"A new bill backed by movie studios and other large copyright holders takes a novel approach to curbing access to piratical Web sites: an Internet death penalty. That's a good way to describe the approach adopted by the legislation introduced today, which specifies a step-by-step method for making Web sites suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks vanish from the Internet. It's called the Protect IP Act. The U.S. Department of Justice would receive the power to seek a court order against an allegedly infringing Web site, and then serve that order on search engines, certain Domain Name System providers, and Internet advertising firms - which would in turn be required to 'expeditiously' make the target Web site invisible." ...because the interests of big content are obviously far more important than socialist communist terrorist nonsense like freedom of speech, right to a fair trial, innocent until proven otherwise, and so on. This is exactly what the founding fathers had in mind. Honest.

"Ars Technica's John Siracusa looks back with a decade's hindsight at his early reviews of Mac OS X. He talks about what went right, what went wrong, and what he's still waiting on." I've read them all over the years, and Siracusa is by far the best reviewer on the web. His Mac OS X reviews are worth it for the technical details of the inner workings of Mac OS X alone - even if you don't use or like Apple's operating system.

Because of Google I/O going full-steam ahead, it's a bit of a Google thing going on here. Google co-founder Sergey Brin had a little chat with the press about the Chromebooks Google announced yesterday, and during that talk, he stated that traditional PC operating systems are "torturing users" with their complexity. While he certainly has a point, I'm not sure I like his solution. Giving Google all my files? Yeah... No.

Nilay Patel has read through the 750 pages of legal filings in the Skyhook v. Google case we have also reported on extensively, and it's one damn fine piece of work. An absolute must-read, with detailed timelines of how Google uses compatibility to push Android device makers into a certain direction. "So what does all this mean? At the very least, it's now extremely clear that Google plays a major role in Android device development, to the point where Andy Rubin himself approves and denies requests from OEMs. It's also clear that Google places tremendous value on collecting location data, and it acted swiftly when it determined Skyhook's deal with Motorola might threaten its ability to collect that data."

Back in the 80s, a GUI paradigm called WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) began to establish itself as the new way in which most people interacted with a computer. When it comes to one of the most significant elements of that system, overlapping windows, I'm beginning to wonder, has it had its day?

A U.S. court's antitrust oversight of Microsoft is ending after eight and a half years, with some observers questioning what the long fight accomplished. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's oversight of a twice-extended November 2002 settlement agreement between Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice ends Thursday.

"Pinta, a 'lightweight' open source raster image editor, turned 1.0 on April 27, offering Linux users another choice for simple image editing. Pinta is intended to be a clone of Paint.NET, the Windows-only raster editor written in .NET. As such, it uses Mono under the hood, but it gains the ability to run equally well on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows. Is it a replacement for GIMP or Krita? That depends on what you need to do." What I like about Pinta is that I actually caused its creation in the first place.

"At its annual developer conference in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, Google said that Chrome OS notebooks, now called 'Chromebooks', will be available in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain starting June 15, and that it will be offering a combined software and hardware subscription service for businesses, schools, and government customers. The pricing of Google's subscription plan is modest: For $28 per user per month, businesses will receive Chromebooks, Web-based administration controls, enterprise-level support, a warranty, and hardware replacement upon subscription renewal. Schools and governments have access to the subscription package for $20 per user per month." Look at the concept here.

" Gourdol confirmed tonight would get the full WebM support, which also includes the Vorbis audio encoding technology and a container to bundle the data together. 'We don't have a timetable for it,' Gourdol said of WebM support in Flash. Important factors include hardware support, just getting under way today, and broad use of the technology, he said."

"Representatives from Apple and Google faced hard questions about their location and privacy policies when testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law on Tuesday. Apple VP of Software Technology Guy 'Bud' Tribble and Google Director of Public Policy Alan Davidson both stood behind their companies' policies at the hearing, however, while continuing to insist that they take consumer privacy seriously."

So, the biggest acquisition in Microsoft's history. The Wall Street Journal reports - and it has been confirmed - that Microsoft and Skype will announce today that Redmond will buy Skype for $8.5 billion. That's a lot of money for a company that hasn't ever actually made any profits. Update: and it's official: yay on Skype on the Xbox360 and Windows Phone, and this: "Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms." Let's hope this includes Linux.

Apple has released the source code for WebKit in iOS 4.3, which it had been withholding for eight weeks. However, according yo Jay 'saurik' Freeman, they are still not, and never have been, in compliance with the LGPL. "Apple's provided source code (which /is/ heavily modified for the iPhone) isn't even complete enough to compile (it is missing a bunch of code for the WAK* classes), so Apple has simply never been in compliance with this license," Saurik writes. So, it would seem that Apple is still violating the LGPL, and has been doing so for a very long time. Funny how this never makes it to mainstream technology sites. I guess they find their pre-release review devices more important.

"Hyperion Entertainment CVBA is pleased to announce that all materials comprising the AmigaOS 4.1 distribution for Amiga 1200/3000/4000 equipped with the appropriate PowerPC based accelerator card (Cyberstorm PPC or BlizzardPPC) have now been completed. AmigaOS 4.1 brings Amiga1200/3000/4000 the wealth of new functionality which was made available to other supported platforms in August of 2008 - up to and including - Update 2 released on April 30th, 2010."

AMD Embedded Solutions has gained a great appreciation for the value of coreboot to our ecosystem and continues to build momentum by adding support for our existing products, adding new features, and introducing a roadmap for support going forward." Let's hope regular boards are next. BIOS needs to die.