Mozilla is set to release its next version of its famous Firefox browser within the next six months. This is an incremental improvement; but what exactly is improved?
The Fedora Core Blog gives a review of the features we can expect from Firefox 1.1.

In a blow to the entertainment industry, a federal appeals court on Friday found that federal regulators overstepped their authority by requiring consumer-electronics manufacturers to help restrict digital home recording.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reversed a Federal Communications Commission order that required makers of consumer-electronics devices capable of receiving broadcast digital TV signals to recognize a “broadcast flag,” which is code that allows content owners to place limits on redistribution of digital content streams. The rule was to apply to devices manufactured on or after July 1, 2005.

Specifically, the court admonished the FCC for exceeding what’s known as its “ancillary authority” over some reception devices (consumer-electronics products) by trying to regulate a function not directly related to the actual transmissions themselves.

Source: Wired

Four Britons were jailed on Friday for being part of a global gang described as “Robin Hoods” who stole expensive software from rich companies and gave it away for free over the Internet.

Prosecutors told London’s Old Bailey criminal court that the four men, motivated by a hatred of software companies, were the key players in an international ring called DrinkorDie.com, said to be one of the world’s most sophisticated Web piracy groups.

The gang allowed Internet surfers to download new software for free, often before it came on the market, including the Windows 95 operating system two weeks before it was released.

Source: Reuters

Google’s effort to speed the pace of Web browsing quickly aggravated some early users, who say that the software is delivering them Web pages under other users’ logins and breaking Web applications.

Google Inc.’s Web Accelerator application, launched as a test on Wednesday, uses a combination of local and server-based caching and preloading of Web pages to more quickly serve Web pages to a user’s browser. Google’s servers, in many ways, act as an intermediary between Web sites and a user’s browser.

But Google’s approach has had some unintended consequences. For some web sites Web Accelerator was returning users cached pages under other people’s user names. Other web sites discoverd that Web Accelerator was initiating links which performed critical functions, such as account deletions, and for some sites Web Accelerator just broke them.

Source: eWeek