Whether US federal officials have serious concerns over the Yahoo/Google beta test remains unclear this morning, though explanations given to the press last night may actually raise more questions than they answer.

The US Department of Justice has yet to issue a comment on, or confirm, a story that first appeared on Reuters wires late yesterday. Initially, it was reported and widely repeated that the DOJ is investigating Yahoo and Google over a test of integrating AdSense ads on Yahoo search pages.

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Although China is one of the world's most populous nations, until recently it lagged behind the US in terms of its online population. That changed in February however, when the country's population online reached 221 million.

Even with the jump ahead of the US, China still lags behind the worldwide average in terms of a percentage of its population. At the end of 2007, that number stood at about 16 percent, versus a worldwide average of 19.1 percent.

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Twitter, the moment-by-moment status update ("What are you doing now?") site that's the buzz among social networking circles, was shaken by a potentially embarrassing foul-up.

Especially popular among Silicon Valley's big names and linkable to many other sites, most notably Facebook, Twitter allows users to create a pseudo-RSS feed of the often inane and meticulous details of their day. Some users, however, found their not-so-inane private messages had been broadcast to all their friends through no fault of their own.

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On its way to becoming an EMC division, Iomega today announced its new 500 GB ScreenPlay HD Multimedia Drive, designed to let users watch entertainment content on their TVs and home theater systems without the need of a PC.

The ScreenPlay HD Multimedia Drive measures 7.7" x 2.3" x 5" and weights two pounds, which is the equivalent of a regular-sized paperback book. The USB 2.0-powered drive is a 3.5-inch 7200 rpm hard drive connectable to PCs using Microsoft Windows 2000, XP or Vista.

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Microsoft and Salesforce.com are at loggerheads over online CRM. Microsoft just rebranded its service and retooled its software, Salesforce is partnering with Google to parry Microsoft, and verbal attacks from both sides verge on vicious.

Why? As some analysts see it, software as a service (SaaS) opportunities have never been bigger anywhere than right now with CRM.

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On Monday, Netflix discussed its favorable first quarter 2008 and tempted investors and subscribers alike with references to four mystery hardware manufacturers working on Netflix-enabled products.

Netflix executives made reference to a LG "product launch" scheduled for the second half of this year, which will bring to the market a Netflix-integrated set-top box.

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It's apparently safe to try this now: Microsoft stated this afternoon it's going forward with plans to deploy Windows Vista Service Pack 1 via Automatic Updates.

But today's go-ahead won't mean that users will wake up one morning and suddenly find themselves upgraded (or not), or even that SP1 will find itself deployed all in the same morning.

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Apple posted its best second quarter in company history, on strong sales of Macs and iPhones.

One chink in Apple's armor was its iPod sales, which only managed to increase 1% year-over-year to 10,644,000. However, sales of Macintosh computers were up 51% to 2,289,000, and the company sold 1.7 million iPhones.

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A long-standing claim was that Rambus behaved unfairly by withholding secrets from competitors in standards committees. But an appeals court today erased an FTC decision, on the grounds that those committees may have been useless anyway.

An August 2006 US Federal Trade Commission decision finding Rambus illegally garnered monopoly power in the memory market by manipulating standards agencies, was voided yesterday by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, on the grounds that the standards agency in question -- JEDEC -- did not provide its members with enough guidelines for properly sharing information the FTC said Rambus withheld.

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Yesterday an e-mail was sent out from the Windows Live Mail Team announcing that Outlook Express would be dropping the legacy DAV protocol on June 30 2008, severing access to the Hotmail Inbox from Outlook Express.

Users are encouraged by the team to download Windows Live Mail as Outlook Express' free replacement. Live Mail replaces Distributed Authoring and Versioning with Microsoft's proprietary DeltaSynch protocol, which detects changes in the e-mail server, allowing the client to only download the changes, instead of all the headers in every folder as DAV does.

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Security research firm IOActive notes that several ISPs, including Earthlink, are using advertising servers to collect revenue on misspelled URLs, but alleges that in so doing, they may have mistakenly exposed users to cross-site scripting.

Dan Kaminsky, the group's director of penetration testing, reported that a bug on Earthlink servers may have allowed hackers to launch phishing attacks through the third-party Barefruit service used by several ISPs. Barefruit is a service whose stated purpose is to help ISPs catch DNS errors and redirect users appropriately. However, ISPs took advantage of that redirection by building error-catching pages that included paid advertisements. Earthlink was notoriously caught using Barefruit for this purpose in 2006.

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As of August 31 of this year, Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" technology -- once codenamed Janus -- will no longer play for sure -- unless, that is, users play back the tunes on the same computers and OS forever.

In a move that's come under concerted attack by users ranging from anti-DRM music bloggers to Linux fans, Microsoft has disclosed plans to stop providing authorization keys for songs downloaded from the old MSN Music service.

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The latest Research in Motion (RIM) BlackBerry smartphone, the Curve 8330, is now on its way to three different US mobile phone networks on May 1, the latest addition being Alltel.

Operating on Alltel's EV-DO network, the BlackBerry Curve 8330 features a full QWERTY keyboard, trackball navigation system, instant messaging, GPS, 2 megapixel camera with video, Bluetooth 2.0, and an added MicroSD slot. It measures 4.2 x 2.4 x 0.6 and weighs just four ounces.

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In-Stat has published a report that forecasts the future of the worldwide mobile TV market, anticipating a total of $12 billion dollars in revenue in 2012, but it appears the fragmented nature of standards is here to stay.

Much like PAL and NTSC on analog sets, different nations adhere to different mobile broadcast standards. DVB-H, ATSC-M/H, CMMB, ISDB-T, DVB-SH, T-DMB, and MediaFLO are just some of the most common standards currently in place or in development. And among these, there is even further disunion between free, pay-as-you-go, and subscription-based services.

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In the face of better-than-expected financial results last quarter for Yahoo, Microsoft now seems to be indicating that it is ready to move on.

Over the past two days, CEO Steve Ballmer has made comments that Microsoft's offer for Yahoo will not change, and that the company will soon move on if necessary.

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