The US Department of Justice has completed its review the RFID Consortium's joint patent-licensing arrangement that covers essential technologies in UHF RFID, and have deemed it pro-competitive.

The RFID consortium and VIA Licensing issued a call over two years ago to pool all the foundational patents for Ultra High Frequency RFID that were either necessarily infringed, or necessary to make, use, or sell a product in compliance with the applicable UHF RFID standards.

For those of us who not only need to keep dozens of Firefox tabs open at once but need to see them to remember they exist, Tab Mix Plus' upgrade to Firefox 3 compatibility is some of the week's best news.

Tabs are a great way of managing the multiple threads one follows in the course of a day, but if you operate on an "out of sight, out of mind" basis, Firefox's current horizontal scroll tends to lead to confusion (and, often, resource-wasting tab duplications).

With Microsoft picking up the pace in both the development and marketing of Windows 7, it's also finding itself moving ahead with the next amendment package for Vista not too long after the release of SP1.

In an early piece of news that we had expected to hear on Monday, Microsoft will release the first beta editions of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista to private testers on Wednesday, October 29. Those testers will be among the first, according to a blog post from Windows 7 corporate VP Mike Nash this afternoon, to test burning data directly to Blu-ray Discs using only the Vista OS.

The EU anti-piracy directive that would let intellectual property holders get information about file sharers has been implemented in a Swedish bill, which this week received approval to be presented to Parliament.

Sweden's English-language news site The Local reports this week that the Lagrådet Legislative Council has green-lighted a bill that would make file sharers' IP addresses available to copyright holders.

Time Warner's Cartoon Network is in the final stages of developing its own massively multiplayer online game (MMO) called FusionFall, and is seeking beta testers to help iron out any problems.

Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall has been in a limited closed beta, but the channel is now expanding the test before the game's official launch this fall. All participants must be 18 years of age or older, due to the non-disclosure agreement that must be agreed to.

Apple iPhone users are slightly more into gaming, but users of both Android and iPhone phones like to play games, shop, and find out about music and the weather, according to an analysis of application downloads issued this week.

At least nine Android apps are already faring very well with consumers, even though Android Market only offers 10 percent as many software applications as Apple's App Store did on its own launch this summer, a new study indicates.

Intel execs at this week's Developer's Forum made derisive remarks about the ARM chips used in most smartphones -- including the iPhone -- saying they made devices "not very smart." Another executive then issued a retraction of sorts.

Shane Wall, VP and director of strategic planning, platform architecture and software for Intel's Ultra Mobility Group; and Pankaj Kedia, director of ecosystems of the Ultra Mobility group, engaged in a discussion after Wall's keynote at IDF on Tuesday. There, the execs blamed the deficiencies of both the Apple iPhone, and smartphones as a whole, on ARM chips.

Apple this week issued a new, two-part NDA to take the place of an initial agreement abandoned after iPhone developers barraged the Internet with messages signaling their discontent, sometimes using colorful language.

Acknowledging that the first non-disclosure agreement had turned out to be "burdensome" for developers, Apple announced about three weeks ago that it would drop the old document in favor of a new one, while also telling developers to keep complying with the old one in the interim.

In another indication that the American information technology industry is better suited to riding out the economic storm than other sectors, Microsoft's forecast for the rest of this year is for slightly slower growth.

Prior to the on-shore strike of an approaching hurricane, you're likely to hear many meteorologists use the phrase, "I'm not a fortune teller," as a way of downplaying expectations about the confidence one may have in their predictions. Over the last week of quarterly earnings reports, the keyphrase uttered almost invariably has been, "We're not economists."

Yesterday, Dish Network announced that 21 new markets will be transmitting content in MPEG-4, bringing the total US Markets using the standard to 52. In six of these added markets, local HD channels were added to content rosters.

The 21 new markets are: Abilene-Sweetwater, Sherman, and Waco-Temple-Bryan TX; Atlanta; Birmingham (Anniston and Tuscaloosa), and Huntsville-Decatur (Florence) AL; Chattanooga and Memphis, TN; Columbia-Jefferson City, Joplin-Pittsburg, and St. Louis MO; Des Moines-Ames, IA; Florence-Myrtle-Beach, SC; Ft. Myers-Naples, and Mobile-Pensacola (Ft. Walton Beach), FL; Jackson, MS; Lincoln, Omaha, and Hastings-Kearney, NE; Quincy-Hannibal-Keokuk, IL; Ada, OK; South Bend-Elkhart, IN; and Topeka, KS. Of these markets, Nebraska, Illinois, and Iowa as well as Columbia-Jefferson City, MO; and Waco-Temple-Bryan, Texas will receive high definition local channels.

With just over a week left before the general election, reports are surfacing of problems with e-voting machines from manufacturers rarely mentioned in the news.

Hart InterCivic isn't the most common e-voting platform out there (that would be the Accuvote TS and TSX line, from Premier / Diebold), and the eSlate doesn't operate like touchscreen units do. Instead, it uses a dial-and-button approach that's a bit like an older iPod -- run your finger around a big dial, then click a button to make your picks.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will take over responsibility for the controversial "Secure Flight" passenger screening program in early 2009, according to documentation released by the Department of Homeland Security yesterday. DHS also revealed just how large its watchlist is.

Those responsibilities were previously managed by individual airlines.

Lobbyists for the National Association of Broadcasters made headway today in their efforts to block FCC approval of a Google-spearheaded computer industry proposal to open the "white spaces" for free and open access.

After issuing a blistering attack last week on a move by the computer industry to open the white spaces of the wireless spectrum for public access, lobbyists for TV broadcasters today succeeded in convincing eight US legislators to send a letter to the FCC calling for a period of public comment before an FCC vote.

Beginning today, customers can implement instances of Windows Server 2003 (licensed to and purchased by them) in Amazon's cloud, enabling businesses to deploy sophisticated Internet applications without their own servers.

After a two-year beta cycle, Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service this morning entered general availability. Now, for what's essentially a service, what does this mean besides removing the warning that some parts are still under construction? Today, Amazon implemented a service-level agreement for EC2 customers guaranteeing 99.95% availability during what it describes as a "service year."

It's a part of Windows that handles all the file and print sharing services over any network. Today, Microsoft decided to take the unusual step of issuing a patch for a vulnerability on this part now, and not wait until November 11.

The part of Windows known as the Server service -- the component responsible for handling file sharing, print sharing, and pipelining between computers -- has been hit once again with an exploit whose profile resembles an August 2006 problem patched the following month. But this time, Microsoft is announcing it received information about this latest exploit privately, indicating that unlike the older incident, Microsoft was working to pre-empt any possibility of the exploit making its way into the wild.