Convicted counterfeiters will now be subject to increased fines and the forfeiture of their property, under a new law that took effect yesterday. And the size of government just got bigger, with the creation of one more office.

While opposition was, as we put it some weeks ago, "mounting" against an intellectual property enforcement bill that would create a new government office in charge of enacting government policy against IP infringement, piracy, and counterfeiting, it's fair to say that opposition remained in large part outside of Congress. Last September 26, the US Senate passed the PRO-IP Act by unanimous consent; two days later, the House ratified it by a vote of 381-41.

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While stopping short of confirming rumors of 1.5 million pre-orders, T-Mobile told BetaNews today that pre-sale demand for its G1 is "robust," and that the first Android device will, in fact, be available on Oct. 22.

In a statement to BetaNews this morning, T-Mobile finally lifted its veil of silence on reports that customers have pre-ordered 1.5 million G1 phones. Although neither confirming nor denying rumors flying around since Friday, a T-Mobile spokesperson said that the industry's first Android device is "one of the most highly anticipated phones of the year," that demand "continues to be robust," and that the phone will be available on Oct. 22 for customers "to be able to experience."

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Sony's Bravia Internet Video Link will receive its first movie premiere, Hancock, on October 28, before it is released on any other media.

Early in the summer, Sony CEO Howard Stringer announced that broadband-connected Bravia TV's would receive a streaming movie service, beginning with the premiere of Sony Pictures' Hancock.

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Since there have been computer intrusions, it seems, there have been crackers (that is, black-hat "hackers") wanting to write books detailing What They Did. But often, the better the hack, the less the urge to write a book about it.

David Kernell, the college student currently accused of "hacking" into VP candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail account, may yet end up taking his lumps from the legal system -- even if he didn't do much more than take an educated guess at Palin's "secret" security question. If Kernell does end up with a conviction, I would humbly ask that repayment of his debt to society consist of haranguing Yahoo about their pitiful secret-question security system. Or maybe he should have to field-dress a Palin-shot moose as punishment. Please, though, kid -- would you spare us the book telling us how clever you were?

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Showing that the upcoming G1, the industry's first Android-based mobile device, isn't the only new smartphone to be "exclusive" to its wireless network, on Monday, T-Mobile USA announced the availability of a BlackBerry flip phone.

T-Mobile competitor Verizon Wireless got the honor of being the exclusive provider of another new RIM smartphone -- the BlackBerry Storm -- in the US. But T-Mobile is the exclusive US provider of the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220, the first smartphone from RIM to come in a flip phone form factor.

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Is it an indication that poetic titles and artificial excitement can do less to endear an OS in the minds of its users than simple, straightforward functionality? Today, Microsoft said it's going back to doing things by number.

In a quick announcement this afternoon on the company blog for Windows Vista -- what's already being perceived as the "old version of Windows" by Microsoft -- the company's corporate VP for Windows product management revealed what many developers had already long suspected: The next version will be called what we've been calling it for months already, "Windows 7."

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For the last several days, investors whose contribution of capital influx fuels the US technology business had difficulty determining which way was up. Today, on what for some was a holiday, they definitely found up again.

In perhaps the most welcomed rally in the history of the US stock market, a single-day 936.42 point surge in the Dow Jones Industrials (an 11.08% gain) indicated investors' newfound confidence in the British and European governments' respective bailout plans for their troubled banks. Almost every major technology stock participated in the rally, giving much needed support for some issues that were, and even still are, dangerously close to delisting.

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Sign up for the Mufin beta using this special BetaNews invite code now.

Got ears? Willing to roam outside your musical comfort zone? Then you should know the Mufin, man, and we can introduce you.

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Parallelism in programming has largely been conducted in the laboratories. But with the next version of the .NET Framework, developers everywhere will be able to experiment with what could become a monumental change in languages.

In perhaps the most significant development in the brief history of the field of implicit parallelism in computing, one of Microsoft's development teams announced last Friday that the next .NET Framework 4.0 -- the first glimpses of which we'll see later this month from PDC in Los Angeles -- will include the so-called Parallel Extensions as a standard feature. This after the Extensions were first introduced in a Community Technology Preview last November.

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The MySpace consumer ad platform which was unveiled at the end of September has been Re-unveiled as "myAds-beta," giving entrepreneurs the ability to buy "Hypertargeted" ads on MySpace.

Though adorned with a gimmicky name, myAds' "Hypertargeting" system is genuinely interesting. After creating the visual content of the ad, the user then chooses where the ad points and at whom it will be targeted. First, by gender: male, female, or both; and then by age, which includes a tab for "all ages" and then two drop boxes that can be ranged from 14-65+. It also allows the targets' physical location to be chosen: National (US,) Region (Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest, West) or by state and city.

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An FCC technical report issued Friday makes it look more likely that the US government will sign off on a Google-led pitch to clear the white space spectrum for free use by Android. The news couldn't come at a worse time for T-Mobile.

With Google and a growing number of influential partners putting pressure on the FCC to make spectrum in the white spaces available for "free and open access," a team of FCC technologists on Friday released a report suggesting that worries about wireless interference from so-called white spaces devices -- raised by T-Mobile and other parties -- are overblown.

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Though reports early last year said that a deal between CBS and Google for YouTube distribution had fallen by the wayside, the network's content will soon be available in full on the popular video site, complete with commercials.

Announcing on Friday that "Full-Length TV Dinners" would be coming to the Site, YouTube's team blog noted that it will naturally first be a test. Advertisements could be pre-, mid-, or post-roll, but will only appear in the premium full-length content. In our tests -- which, granted, only lasted a few minutes this morning -- we didn't see any overlaid advertising in premium content, though overlay ads do appear in "clips" from CBS shows (including the Evening News), which only last a few minutes.

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A less-than-critical Vista hole could become more critical, as Microsoft's security team says it's aware of a published exploit that could enable an ordinary process to pass itself off as a system process with unrestricted access.

Last April, Microsoft admitted to a serious, though perhaps not critical, security hole in all modern versions of Windows including XP and Vista. But a notice posted last Thursday to the company's Security Response Center blog, warning of a published exploit using that same technique, is an indication that the hole has gone unplugged all this time.

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When Charlie Rose interviewed Sony CEO Sir Harold Stringer on Wednesday, a few excellent questions were posed -- but a few others should have been.

No American television host conducts long-form interviews like Charlie Rose -- especially when the interview subject has a lot of 'splainin' to do. Enter Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony, who sat down for a marvelous show-long interview with Rose on Wednesday.

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In August, Italian courts ordered that local ISPs block popular BitTorrent destination The Pirate Bay, but the decision was later overturned in appeal. This week, we found out why the Court of Bergamo ruled as it did.

Italy's recent attempt to block BitTorrent tracking site The Pirate Bay was deemed indefensible under an EU regulation.

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