Google will be subjected to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years over charges that it "violated its own privacy promises". The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that the search giant wrongly used information from Google Mail users last year to create its social network Buzz. The FTC ruled that "the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective". "Google Buzz fell short of our usual standards," Google said in a blog post. "While we worked quickly to make improvements, regulators unsurprisingly wanted more detail about what went wrong and how we could prevent it from happening again. "Today, we've reached an agreement with the FTC to address their concerns." That agreement will require Google to undergo a privacy review once every two years for the next 20 years.

Apple is gearing up to deploy an OS X Lion update to developers that they may be classifying as the "GM1" release . . . That would still mean an early Summer release - and potentially one before Summer technically even begins. After all, early June would line up nicely with the June 5 to 9 timeframe that Apple's WWDC event is likely to take place this year.

"Version 4.6 of GCC was released over the weekend with a multitude of improvements and version 2.9 of the Low-Level Virtual Machine is due out in early April with its share of improvements. How though do these two leading open-source compilers compare? In this article we are providing benchmarks of GCC 4.5.2, GCC 4.6.0, DragonEgg with LLVM 2.9, and Clang with LLVM 2.9 across five distinct AMD/Intel systems to see how the compiler performance compares."

I'm still reeling from the unrivalled epicness and awesomeness that is Sucker Punch in IMAX (just got home - do not miss this film), but now I'm back to boring old reality where we apparently care about pieces of plastic that go beep. So, anywho. The deal between Nokia and Microsoft has many Symbian and Qt developers worry about the future of their platforms. To address these concerns, Purnima Kochikar, vice president of Forum Nokia, has published an open letter describing Nokia's plans for Symbian, Qt, and Java for Series 40 devices. While the letter doesn't deliver any hard dates, the transition phase to Windows Phone 7 is set to 2011/2012.

HelenOS is a modern microkernel-based multiserver operating system running on a large variety of processor architectures. Version 0.4.3 thereof has been just released. The new release fixes many bugs and brings a lot of improvements in areas so diverse such as new hardware platform support, userspace device driver framework, device drivers, observability and robustness, programming languages, file systems and networking. For the complete list of user-visible changes, see the release notes. The released files can be downloaded from the project's download page.

"The International Trade Commission has ruled in favor of Apple in one of the company's patent disputes with Nokia. ITC Judge E. James Gildea said on Friday that Apple did not violate any of Nokia's five mobile device patents, though the Commission's members must first review the decision before taking any further action." In the vice-versa case, ITC staff sided with Nokia (i.e., Nokia does not violate Apple's patents either).