It's no surprise that HTC is working very hard on increasing its brand awareness, preferring to market phones as being HTC devices instead of carrier-branded ones that do not carry any HTC branding at all. This strategy is paying off, and today must've been very nice for them: they held an Apple-style product announcement in London, attended by media from all over the world. The news: two new phones, and an improved Sense experience which includes a web presence where you can remotely manage your HTC devices.

After several months and preview releases, Microsoft has finally lifted the curtain for the Windows Explorer 9 beta release. Internet Explorer 9 is Microsoft's attempt at not just catching up to the competition, but at actually surpassing them. Since enough sites will be focusing on just how many nanoseconds faster or slower the beta is compared to the competition, I'll talk a little about the new minimalist interface.

If there's one consistent piece of criticism that gets lobbed in Canonical's and Mark Shuttleworth's direction, it's that they do not contribute enough code - or anything else for that matter - to the Free software world. Mark Shuttleworth has apparently had enough, and has written a very, very lengthy blog post detailing how he feels about this criticism.

"Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac launched today with a number of new features and refinements for users looking to run alternative operating systems in virtual environments on their Macs. As summarized on Parallels' site, the update brings enhancements to gaming and graphics, simpler setup and integration, greater manageability and mobility, and better performance. Beyond improvements to the standard Parallels Desktop application for Mac OS X, the company has also released a new, free iOS application, Parallels Mobile, bringing remote access on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch to users running the desktop software."

If the rumours are true, and if this Pastebin post (be sure to mirror the key if that won't get you in trouble with your authorities) is legitimate, then it looks like High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection has been cracked so hard its mother's mother felt it. HDCP is a copy protection mechanism which protects the audio and video streams sent over DisplayPort, HDMI, and DVI.

"Intel kicked off the second day of its developers conference by officially launching its app store and rolling out new Atom processors. The chip maker's AppUp center, which went into beta early this year, went live today, Renee James, an Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Services Group, said during the morning's first keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco today. The AppUp center is a consumer-centric store that focuses on free and paid apps for entertainment, productivity, networking and gaming. The apps are optimized for netbooks in terms of screen size and mobility, according to Intel. Intel also launched a new Atom chip that was formerly known as Groveland. Doug Davis, vice president of Intel's architecture group, took the wraps off the Atom CE4200, which is designed for smart TVs."

Nokia might not be gaining a lot of mindshare in the smartphone world with its Symbian operating system, but fact of the matter is that Symbian is still the most popular smartphone operating system in the world - by a long shot. Today, Nokia officially unveiled three new smartphones that will run the latest iteration of the mobile platform, Symbian^3.

HP and ArcSight have signed a definitive agreement for HP to acquire ArcSight, a security and compliance management company, for $43.50 per share, or an enterprise value of $1.5 billion.

Who said a public outcry - even if it's just on the internet - never helped anyone? Yesterday, we reported on The New York Times' findings that Microsoft lawyers were taking part in raids on opposition groups in Russia. Today, Microsoft has announced a number of steps to fix the situation - the most significant of which is a unilateral software license extended to all NGOs in Russia and several other countries.

InfoWorld's Neil McAllister offers 20 questions to test your knowledge of the open source and free software movements. Which was the first commercial Linux distribution? How many separate clauses make up the typical BSD-style open source license? What is the difference between the GPL and the LGPL?

Piracy is a big problem for large software vendors licensors like Microsoft. As such, the Redmond giant is undertaking several anti-piracy efforts all over the world, and, of course, it attempts to make its software harder to crack through activation and validation. As The New York Times has discovered, however, the prevalence of pirated Microsoft software in Russia is giving the Russian authorities a pretence to raid the offices of outspoken advocacy groups or opposition media - supported by Microsoft lawyers. Update: Microsoft responds with a blog post that says all the right things, including "Microsoft will create a new unilateral software license for NGOs that will ensure they have free, legal copies of our products."

Technologists fear (and loathe) that which has no purpose. Why must some insist in deriding an operating system like Haiku that doesn't fit their particular needs or precepts of what has a purpose, when, it's advanced enough to have a decent web-browser and productivity software? Today I shall be further offending these people's tastes with a look into LoseThos--a pure 64-bit, preemptive-multitasking, multicored PC operating system that is intended to be used as a secondary operating system for user's recreational programming on their best PC while dual booting a primary system such as Linux or Windows where they do networking and other modern activities such as multimedia. Yes, LoseThos has no networking, no security of any kind, and VGA graphics; but it certainly has a purpose: to be fun! (for programmers, at least)

EULAs, and whatever nonsense they may contain, are legally binding in the US. Have a great weekend!

Yesterday's back-pedaling from Apple has been very well received in the industry. Two companies who were bitten pretty hard by Apple's policies - Google (through AdMob) and Adobe - have both responded to yesterday's changes, and as you can expect, they're both pretty happy.