for domain registration competitor Network Solutions.

GoDaddy's Super Bowl ads have a tradition of random T&A. That's really not news anymore, and in fact about three weeks ago the operators of GoDaddy's Twitter account invited followers to drop by and vote on which ad to run.

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Back in 2007, Motorola had plans to split into two companies, one that concentrated on communications equipment and the other on cell phones. But that was before the global economic crisis, and now it must change course.

6:17am PT: Earlier in the call, Jha said that the Mobile Division will contain costs -- through reductions in its workforce in the first and second quarters, and by shrinking its manufacturing footprint -- while placing a "greater focus on quality."

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After a years-long falling out, it appears that two of the co-founders of Facebook have concluded a dispute that included assertions that one of them, effectively speaking, didn't exist. Did the threat of a nasty tell-all bridge the gap?

That's the assertion today at Gawker, which ran a nice overview on Monday of the dispute between Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, which originated at Harvard (where Saverin incorporated and managed the business and invested $20,000 in seed money). The dispute led to a lawsuit, a book deal, and reputed interest by Aaron Sorkin ("The West Wing") in a screenplay.

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Is it possible that the Recording Industry Association of America is afraid of listeners? Their pleading to a US appeals court to forbid the Webcasting of arguments in RIAA v. Tenenbaum is starting to sound like the excuses from a kid seeing monsters under the bed.

The latest round of entertainment up in Boston came last week, when 14 news organizations filed an amicus brief with the appeals court explaining that contrary to RIAA's claim, allowing cameras in the courtroom for the February 24 hearing falls in line with usual and customary camera access for similar hearings.

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An agreement negotiated in secrecy among governments and industry representatives and known to the public only through leaked documents and the efforts of privacy activists may sound so 2008.

But unless concerned citizens and a federal court intervene, a number of intellectual property laws may get a very "retro" cast to them.

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Verizon launched its Hub "family communications command center" today, a desktop touchscreen device endowed with VoIP functions and the ability to share information with multiple wireless handsets.

The Hub is similar in concept and design to the Samsung HomeManager which AT&T announced in September. Both devices offer a broadband-connected 7-inch touchscreen computer that manages all incoming communications and acts as portal to various Web services, and both units also act as a VoIP terminal with an associated cordless handset.

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Despite a rash of reports to the contrary, Dell isn't necessarily about to take a long rumored step into the smartphone market any time soon, and here are five reasons why.

Evidently, Dell's been internally eyeing the mobile phone space since at least 2005, when an article in CNET cited a company roadmap as indicating plans to debut a smartphone by mid-2006. Although that didn't happen -- and no phones have emerged for Dell since then -- the phone specter has arisen around Dell again in multiple places over the past couple of weeks.

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Download Google Toolbar for Firefox 5.0 for Windows from Fileforum now.

One of Google Chrome's signature features is a "New Tab" page that shows thumbnails of favorite Web sites. The latest IE has a similar feature, though now, Google Toolbar 5 for Firefox retrofits that browser with a similar feature.

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Ongoing efforts to modernize the Department of Defense's thinking about tech issues brought the Defense Information Services Agencies (DISA) to the cusp of launching forge.mil, DISA's own version of the SourceForge open source model.

It may seem a little surreal to have the IT support team for the Department of Defense working closely with a company with the motto, "Where subversion meets the enterprise," but here we are: DISA last year took up talks with CollabNet, which bought SourceForge Enterprise Edition from sourceforge.com back in 2007. The company already works with a number of government entities (including the US Air Force and the State of New Mexico Department of Corrections).

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Sagoon is a newly-launched search engine that joins the race to provide a semantic search with the elegant screen layout made famous by Google. The company calls its semantic technology the "Random Vector Model," where traditional keyword searches are paired with algorithms and formulas that analyze content between sites, finding their hidden similarities.

Sagoon is based out of Washington DC, but the underlying technology comes from New Dehli, India's Elixir Web Solutions

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Facing the prospects that US broadcast stations may make the switchover to all-digital on February 17 regardless of what Congress does, the acting FCC chairman told an advisory panel last week it may be too late to undo the damage.

The state of chaos regarding the US' national switchover from analog to digital TV broadcasting may not be something a delay can remedy. This from the man currently heading the FCC while a permanent chairman -- one emerging from an administration said to be favoring a delay -- has yet to be appointed, despite the likelihood of a nominee.

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In a crafty bit of coding, TringMe has unveiled a demo of a Silverlight widget that allows outgoing VoIP calls to be made. The India-based IP telephone software company says that Silverlight does not provide microphone support, so this widget uses Flash to access the microphone for the exchange taking place in Silverlight.

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With the as yet unannounced test of Wi-Fi at 100 commuter rail stations in New Jersey, Comcast follows Cablevision's lead into testing Wi-Fi among commuters in areas adjacent to New York City.

A spokesperson for Comcast today acknowledged that the company is in "early, early beta" with a Wi-Fi test at rail stations in New Jersey, while San Francisco's BART announced plans to expand its own recent trial into a full commercial rollout.

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