I'm (was?) a Twitter user. This past week I found it utterly weird that none of the words #wikileaks, #cablegate, #cables, #Assange were actually "trending". I even tweeted about this 5 days ago. Today, my fears of secret censorship seem to be coming true. It appears that Twitter is censoring all these words, so they don't appear in the (much-used) Twitter "trends" list. Update 1: A Twitter staffer replied to the blog post saying that their trending algorithm doesn't always result to the most popular terms. Update 2: More investigation about what might be going on.

"The licensing dispute that has prevented NVIDIA from building controller chips for Intel's latest CPUs may finally be coming to a close. Late last week, a Bloomberg report cited inside sources that claim the two companies are in talks to settle the matter out of court. While both Intel and NVIDIA would benefit from a settlement - for instance, by avoiding legal fees for protracted litigation - Apple also stands to gain."

Oracle executives talked up on Thursday the planned Solaris 11 release due in 2011, with the Unix OS upgrade offering advancements in availability, security, and virtualization. The OS will feature next-generation networking capabilities for scalability and performance, said John Fowler, Oracle executive vice president of systems, at a company event in Santa Clara, Calif. "It's a complete reworking of enterprise OS," he said. Oracle took over Solaris when the company acquired Sun Microsystems early this year.

If you haven't looked at the Windows utilities landscape lately, you're in for a big surprise. Many of the old favorites have changed, bringing new features to Windows 7, as well as XP. Others have fallen by the wayside, replaced by upstarts that deliver meaningful functionality that once cost big bucks. With that reality in mind, Woody Leonhard has picked the 15 free Windows utilities everyone should have.

Guess I'm not the only one who thinks a war is brewing between 'the internet' and the establishment. "Early this morning, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed reposted a tweet from EFF cofounder John Perry Barlow. 'The first serious infowar is now engaged,' Barlow wrote. 'The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.' Barlow is no stranger to theatrical overstatement; this, after all, is the guy who in 1996 penned "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" that opened with the lines: 'Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.' Barlow was wrong about sovereignty. Despite its name, 'cyberspace' runs on physical infrastructure that sits in various governmental jurisdictions, and when sites like Wikileaks start irritating those governments, sovereignty is quite powerfully brought to bear. Still, his recent tweet is accurate. There's a war on for WikiLeaks, and it's being fought all over the world."

"Federal authorities in the first-of-its-kind game-console-modding criminal trial abruptly dropped their prosecution Thursday, "based on fairness and justice." Following procedural rulings made by the presiding judge in the aftermath of his 30-minute tirade yesterday, it emerged that a key witness, an employee of the Entertainment Software Alliance, had provided a pirated game to the defendant during the course of his investigation. As this detail had been known to the government for almost a week but had been withheld from the defense, prosecutors had no choice but to move for a dismissal."

The sweet smell of competition is lingering in the air. That sweet smell which indicates that somewhere in the vicinity a company is working on actually improving a product so we can all benefit. This time around, it's Adobe, delivering the first Flash 10.2 beta. Prime feature? Complete hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline - fully cross platform, cross-form factor. Cross-platform! There's a catch, though.

"Rambus, a designer of memory and interface technologies, on Wednesday accused a list of companies of patent infringements again. The company accused the defendants of illegal usage of memory-related intellectual property and said that the semiconductor companies infringe its rights by implementing a number of widely used industrial standards. The tech designer demands ITC to stop importation of chips that infringe its patents and products on their base."

"Symbian Foundation has started dismantling itself. On Dec.17 the organization will shut down its websites, and anyone who wants to get the source code for the current version of the Symbian mobile operating system should download it now or they will have to pay for a copy to be shipped on physical media in the future, its website. Nokia will take over development of Symbian OS, the company said on Nov. 8. The Symbian Foundation will become a licensing operation only."

Finally! After pioneering sandboxing of Javascript and tabs in the browser, Chrome is now finally busy moving Flash into a sandbox. Windows users of the dev channel have been fed the new release with Flash sandboxing already.

The European Commission has decided to open an antitrust investigation into allegations that Google has abused a dominant position in online search, in violation of European Union rules. The Commission will investigate whether Google has abused a dominant market position in online search by allegedly lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competing services which are specialized in providing users with specific online content such as price comparisons (so-called vertical search services) and by according preferential placement to the results of its own vertical search services in order to shut out competing services.

Now this is interesting. My brand-new MacBook Air 11.6" is at my local Apple retailer because either the SATA part of the logic board or the SSD died mysteriously, and here we have Apple blocking PhotoFast from selling their faster, more spacious replacement drives.

"ZFS will be supported in Debian Squeeze using the official installer. This means that Debian Squeeze will be one of the first GNU distributions to support ZFS. In fact, even though ZFS support didn't make it to Debian-Installer beta1 by the time it was released, it is now available in the netboot images (this happens because netboot images fetch newer installer components from the internet)."

The version 10.11 of the Genode OS construction framework has been released. Driven by the requirements for the recently published Live CD, the new version features an execution environment for drivers of the gPXE project, an on-demand-paged ISO9660 file system, alpha-blending support for the GUI server, a new virtual network bridge, and a http-based block driver. Enjoy the release notes for the full story.