"A divided Federal Communications Commission has approved new rules meant to prohibit broadband companies from interfering with Internet traffic flowing to their customers. The 3-2 vote Tuesday marks a major victory for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who has spent more than a year trying to craft a compromise. The FCC's three Democrats voted to pass the rules, while the two Republicans opposed them, calling them unnecessary regulation. The new rules are likely to face intense scrutiny on Capitol Hill once Republicans take over the House. Meanwhile, public interest groups decried the regulations as too weak, particularly for wireless systems."

Very light on details, but this is interesting nonetheless - very interesting, and potentially one of the biggest things to have hit the operating systems business this decade. Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft plans to announce Windows for ARM processors at CES in January 2011.

"Oracle on Wednesday announced the availability of Cloud Office 1.0, a Web-based productivity suite that is set to give online applications from Microsoft and Google a fresh dose of competition. Cloud Office is integrated with the on-premises Oracle Open Office, of which version 3.3 was also announced Wednesday. Like Open Office, Cloud Office is based on ODF (Open Document Format). It provides a set of spreadsheet, text and presentation applications and is compatible with Microsoft Office, according to Oracle."

Jos Poortvliet recently had the opportunity to conduct a Q&A with Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn. They covered openSUSE, SUSE and open source in general. Please see the full text of his interview at news.opensuse.org.

It's a public secret that there are many people with complaints about Mac OS X's Finder. It lacks several features common to other file managers, and on top of that, it has several issues with dealing with some types of network shares (SAMBA, specifically). While third parties can't fix the bugs, they can extend the Finder's feature set. TotalFinder is a collection of Finder extensions that tries to bring some of Google Chrome's interface ideas to the Finder. BinaryAge was kind enough to provide me with a free license so I could give a quick review of TotalFinder.

A few moments ago, a woman appeared at my doorstep with a package for me. Since it was about 19:30, I was a little perplexed - this isn't a very usual time to be delivering packages. Also, this was a woman who I've seen walking around town before - she's a local. She handed over the package, and when I saw the note on top, I was even more intrigued: "From Trevor Dickinson, A-EON Technology".

The source code for Android 2.3 has been released. "Nexus S went on sale yesterday morning in the US, running Gingerbread. Just like I did for Froyo, I'm open-sourcing the matching Android platform source code, right after the first consumers get their hands on it. I'm going to start literally right now, and the process will take a few hours."

InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues sees 2010 as a watershed year for Ubuntu, one that could herald meaningful enterprise interest in the OS, thanks to a rising tide of developers - and deployment servers - adopting the OS. "As with many recent trends in the IT industry, developers become ambassadors for products they enjoy using and have quickly become an early indicator for enterprise technology usage in the future. In a seemingly perfect storm, Ubuntu is benefiting from strong developer usage, and the fact that developers are increasingly selecting Amazon's EC2 cloud platform bodes well for continued Ubuntu success on EC2," Rodrigues writes, noting that Ubuntu has surpassed Red Hat usage on deployment servers as well. "As that occurs, IT decision makers will need to consider or reconsider Ubuntu for usage within the enterprise. Rest assured that Red Hat won't sit idly by during these discussions."

While Microsoft's Security Essentials has been very well received because of its small footprint and unobtrusive nature, it didn't always rank among the very top when it came to its detection rates. Overall, I'd still say it's one of the best antivirus tools. Now, with version 2.0, Microsoft has improved the detection mechanisms, but of course, it'll take some tests before we can see how effective they are.

Opera 11 has been released. "Tab stacking is a better way to organize your open tabs. Simply drag one tab on top of another to create a stack. Extensions help you personalize your browser and enhance what Opera can do. With the flick of your wrist, mouse gestures let you navigate back and forwards, open new pages, close tabs and so much more. In Opera 11, you now have a handy visual guide to the wonders of mouse gestures. We changed the address bar, so you can make better sense of the security levels of the sites you visit. Opera 11 now displays a clear badge indicating the security level and allowing immediate, one-click access to security and trust information about the site."

Well well well well well, paint me red and call me a girly scout. I've been saying for months now that there's much more collaboration between Apple and Microsoft than their respective fanboys want to believe, especially when it comes to fighting Google and Android, which both companies partly do via patent suits. More evidence for this has emerged today. Remember CPTN Holdings, the consortium led by Microsoft which bought that bundle of patents from Novell? Which other companies are part of this consortium? EMC. Oracle. Apple.

MySQL 5.5 delivers significant enhancements enabling users to improve the performance and scalability of web applications across multiple operating environments, including Windows, Linux, Oracle Solaris, and Mac OS X. The MySQL 5.5 Community Edition, which is licensed under the GNU GPL, and is available for free download, includes InnoDB as the default storage engine.

"In addition to talking up Windows tablets and slates at the January Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft execs also are expected to use the conference to give another push to Windows Phone 7. But the first 'major' update to the WP7 platform may not hit until August or September of 2011, my sources claim."

L0phtCrack is one of the most used tools by security professionals worldwide. After years of inactivity, version 6 was released in 2009 and development hasn't halted since. In a new video, L0phtCrack co-author Christien Rioux aka dildog talks about the upcoming version and introduces some of the new features.