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The account setup wizard has been overhauled. Reachable under File, then New, Mail, and Account (Quick Setup), Thunderbird now looks to mozillamessaging.com to look for additional information on how to configure the account. Mosedale stressed in his blog that only the domain name from your e-mail address gets sent to Mozilla’s servers, and that the entire process falls under the Mozilla’s privacy policy. Nevertheless, it’s a move that’s likely to cause some concern among privacy advocates.

Thunderbird 3 beta 3 is now available to download for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. The beta introduces some significant improvements to the open-source desktop client, from performance to interface.

The compact header mode has been deleted, which is sure to annoy those who like using Thunderbird on smaller-form computers like netbooks. Mosedale cited bandwidth issues as well an ongoing need to improve the design and configurability of the feature.

The new beta is built on Mozilla’s Gecko 1.9.1.1 platform, keeping it up to date with the latest changes that affect
Firefox. Mozilla also claims that there are more than 500 changes in this version, and hints at more alterations to come by stating in a press release that many of them are ”laying the groundwork for future changes”. On his blog, Chief Technical Officer of Mozilla Messaging Dan Mosedale said that many of the improvements will help support the new global database search engine. Based on these comments, more betas of Thunderbird 3 are expected.

Hitting Enter or double-clicking a message will now open it in a new tab and make it your focus. Middle-click an e-mail to open it in a new tab but retain your focus on the current tab–usually the folder pane. You can switch tabs via the hot key combo CTRL+Tab, and the new tab menu button on the right side of the tab bar will help you manage your tabs.

In my own experiences with Thunderbird 3 beta 3 for half a day, users with large inboxes should be careful to note that Thunderbird now adds all your messages to its search archives. This can hamper performance until it’s completed. Also note that the calendar extension Lightning isn’t compatible with beta 3 unless you’re using the nightly build.

The interface and behavioral changes in this beta are significant and should be easy to spot for longtime ‘bird-watchers. The biggest is that Thunderbird now supports e-mail tabs. If you’ve checked out the highly unstable Shredder version of Thunderbird, or Postbox, a competitor that’s based on Thunderbird’s own open-source code, you’ve known that this feature has been due for a while.

Another new feature is the message summary view, which you can see when you select multiple messages at once. They’ll open in the message preview pane. Changes to folders include a Smart Folders mode, which gives users the ability to combine inboxes from multiple accounts, and the new ability to customize column headings on a per-folder basis.

Gmail integration has existed in Thunderbird for a while, but improvements to the feature in this beta include better recognition and integration of Gmail’s special folders. These include Sent and Trash, and non-English versions of Gmail. All Mail defaults in Thunderbird to the Archives folder.

Google Voice, shown here running on Android, was in fact rejected from the App Store, Google said Friday.

Now we know. “Apple’s representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the
iPhone,” Google said in its letter. By contrast, Apple said in July that “contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and continues to study it.”

Schiller spoke on the phone with Google senior vice president of engineering and research Alan Eustace on July 7th to inform him that Google Voice had been rejected, according to the letter. Other Apple and Google representatives met to discuss the application on several occasions between July 5th and July 28th, but Schiller and Eustace were the point men for their respective organizations, Google said.

Updated 10:25 a.m. PDT with additional details, and at 10:52 a.m. with comment from Apple.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The FCC had requested information from Apple, Google, and AT&T concerning the rejection of Google Voice from the App Store in July, and all three companies sent letters that were eventually made public. But Google redacted a significant portion of its letter at the time, raising questions about what lay behind those black pixels.

Suspicion had originally fallen on AT&T, based on the theory that the wireless carrier didn’t want an application that allowed the user to make cheap international calls on its network. But AT&T claimed it had no involvement in the manner in its own letter to the FCC released in August.

In its letter to the FCC, Google also says that Apple rejected the iPhone native version of Google Latitude for potentially causing confusion with the built-in Maps application that ships with every iPhone. That application is an Apple-tweaked version of Google Maps, and Google said Apple believed that “the company did not want applications that could potentially replace such functionality and potentially create user confusion.”

Google told the Federal Communications Commission in a redacted letter to the agency a few weeks ago that Apple did in fact reject its Google Voice application from the App Store.

Apple has become more open about its App Store approval process in recent weeks and months, explaining to prominent developers why certain applications were rejected from the store and shedding light on the process for the first time in its letter to the FCC.

Google dropped its request for confidentiality in the manner concerning the rejection of Google Voice from the App Store in July, and directly contradicted Apple’s version of events Friday. In the letter (click for PDF), Google said Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller informed Google that the app had, in fact, been rejected, when Apple’s public statements to the FCC in that month claimed it was merely still under review.

Apple stuck to that story on Friday. “We do not agree with all of the statements made by Google in their FCC letter,” the company said in a statement. “Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google.”

However, the stark contrast between the public statements of the two companies will undoubtedly raise eyebrows, and give more fuel for those who believe Google and Apple are increasingly at odds, especially now that Google CEO Eric Schmidt no longer sits on Apple’s board of directors.

Google Voice allows users to give their contacts a single number and have that number ring multiple phones depending on their location. It also translates voice mails into text, and is a popular application on Google’s own Android mobile operating system.

“RealDVD makes a permanent copy of copyrighted DVD content,” Patel wrote in her decision, “and by doing so breaches its (Content Scramble System) License Agreement with the (DVD Copy Control Association, the group that oversees the protection of DVDs for the major Hollywood studios) and circumvents a technological measure that effectively controls access to or copying of the Studios’ copyrighted content on DVDs.”

The big question for Real is whether it has the stomach to continue the fight. The legal fees have already set Real back more than $6 million.

The MPAA crushed these arguments in proceedings. The studios showed that both ARccOS and RipGuard are anticopying technologies used by some of the major film studios as a layer of piracy protection in addition to CSS. The studios’ lawyers produced documents that revealed ARccOS and RipGuard were effective enough copy protections to stymie Real’s engineers, as well as a group of “Ukranian hackers,” from cracking them.

Facet, the DVD player that copied and stored digital movies, will not be hitting store shelves anytime soon.

Hollywood, however, is working on its own programs to give consumers access to digital copies after buying a CD. But the studios typically want additional money for the digital copy.

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET)

While the courtroom showdown was first billed as a fight over RealDVD, it soon became clear that what was really at stake for Real was Facet.

So, now we wait to hear whether Real will carry on the fight. However it turns out, the company has earned kudos from anticopyright proponents for waging the campaign. The question is whether carrying the flag for the free-content crowd is enough of a payoff.

“Had Real’s products been manufactured differently, i.e., if what happened in Vegas really did stay in Vegas,” Patel continued, “this might have been a different case. But, it is what it is. Once the distributive nature of the copying process takes hold, like the spread of gossip after a weekend in Vegas, what’s done cannot be undone.”

“We are disappointed that a preliminary injunction has been placed on the sale of RealDVD,” Real said in a statement. The company that makes entertainment software said it would have more to say after it had reviewed Patel’s decision.

“We are very pleased with the court’s decision,” MPAA Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said in a statement. “This is a victory for the creators and producers of motion pictures and television shows and for the rule of law in our digital economy. Judge Patel’s ruling affirms what we have known all along: Real took a license to build a DVD-player and instead made an illegal DVD-copier.”

One glaring hole in Real’s argument was its assertions that RealDVD didn’t circumvent ARccOS and RipGuard because they really aren’t anticopying software; and that Real had licensed CSS, the technology designed to prevent unauthorized copying of DVDs, so it was essentially authorized to do what it wanted with it.

(Credit:
Munger, Tolles & Olson)

The decision represents a major victory for the film studios, which had accused Real of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and breach of contract in a lawsuit filed last fall. Had the decision gone against the film studios and its trade group, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), it would have been an affirmation that consumers have the right to copy their DVDs for personal use. Right now, when a DVD owner loses or breaks a disc, they conceivably must purchase another copy. RealDVD and Facet eliminate the need for discs once copies are made.

Real CEO Rob Glaser demonstrated the device in court last spring and showed how an owner could move between films–it holds more than 70–in a way similar to how someone scrolls through an iTunes playlist. I wrote that the device could have helped spur flagging DVD sales and given DVD collectors, such as myself, a way to revitalize their movie collections.

U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel on Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction that will prevent RealNetworks from selling the $30 software until a jury can decide the issue. That will undoubtedly keep RealDVD and Facet, Real’s prototype DVD player, off store shelves for an indefinite period. Facet also makes digital copies and stores them to a built in hard drive.

“Real was aware of ARccOS and RipGuard during the development of the RealDVD
products,” Patel wrote in her 58-page decision. “Real software engineers identified ARccOS and RipGuard as both copy protection systems and barriers to their development of a DVD copying device from the outset of the RealDVD project.”

But the MPAA argued that Facet and RealDVD are pirate tools that enabled users to copy and redistribute movies and could cost the industry billions. The MPAA has maintained that under the DMCA, consumers do not have the right to copy films–ever.

Bart Williams, attorney who argued case for the studios.

A federal court has found enough evidence to decide that RealDVD, the software that enables users to copy DVDs and store digital duplicates on a hard drive, violates U.S. copyright law.

In her decision, Patel made a play on words using Vegas–Real’s code name for RealDVD–to illustrate how the software could lead to the mass pirating of movies.

Patel’s decision is unlikely to surprise anyone who followed the case. During last year’s hearings on a temporary injunction and last spring’s proceedings on the preliminary injunction, Patel appeared highly skeptical of Real’s arguments.

In her questions to both sides’ attorneys, Patel seemed concerned about the potential for people to use RealDVD and Facet, to copy rented discs without compensating the creators, a practice known as “rent, rip, and return.”

One other important detail: ARccOS and RipGuard are not included in the CSS license. By circumventing the technology, Real had risked violating the DMCA, which prohibits the cracking of antipiracy technologies. And that’s exactly what happened.

Toshiba said in December that it would begin shipments of a 512GB drive this year. And this drive became available exclusively on Toshiba laptops in May.

On the performance front, Toshiba said it is using an advanced controller chip that enables a maximum sequential read speed of 230 megabytes per second and maximum sequential write speed of 180 megabytes per second. These read-write speeds are typically many times that of a hard disk drive. Toshiba did not specify random read and write speeds, which are also critical benchmarks for everyday data access.

Note: Intel has found a bug in the new SSDs cited above that affects users who set a BIOS drive password. When disabling or changing the password followed by powering off/on the computer, the SSD becomes inoperable. The root cause has been identified and a fix is under validation. Intel expects to post an end-user firmware update to fix this bug in the coming weeks.

All drives come in either a 1.8-inch enclosure, typically used in ultraportable laptops, or a 2.5-inch housing, the standard size for mainstream laptops.

Back in December of last year, Toshiba said sample quantities ranged from $220 for the 64GB drive to $1,652 for the 512GB drive–though these prices have likely come down, as the drives are now shipping commercially.

Intel has recently begun shipping a 160GB solid-state drive that offers improved random write performance. The chipmaker was able to get up to a 2.5X improvement over previous versions of its SSDs.

Toshiba has begun volume shipments of solid-state drives ranging up to 512GB in size, as these hyper-fast storage options bulk up on capacity.

For businesses up-front pricing may be less important. Over the lifespan of an SSD total cost of ownership may be lower, according to Gregory Wong, president, Forward Insights. Potential savings are particularly relevant to business laptop users, said Wong. And Intel recently did some in-house testing that showed that failure rates of SSDs are lower than hard disk drives.

SSDs typically offer higher performance–often much higher performance–than hard-disk drives and are more durable since they have no moving parts.

Drives are also offered in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities and are built on a 43-nanometer manufacturing process using multi-level cell (MLC) technology. MLC technology allows drive makers to increase capacity while keeping production costs under control.

But SSDs are still hobbled by a distinct price disadvantage. Toshiba’s own Web site offers vivid proof. A Toshiba Portege R600 laptop is priced at $2,099 with a 160GB hard disk drive. Adding a lower-capacity 128GB SSD hikes the price to $2,499. Add the 512GB option and this goes to $3,499.

Toshiba is not alone in announcing commercial shipments of large-capacity SSDs. Micron Technology’s Crucial Technology unit has begun selling 256GB drives listed at $599, which beats Toshiba pricing at that capacity.

USB technology is now used on virtually all computing devices globally as well as the lion’s share of consumer electronics products. Also referred to as “SuperSpeed USB,” next-generation USB 3.0 boosts the data transfer rate 10 times over current technology, while also improving power efficiency.

(Credit:
Point Grey Research)

As the next generation of Universal Serial Bus technology nears commercial reality, next week’s Intel Developer Forum will play host to more USB 3.0-capable devices.

Point Grey Research will show a high-end video camera streaming video to a laptop with USB 3.0 technology

The demonstrations will take place during two USB 3.0 technical sessions at IDF at the Moscone Center, San Francisco, starting on Tuesday.

Consumer electronics devices enabled with USB 3.0 are expected in the market late this year or early next. The specification was developed by Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, NEC, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments.

On display at IDF, among other things, will be a Fujitsu laptop, the first to use built-in USB 3.0. Inside the Fujitsu laptop will be an NEC Electronics “host controller” chip that will exchange data with an external SuperSpeed USB drive from Buffalo Technology.

Asus will also be present to show off its PC motherboard with SuperSpeed USB. The Asus X58 motherboard uses the same NEC chip and will exchange data with a LucidPort SuperSpeed USB mass storage device running the new USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP), which delivers improved performance and reduced latency.

A Fujitsu laptop, a high-end video camera, and a solid-state drive using USB 3.0 technology, among other hardware, will be demonstrated at IDF, according an announcement from the USB Implementers Forum on Thursday.

And USB 3.0 will be a godsend to video cameras–which often need to transfer gigabytes of video data. A prototype high-performance digital video camera from Point Grey Research will be rolled out that integrates a 3-megapixel Sony “IMX036″ CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) image sensor to output 1080p high-definition images at 60 frames per second. This camera will stream uncompressed HD video to a laptop PC through a SuperSpeed USB ExpressCard from Fresco Logic.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

It says something about open source’s impact on the world when the the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency–a division in the Department of Defense–starts running seminars on how to shift to open-source software.

The September 1 seminar, co-hosted by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI), promises to detail the Open Source Corporate Management Information System (OSCMIS) program, a “Web-based federal administrative software suite consisting of more than 50 applications which handles human resource, training, security, acquisition and related functions for DISA’s more than 16,000 users worldwide.”

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If you’re interested in attending the training in Washington, D.C., seating is limited but still available. More details can be found at OSSI’s Web site.

Could there be a better sign that open source has arrived?

John Weathersby, executive director of the OSSI, told me over e-mail that “this is about transparency and sharing and making available resources which have already been paid for.”

After all, it’s one thing to adopt open source, which the U.S. federal government has in earnest–but to advocate for it and teach it? That’s a higher level.

It’s not some utopian open-source ideology; it’s about opening up government by opening up software.

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search,” the post reads, making it all sound vaguely like some kind of elf workshop. “It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.” The user interface is unchanged.

The company acknowledged that “some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet.” But the industry buzz is obviously a huge part of it: There’s a legitimate new contender in the search engine market, Microsoft’s Bing, which is fueled by heavy marketing dollars and has begun to inch its way up in market share since its debut earlier this summer.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gives the impression that he isn’t particularly worried about Bing. But it’s hard to not look at a shadowy blog post about under-the-radar upgrades to Google’s search index and not take it as a Googly way of saying, “game on.”

Google is upgrading its search infrastructure and it’s being really shady about it.

Developers are encouraged to try out the new technology on a “sandbox” page and then offer feedback by including the word “caffeine” in Google’s feedback text field, secret-password-style.

In a post on its Webmaster Central blog, however, Google engineers Sitaram Iyer and Matt Cutts insist that ordinary users won’t even see the difference.

Professor Shinji Takeoka of the Department of Life Science & Medical Bio-Science at Waseda says that nanosheets have powerful features for tissue binding, such as high adhesiveness, flexibility, and transparency.

This sounds like really great news, but it does beg the question: If one can get an eye lift over lunch break and forego gauze pads and ice packs altogether, do we call this progress?

“This approach would constitute an ideal candidate for an alternative to conventional suture/ligation procedures, from the perspective not only of a minimally invasive surgical technique but also reduction of operation times.”

Nanosheets are, by definition, ultrathin (nano being a billionth). But when scientists use the term “ultrathin nanosheet,” they are being more than merely redundant.

(Credit:
Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co.)

Applying nanosheets with poly-L-lactide (PLLA) to the incisions of mouse stomachs, the team found that these centimeter-long biodegradable nanosheets healed the incisions without scarring or tissue adhesion.

With collaboration from the National Defense Medical College, Takeoka’s group published its findings in the journal Advanced Materials. What stand out about these particular nanosheets are not only their thinness but that, as Takeoka recently told Nanowerk:

Today, Takeoka tells me by e-mail that his team’s nanosheet could be applied “not only in the field of surgery as a wound dressing instead of conventional suturing operation, but also in the fields of plastic surgery, endoscopic surgery, regeneration medicine, and external use (skin etc.).” A wide range of medical applications looks promising.

Sealing with the PLLA nanosheet versus conventional suture/ligation treatment.

Around the world, scientists working on nanosheets are locked in a race to find ever-thinner materials to meet ever-growing demands, for surgeries and supercapacitors alike. The recent unveiling of a biodegradable nanosheet that is just 20 nanometers thick pushes the researchers at Tokyo’s Waseda University to the front of the pack.

(Credit:
Point Grey Research)

Consumer electronics devices enabled with USB 3.0 are expected in the market late this year or early next. The specification was developed by Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, NEC, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments.

And USB 3.0 will be a godsend to video cameras–which often need to transfer gigabytes of video data. A prototype high-performance digital video camera from Point Grey Research will be rolled out that integrates a 3-megapixel Sony “IMX036″ CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) image sensor to output 1080p high-definition images at 60 frames per second. This camera will stream uncompressed HD video to a laptop PC through a SuperSpeed USB ExpressCard from Fresco Logic.

USB technology is now used on virtually all computing devices globally as well as the lion’s share of consumer electronics products. Also referred to as “SuperSpeed USB,” next-generation USB 3.0 boosts the data transfer rate 10 times over current technology, while also improving power efficiency.

Asus will also be present to show off its PC motherboard with SuperSpeed USB. The Asus X58 motherboard uses the same NEC chip and will exchange data with a LucidPort SuperSpeed USB mass storage device running the new USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP), which delivers improved performance and reduced latency.

On display at IDF, among other things, will be a Fujitsu laptop, the first to use built-in USB 3.0. Inside the Fujitsu laptop will be an NEC Electronics “host controller” chip that will exchange data with an external SuperSpeed USB drive from Buffalo Technology.

The demonstrations will take place during two USB 3.0 technical sessions at IDF at the Moscone Center, San Francisco, starting on Tuesday.

A Fujitsu laptop, a high-end video camera, and a solid-state drive using USB 3.0 technology, among other hardware, will be demonstrated at IDF, according an announcement from the USB Implementers Forum on Thursday.

As the next generation of Universal Serial Bus technology nears commercial reality, next week’s Intel Developer Forum will play host to more USB 3.0-capable devices.

Point Grey Research will show a high-end video camera streaming video to a laptop with USB 3.0 technology

In my opinion, this is partly because of some flaws with the service itself. The radio service has a lot of powerful features for serious music fans who are willing to do a little work, as CNET’s Donald Bell recently explained, but it doesn’t work very well as an on-demand service. How do you add songs to a now-playing queue? Why hasn’t Last.fm secured on-demand rights for huge artists like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin?

But there’s also a bit of a branding gap. Compared with the organic buzz I hear about Pandora and Rhapsody, for instance, Last.fm hardly comes up. Now it looks like CBS is trying to address that issue. In an effort to increase brand awareness, CBS Radio will devote four broadcast HD Radio stations to Last.fm. The playlist will be drawn from listeners’ favorites–Last.fm does such a fantastic job of tracking usage, I’ve referred to it for non-scientific measurements of artist popularity–as well as live performances in Last.fm’s New York studio. The stations will make the cutover on October 5, and include KITS-FM (105.3 HD3) in San Francisco, WWFS-FM (102.7 HD2) in New York, KCBS-FM (93.1 HD2) in Los Angeles, and WXRT-FM (93.1 HD3) in Chicago. All four stations will play the same playlist.

Online radio service Last.fm has always seemed to occupy an awkward middle ground between on-demand streaming music services that let you pick and play any song–like free services Imeem and Grooveshark, and Rhapsody, which charges for its service–and the radio-to-your-taste service pioneered by Pandora. (Disclaimer: Last.fm is owned by CBS, which is the parent company of CNET News.)

HD Radio itself is still in a niche phase. Although it’s available in more than 90 percent of major U.S. markets, the receivers are still fairly rare. That might change tomorrow with the launch of the Zune HD, the first MP3 player with a built-in HD Radio receiver. If nothing else, it shows that HD Radio technology is getting small enough and cheap enough to begin building it into a variety of consumer electronics devices–imagine when it starts becoming a feature in smartphones, for instance.