"Today the jury notified Judge William Alsup that it had reached a unanimous decision on all but one question, and were at 'an impasse'. However, upon entering the courtroom, the foreperson stated to Judge Alsup that not all members of the jury thought sending the note at this time was necessary, with some thinking they could have reached a decision if given the weekend to think over the case further." Word through the grapevine is that they're hung up on the fair-use question (i.e., Google infringed, but t may be fair use), but it's all a guessing game at this point. I do have to wonder if the jury system (which we don't have here in The Netherlands) is a good fit for complex cases like this.

"The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance. In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned. The FBI general counsel's office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly." I no longer know what to say. You will be monitored by The State. If you oppose such monitoring, you're a terrorist.

"In 2007, software developer Laurent Sansonetti launched an open source software project called MacRuby. It aimed to build a Ruby interpreter on top of the Objective-C runtime, providing a seamless bridge between Ruby and OS X "Cocoa" ecosystem—and it succeeded. Now Sansonetti hopes to do something similar for iOS."

It's here: the GIMP 2.8. Its biggest feature is something that many, many people have been requesting for as long as I can remember: single-window mode. No longer do you have to fiddle with a gazillion palette and dialog windows (unless you choose to do so, of course). Great work by the team.

Samsung has just unveiled the Galaxy SIII - 4.8" 720p SuperAMOLED display, quad-core processor, 8.6mm thick body. Despite the larger display, the SIII isn't much larger than the SII, which is pretty impressive. Samsung also shoved a whole bunch of new features into TouchWiz, including a few quite kitschy sound effects. Ice Cream Sandwich, but TouchWizzed. I personally really dislike the move to curved and rounded designs (still waiting for a perfectly straight, sharp-angled slab), and there's no way in heck I'm buying this thing. Available May 29, all throughout Europe. Asia, Africa, and the US will follow later during the summer. Will sell like hotcakes. Update: Really - why are they doing this to ICS? This reminds me of that Southpark episode with Spielberg and Lucas raping Indiana Jones. We're all seeing it, but nobody's doing something about it.

"EdX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone." They really have nothing to lose here. People who want to go to MIT or Harvard will go regardless, and people who otherwise would have no interest in them may be exposed to them. Smart move.

A few days I switched back to Windows Phone 7.5 as my main smartphone operating system. Why? Well, because I can. I like to change things up every now and then, and blessed as I am with an iPhone 3GS (currently pulling duty at my best friend as her portable gaming device), Galaxy SII with CM9, and an HTC HD7, I have the luxury of doing so. Now that I'm back in the neat, tidy, and straight-lined arms of Windows Phone 7 - three long-standing issues really break the illusion, which all come from one source: the networking stack.

"It's never the offence; it's the cover-up. And if there's one thing that the last few years have taught us, it's that the suggestion of a 'rogue' worker having acted alone to do something which led to an intrusion is never correct. There has to be a failure of management oversight as well. That's why Google is in such hot water now over the revelations contained in the Federal Communications Commission report into what went wrong with its Street View Wi-Fi data collection program." What a total and utter surprise: company does bad stuff, tries to cover it up. Sometimes I think I'm the only person in the world who grasps that companies - they are not to be trusted. This really isn't rocket science, people.

I love it when ancient proverbs come to life. If you can't compete, litigate. Right, Nokia? It's suing HTC, RIM, and Viewsonic in the US and Germany over 45 FRAND patents. The world is so predictable, and the technology world even more so. Ever since Microsoft got its claws on this company, its morals and values have been going downhill.

"Motorola Mobility has been granted an injunction against the distribution of key Microsoft products in Germany. The sales ban covers the Xbox 360 games console, Windows 7 system software, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. It follows a ruling that Microsoft had infringed two patents necessary to offer H.264 video coding and playback." But... But... The MPEG-LA, Apple, and Microsoft have been lying to us all this time about the safety of using H264 over WebM, with their supporters blindly parroting the party line? This surprises me greatly and deeply, and I dare say I have not seen this coming at all. Not at all. No sir. Not at all.

Wow. "One crazy idea that the team had at that dinner was to translate Android's source code to C#. Android would benefit from C# performance features like structures, P/Invoke, real generics and our more mature runtime. We decided it was crazy enough to try. So we started a small skunkworks project with the goal of doing a machine translation of Android from Java to C#. We called this project XobotOS." Most of Android's layouts and controls are now in C#. The small benchmark is stunning, but as much as I admire the work, I'm wondering that this like going from bad to worse - from Oracle's Java to Microsoft's C#.

The US Trade Representative has released its Special 301 Report again, the document the US government uses to mafia poor countries (and Canada) into enacting stricter IP laws. "Perhaps the most shameful inclusion in this year's report are a series of countries whose primarily fault is being poor. Moreover, with repeated complaints against countries seeking to ensure adequate access to medicines for their citizens or access to books in schools, this year's report hits a new low. It demonstrates the failure of the enforcement agenda and stands as an embarrassment for one of the world's richest countries to prioritize its IP rights over human and economic rights in the developing world." Infuriating. And people wonder why I consider the current IP legislation and lobby entirely unethical and strictly evil.

"Today we are excited to announce Tizen 1.0 Larkspur, including the addition of new complimentary components, as well as source code that focuses on enhancing stability and performance. We believe that these updates and new offerings improve the experience for developers. We are also continuing to work on improvements and additions, and we will be doing frequent updates to the SDK and source code. There are a few additional components that we plan to add in the coming weeks, and we will continue to fix bugs and add additional features."

It's about time. RIM is in deep trouble, and is seeing its smartphone market share being eaten left and right by Android and iOS. After being more or less the equivalent of a deer caught in the headlights, the company has now finally unveiled its answer to the original iPhone - 5 years too late.