The presumptive Democratic nominee for President said over the weekend that subscribers to his text messaging list would be the first to find out his vice presidential choice.

Alerting users of such important news via text is only the latest way Barack Obama has turned his back on political conventions. Typically, such an announcement comes during a carefully staged rally or campaign event. While such an event may still happen, it surely wouldn't have the suspense of other campaigns.

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CEO Steve Jobs said that nearly 60 million applications have been downloaded, generating about $1 million in sales per day for the company.

Obviously with an average selling price of 50 cents -- and the minimum charge for an application being 99 cents -- a large portion of iPhone applications downloaded through the Apps Store have been free. Even so, the number is quite impressive.

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In 1993, Intel blanketed the world with advertising that stopped just short of placing a "TM" in front of the number "5" in the public conscience. This morning, the company has sent out an advance warning: Prepare for an onslaught of "7."

In advance of its annual US Developers' Forum next week, Intel today formally announced its branding for the generation of processors we've been calling by its code-name, "Nehalem." Rather than stay the current course of emphasizing the number of cores -- in which case, it might have been "Core 4" -- Intel will formally christen its desktop version of Nehalem with the new brand nomenclature "Core i7."

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Microsoft's regular pre-briefing on monthly security issues contained some dire news, including patches for a reportedly "Critical" vulnerability affecting Windows Media Player for XP, Vista, and Windows Server 2008.

The dynamics of this problem, in keeping with Microsoft's current policy, are not being revealed until at least next Tuesday, though the company did acknowledge its existence late yesterday. If the company is implementing its so-called MAPP policy, announced earlier this week, then it's possible that some select partners who produce security software may know the details.

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Religious fundamentalists in West Virginia are now being exempted from getting their digital photos emblazoned on their driver's licenses, after objections over carrying around what they conceive as the biblical "mark of the beast."

Although objecting West Virginians will still be required to have their license photos taken at a state Department of Motor Vehicles office, their photos will be removed from its computer immediately afterward, with the state retaining hard copies of the pictures at its main office.

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Had someone with ill intent been as smart or as lucky as security engineer Dan Kaminsky, the entire Internet could have been rendered mostly inoperative. The extent of just how big a fix he implemented, is only now being realized.

There is an entire subculture that has developed around the notion of deconstructing information technology. And like those who prefer to fish in pre-stocked ponds, the people who populate this subculture are not, for the most part, particularly clever. They may be adept with their tools, but they don't construct exploitation strategies for themselves. Rather, they wait until someone smarter can do it for them.

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Openmoko has finally decided to release the full schematics for its open source, "build-your-own" phones, apparently after the removal of stumbling blocks surrounding non-disclosure agreements for GSM chips.

About a month after shipping its own Neo FreeRunner phone, Openmoko today rolled out plans to post the compete inner workings of that phone and its predecessor, the Neo 1973, on its Web sites at Openmoko.com and Openmoko.org, for use under a Creative Commons (CC) license.

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Last week, Congress sent letters to Internet platform providers expressing concern over targeted advertising. Now those letters have resulted in action from at least one company, which will now enable users to opt-out.

As part of its new privacy policy announced this afternoon, Yahoo will give its users a choice as to choose whether to opt-out of the company's targeted advertising across its properties. It is already offering its users an option to opt-out of similar ads served by third-party networks.

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Users who want to lower their cell phone bills could be in for a treat -- or maybe not -- if the FCC responds favorably to a petition filed jointly by the nation's top three wireless providers, backed by powerful industry groups.

In their petition to the US Federal Communications Commission, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and Verizon Wireless -- along with the CTIA, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), the VON Coalition, and other parties -- are mutually seeking uniformity around, and reductions in, the carrier "terminating rates" which service providers charge each other for helping to carry one another's traffic over networks.

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Three French journalists have been shown the exit from the yearly hacking confab after it was discovered they were hacking into the press room's Wi-Fi network.

Dominique Jouniot, Marc Brami, and Mauro Israel of the French IT publication Global Security Magazine are being accused of the hack. The magazine had been a sponsor of the conference, however organizers said they had ended the partnership as a result of the actions.

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Google has admitted to the SEC that its 2006 investment in AOL could be "impaired," meaning that its 5 percent stake in AOL might now be worth considerably less than the $1 billion the company paid in 2006.

For Google, this assessment might bring a substantial charge against future profits, although the highly profitable company -- which earned $2.55 billion during the first half of 2008 alone -- seems likely to be able to absorb the loss rather handily.

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Armin Heinrich, the developer of the 'I Am Rich' application that sold for $999.99 and does essentially nothing, isn't sure why his submission was pulled from the App Store as it was done without warning.

Eight people are said to have downloaded the program, including six in the US, one in Germany and another in France during the day it was live. Using the App Store's revenue split, Heinrich would have made nearly $5,600 in revenues from an program that essentially does nothing.

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The response from representatives of social networks impacted this week by the discovery of a type of worm that targets them specifically, appears to have come straight out of West Side Story. They're playing it cool, boys, real cool.

In a company blog post late yesterday, whose timing is the main indication of its being a response to concerns raised earlier this week over Kaspersky Lab's discovery of a worm being disseminated through social networks, Facebook's head of security, Max Kelly, advised users that if they really think they have a worm or virus on their computers, they should contact Microsoft or Apple.

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11:10 am EDT August 8, 2008 - Another technical writer has disagreed with author Jonathan Zdziarski's and the media's initial suppositions about the whether the list he discovered on his 3G iPhone truly is a blacklist-in-waiting.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out that its a Core Location blacklist, and that the "clbl" in the called URL stands for exactly that. Applications who use that portion of the iPhone code must follow some very strict rules for privacy reasons.

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Download Snowl 0.1 alpha from FileForum now.

When a company's lab typically comes forth with an idea for the general public, it already has a proposition in mind for why that idea is necessarily good. This morning, one of Mozilla Labs' latest ideas actually leaves that question open.

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