"A payment system devised by online retail giant Amazon is too obvious to patent, the European Patent Office (EPO) has ruled. Amazon had hoped to patent the way its customers pay for products through the click of a single webpage button. The company was previously granted patent rights to the payment system in the US."

Linux.FR has an interview with Lennart Poettering of PulseAudio and systemd fame (among others). Regarding PulseAudio: "I can understand why people were upset, but quite frankly we didn't really have another option than to push it into the distributions when we did. While PulseAudio certainly wasn't bug-free when the distributions picked it up the majority of issues were actually not in PulseAudio itself but simply in the audio drivers. PulseAudio's timer-based scheduling requires correct timing information supplied by the audio driver, and back then the drivers weren't really providing that. And that not because the drivers were really broken, but more because the hardware was, and the drivers just lacked the right set of work-arounds, quirks and fixes to compensate for it."

Well, paint me red and call me a girl scout, I totally did not see this one coming at all. This is so utterly surprising it made my brain explode. Hold on to your panties, because this will rock your world. After pressuring several smaller Android vendors into submission (and yes, HTC is still relatively small compared to other players), Microsoft is now moving on to the big one: Redmond is demanding $15 for every Samsung Android device sold. Samsung's choices are simple: pay up, or face another epic lawsuit.

"One of Microsoft's hottest new profit centers is a smartphone platform you've definitely heard of: Android. Google's Linux-based mobile operating system is a favorite target for Microsoft's patent attorneys, who are suing numerous Android vendors and just today announced that another manufacturer has agreed to write checks to Microsoft every time it ships an Android device. Microsoft's latest target is Wistron Corp., which has signed a patent agreement 'that provides broad coverage under Microsoft's patent portfolio for Wistron's tablets, mobile phones, e-readers and other consumer devices running the Android or Chrome platform', Microsoft announced." That's the reality we live in, folks. This is at least as criminal - if not more so - than Microsoft's monopoly abuse late last century. After the Nortel crap, it's completely left the black helicopter camp for me: Microsoft, Apple, and several others are working together to fight Android the only way they know how: with underhand mafia tactics. Absolutely sickening. Hey Anonymous, are you listening? YES I WENT THERE.

Red is a new programming language inspired by REBOL, but compiled and open source. The language is currently being bootstrapped by first implementing a lower level dialect, in which the high level, dynamic language will be written. This C class dialect for systems programming, Red/System, has reached beta status after only half a year of development. It now supports using dynamic libraries on Syllable. Also, a new version of Syllable Desktop's FTP client, Transferrer, was released (screenshot accessing Syllable Server).

A few days ago Sony released the 11th version of their consumer "Movie Studio HD Platinum" version of their popular PC video editing platform, Vegas. A variety of new features can be found in it, most importantly 3D stereoscopic editing support, and a faster h.264 decoder for AVCHD/digicam/dSLR footage.

"A year and a half after Google pulled its popular search engine out of mainland China, partly over concerns about censorship, its rival Microsoft has struck a deal with the biggest Chinese search engine, Baidu.com, to offer Web search services in English. Baidu, previously primarily a Chinese-language search engine, made the announcement Monday afternoon, saying Microsoft's search engine, Bing, was expected to appear on Baidu's Web pages by the end of this year."

A few days ago, Microsoft released Windows Phone 7.5, also known as Mango, to its developers for testing their applications. It didn't take long for the hacking community (in the form of Windows HoneHacker.com) to come up with a clever solution to enable the phones of non-developers to upgrade to Mango - and guess what, I did just that. Here are a few thoughts.

"Search giant Google, facing a broad antitrust probe into its business practices, has hired 12 lobbying firms, a spokeswoman from the company said on Friday. The Federal Trade Commission, which investigates violations of antitrust law, is expected to look into complaints that Google's search results favor the company's other services, among other issues. Google, which runs an estimated 69 percent of Web searches worldwide, can make or break a company depending on its search ranking."

Apple is likely to replace Hewlett-Packard (HP) as the global number one notebook vendor in 2012 if tablet PCs are included in the calculation of global notebook shipments, according to industry sources.

"Apple has seeded the golden master version of OS X Lion to developers ahead of its public release sometime this month (July). The golden master download is available from Apple's Mac Developer website. The build number is 11A511. In addition, Apple has seeded Developer Preview 7 of Xcode 4.1." You'll now also be allowed to virtualise several instances of Mac OS X inside Mac OS X.

Via TorrentFreak: "Entertainment industry lobby groups often describe file-sharers as thieves who refuse to pay for any type of digital content. But not everyone agrees with this view. Swedish telecom giant Ericsson sees copyright abuse as the underlying cause of the piracy problem. In a brilliant article, Rene Summer, Director of Government and Industry Relations at Ericsson, explains how copyright holders themselves actually breed pirates by clinging to outdated business methods." No faeces, Sherlock.

There's no question Research In Motion is in the midst of a major transitional period. The company is planning to launch a brand new product line based on a brand new operating system within the next 12 months, and even though the first device born out of RIM's new QNX OS was impressive in some ways, it was incomplete. There still is a chance for RIM to deliver some really interesting competitive products, but time is quickly running out, as we have written time and time again. Update: RIM's response.

Newly published results show Apple's newly adopted Thunderbolt technology blows FireWire 800 out of the water with data transfer speeds to an external RAID system at 700MB/s.