Yesterday, we found out about an upcoming technology from Microsoft that may have as a result millions of users having to watch ads bundled with their downloaded media files, or paying for skipping them. In the meantime, Apple was concerned with serious problems, and filed an application with the US Patent & Trademark Office for a technology similar to Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage platform...


Apple's patent, bearing number 20070288886, is about “Run-Time Code Injection To Perform Checks” or, to be more specific, yet another "digital rights management system able to restrict execution of that application to specific hardware platforms". Apple didn't make any breakthrough by noting that digital information can be copied as easy as possible, and that you can't trust your users not to illegally distribute copies of data they purchased, but it's good (at least for them) they are coming up with a solution to protect their products better.

At this time, there is no additional information about when this patent is going to be introduced in Apple's products, but I only hope one thing, that they'll exceed in terms of quality and user annoyance-level Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage...

There's nothing new regarding the fact that sometimes, Microsoft goes a bit over the line when it comes to "we think our users should" part. Unfortunately, big companies do this pretty often, and that's another sad but true fact, but this time it seems Microsoft takes the DRM idea one step further, trying to stick ads into the media we're downloading without any chance to bypass it, at least for now. But...what is this all about, after all?


Fortunately, at this time, all we know is that Microsoft applied for a new patent, but its name should say it all. Under the "Enforcing Advertising Playback For Downloaded Media Content" label, the Redmond giant is describing a software method that uses tokens and DRM to disallow viewing media files before playing the bundled ad first. I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea at all!

If you're thinking about loading an ad and then fast forwarding...don't think you're smarter than the guys at Microsoft! Although this patent doesn't sound really smart to me, as a user, it's a very good marketing movement. Windows Media Player is still the most widely used media player on Earth, and I am sure there's going to be an alternative to watching those ads. Obviously, that would probably mean to pay a subscription fee to some future service offered by Microsoft, so they would probably win anyway, but that's something that remains to be seen...

For a lot of people, Azureus is the best BitTorrent client that money can't buy, and that's not only because this program is free to use... With the growth in processing power for desktop computers in the last years, the fact that Azureus was written using Java is no longer a problem, given that anyone can afford a decent CPU and at least 1GB of memory. Anyway, in the last days, I've seen a lot of Beta version coming up from them, so I thought it would be a good idea to take a closer look...


At this time, there are two Azureus versions available - the "classic" one, or Azureus 2.x and Vuze, a new platform released since Azureus 3.0, practically a new media sharing application, including a graphic browser. The happenings of the last days concern only Vuze, so if you're a faithful Azureus 2 follower, there's nothing special to find out, unfortunately.

While latest stable release of Azureus Vuze is 3.0.4.0, made public on the 7th of December, I have seen no less than 3 preview releases in the last days, starting with 3.0.4.1 B08, on the 18th of December, and today I found out that Azureus 3.0.4.1 B10 is already available(according to their site, this version became public yesterday)! So...what's the catch?

To be honest, each time a new software release is expected, a lot of people expect a bunch of new features, but with Azureus, things look pretty different, in my opinion. The main reason is that, no matter how we say it, Azureus was always a memory hog, and improving its memory leaks was always a point on the fixes list for new versions. Even according to the official changelog, improving system resources usage seems to be the main goal of the development team, for now.

Since I talked about Vuze, it would be nice to tell you where to grab it from, so here you go - available for Windows, Azureus 3.0.4.0 can be downloaded from here, and the current Beta release should be on this page. The good part is that being a Java program, Azureus can work easily on Linux and Mac OS X platforms too, as long as you can spare a few minutes to read the instructions on how to make this happen...

It seems Microsoft is moving pretty fast these days, because their first news regarding the ghostly Beta version of IE 8, only expected by a lot of people, but never announced officially so far, were made public at the same time as Mozilla released to those interested the second Beta of Firefox 3. Here's what Microsoft announced less than a day ago regarding Internet Explorer 7's follower...


According to various sources from Microsoft, internal builds of the future Internet Explorer had no problems passing the Acid2 test, showing that next browser from the Redmond giant is already fully compliant with HTML and CSS specifications. Since Opera, OmniWeb, Safari and the Firefox 3 Beta versions also pass this test, we should be amazed by this "performance" from IE8. After all, we're waiting for new features, aren't we?

For now, there are no interesting news about the features of IE8, but we may figure out that a better integration with online services from Microsoft, such as Windows Live, is for sure a target of the development team, and since the official announcements place the first public Beta's release date somewhere in the first half of 2008, we still have a long wait ahead...

At last, some good news - we won't have to wait 7 months to find out what new features will be packed into IE8, and we won't have to write Sci-Fi stories about this, either. In March 2008, Microsoft will tell us more about IE8, at the MIX Conference, and be sure we'll be ready to give you all the details as soon as they emerge!

About 2 months ago, I was telling you about Firefox Gran Paradiso for the first time, but then came Firefox 3 Beta 1, and now we are one step closer to the final release of the new Firefox browser, with the Beta 2 version launched at the same time as the interesting and useful Personas plugin...


Before anything else, I have to issue a warning - don't install Firefox 3 Beta over your existing Firefox 2! This being a release made available only for testing purposes, all the risks are ours, but I found Firefox 3 Beta 2 to be working like a charm, apart from the fact that - as I expected - it's not compatible with my Tab Mix Plus addon.

The feature that jumped right in front of me is called Smart Bookmarks and allows you to simply work your way, while Firefox builds automatically folders with most visited sites, recently bookmarked ones and also a list of recent tags. The tags feature allows you to easily associate keywords with bookmarks and sort them by topic.

There are a lot of things to see in this new Firefox 3 Beta, like the improved Download Manager, the anti-virus integration or the new malware protection feature, which can be seen in action here, although the blacklist of malware sites hasn't been activated yet, so hold your horses and don't go roaming the web trying to test this new feature for now!

No, I didn't forget it, but I left it for the end...here's the download page. No matter if you're using Windows, a Mac or Linux, there's a Firefox 3 Beta 2 version for you all, so give it a try and get back here to share your experience with the rest of us! I did my part, and now the ball is in your court...