Addressing the recent announcement that he will not deliver the Macworld keynote this year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs released a statement this morning about his mysterious health condition.

Jobs' health has been an issue of considerable interest to the Apple community, and indeed to the tech community at large. Jobs' now gaunt frame causes some level of discourse at each of the CEO's public appearances, and the intensity of the rumors is only aggravated by Apple's secretive nature.

A phisher or phishers operating over the holiday weekend deluged Twitter users with direct messages luring the unwary to a page designed to steal their sign-in information.

Twitter's official status blog announced the problem Saturday afternoon, but regular users were reporting a welter of suspicious messages throughout the weekend.

Computer security fuels many excellent conferences. CES is not typically one of them, but the current state of the economy is compelling conference goers to refocus on their core priorities...and security is one of them.

Some readers will argue that if we're talking about the best possible security for end users, we're at the wrong show -- Macworld's a little to the west. But as security researchers proved when they spanked OS X at last spring's CanSecWest conference, the world is moving on from the impenetrable-Apple era.

Here's a very familiar theme for us every year: Despite not only manufacturers' own best efforts but also certain governments' own regulatory bodies to drive and even enforce industry standards, there's no one way to do digital mobile TV.

Despite the push from manufacturers, mobile carriers and government regulatory agencies, mobile digital television has failed to make an impact on the world like it did in South Korea.

With the consumer economy changing radically and rapidly, Microsoft and others are experimenting once again with applying the pay-as-you-go model to computing, since it seems to work well enough for other industries.

In an industry where everything old is new again, only sooner, the information technology community took notice of an Ars Technica story last Monday revealing that Microsoft had, yet again, made an effort to obtain an US patent on the concept of doling out metered computing services from a centralized server complex.

Vendors at CES 2009 will be displaying some interesting new workarounds to the persistent issue of short battery life, ranging from an "ECO On Mode" in MSI's Wind U115 netbook to a solar battery charging gadget from Energizer.

Battery life -- or more precisely, the lack thereof -- continues to be problematic for mobile users. The designs of laptops and other mobile devices are diversifying in individualistic directions, but long battery life is all too rarely one of those distinctive characteristics, even though individuals everywhere continue to request it.

Every so often, the Web provides a form of entertainment that almost everyone can enjoy -- a punching bag. Enter Andy Burnham, the UK Culture Minister, and his recent musings on a movie-style ratings system for the Internet.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph earlier this week, Burnham said that "new standards of decency" need to be applied to Web content, and that he means to approach the Obama administration to create rules for English-language sites.

What were the stories that gathered BetaNews readers' attention, got them talking, made them think more about the meaning behind the technology? Our space-age statistics generator has provided us with the final tally.

#20. Intel readies the world for generation 7 of its CPUs

Before CES 2008, Betanews debuted our "Better Questions" contest, where we asked you, the reader, what questions you wanted answered from the CES floor. This year, we're asking you again.

Our correspondents will be out in force all next week, meeting with the companies, executives, and business leaders whose decisions directly impact the consumer electronics industry -- which is experiencing as much volatility now than at any time in its history. We're already asking some of the big questions, in our ongoing CES 13 Countdown series. But we've heard from some of you that you might have better questions of your own.

In the early morning hours of the final day of the year, many Zune users found their devices frozen on the logo screen, totally unresponsive.

The 30 GB Zune experienced a Y2K-like mass failure at around 6:00 am this morning, where the portable media player goes to the loading screen and freezes permanently. Zune.net's service status today warns: "Customers with 30gb Zune devices may experience issues when booting their Zune hardware.  We're aware of the problem and are working to correct it.  The Zune Social might be slow or inaccessible. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience."

CES rollouts will run the gamut from MSI's Wind "hybrid" netbook -- with a mix of SSD and HDD drives in a single machine -- to a high-end notebook with a secondary display. And Windows 7 could be closer than anyone thinks.

Now that notebooks are overtaking desktop PCs in worldwide sales and shipments, next week's CES show is sure to feature a slew of new models across a wide spectrum of form factors and price points. New sub-$500 netbooks will be plentiful, particularly with the global financial crisis still at hand. On the other side of the proverbial coin, CES will also act as a launchpad for much pricier models with high-end features such as secondary displays and advanced 3D graphics.

If you don't own a media PC yet, do you actually want one? Now would be a good time for anyone who makes media PCs to step up to the plate and deliver an updated value proposition...Any volunteers?

It was supposed to be the breakthrough product of CES 2006: a personal computer platform designed for incorporation into the living room entertainment cabinet, that would serve as the centerpiece of a component-rich environment full of choice and diversity. It was an idea touted by both AMD and Intel, and backed up by Microsoft. And if you ask consumers directly, the media PC isn't all that bad an idea.

While other manufacturers are pulling back on chip development because of the bleak economy, Samsung is now stepping up its work on WiMAX and LTE so as to bring down its royalty payments -- and quite possibly, its financial risk.

To cut costs by saving on royalty payments to Qualcomm, Samsung is expanding its chip development activities for 4G WiMAX and LTE devices in both internal and external directions -- bucking current industry trends to "conservative" development.

Video search engine Blinkx has taken a new approach to video advertising with its "un-roll" format, in a move which leverages its technology for sorting videos for a project with a potentially much higher rate of return.

Instead of tag-based cataloging, Blinkx uses contextual cues such as speech recognition and video analysis to sort its videos. The service is now taking a similar approach to advertising.

The proof of concept for a Windows Media Player exploit does exist, and it has been shared. But it's not a vulnerability, Microsoft said, because it would need to trigger remote code execution...and this one doesn't.

Coder Laurent Jaffié recently posted to some "security" sites (at least one of which clearly deserves the prefix "in-") a Perl script that literally does nothing more than create a malformed .WAV file. If you play that WAV file in Windows Media Player, well, it evidently crashes. And Jaffié's description of the file in his comments actually does not claim to do more than that -- specifically, he calls it a "remote integrer [sic] overflow."