The Federal Communications Commission approved rules Tuesday night that it says will ensure that millions of cable subscribers will still be able to watch broadcast programming after the digital television transition in 2009.

The FCC says approximately 40 million households are analog-only cable subscribers. Tuesday’s ruling will require cable operators to guarantee analog cable customers will receive broadcast channels until February 2012.

The popular open-source browser Firefox hit another milestone on Friday when it passed the 400 million download mark.

The browser, distributed by Mozilla, appears to be enjoying exponential growth in terms of downloads. From its launch in 2004, it took one year to reach 100 million downloads. A year later, it hit 200 million downloads.

Microsoft Windows’ infamous “blue screen of death” has become synonymous with an operating system crash or freeze, but that’s nothing compared with what users of pirated copies of Vista worldwide can expect from now — a black screen of darkness.

In an e-mail to a large Windows Vista distributor titled “Pirated Vista — A darkness descends!” — a local Microsoft representative made it quite clear what Vista pirates can expect to happen to their unlicensed installations.

A copy of this e-mail was obtained by Computerworld.

“Good afternoon, as of this week, Microsoft has activated a function in Vista called ‘Reduced Functionality.’ This is a specific function in Vista that effectively disables nongenuine copies of Windows. Therefore anyone who has a pirated copy of Vista will experience:

A black screen after one hour of browsing
No start menu or task bar
No desktop

Advanced Micro Devices appears to be succeeding at its strategy of winning microprocessor market share by lowering prices, according to final second-quarter figures released by iSuppli.

AMD’s microprocessor market share, measured in dollars, increased 2.5 percentage points to 13.4 percent, about midway between the company’s recent low of 10.5 percent in the first quarter of 2007, and its most recent high — 16.8 percent — in the third quarter of 2006.

According to iSuppli, the pressure on AMD became strongest as Intel launched its Core2 Duo and Core2 Quad chips within the last year. Since then, however, AMD has launched new chips at aggressive price points, forcing average selling prices down. However, as the iSuppli figures are measured in dollars, this has actually hurt players like Via, whose market share has been absorbed by AMD and Intel.

Intel’s second-quarter market share decreased slightly, down two percentage points to a commanding 78.8 percent of the market.

A Yahoo-owned advertising network became the unwitting ally of cyber crooks after it spewed millions of Trojan-laced banner ads on MySpace, PhotoBucket and other websites.

The banners contained a Flash file that silently installed a Trojan back door on unpatched Windows machines that visited the popular web destinations. Using an unpatched version of Internet Explorer while visiting MySpace or PhotoBucket was all that was necessary to become infected. The ads also ran on TheSun.co.uk, Bebo.com and UltimateGuitar.com.

Researchers at IBM and ETH Zurich have devised a way to print patterns with molecules. Using the technique, particles are precisely arranged on a soft, rubbery template. A glass or silicon plate is laid on top of the soft template, and the particles transfer to the glass or silicon.

The pattern on the solid substrate then can be exploited in a number of ways, according to Heiko Wolf, researcher in nano-patterning at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. It can be used to mass-produce patterns.

Internet searches for bomb-making instructions should be blocked across the European Union, the bloc’s top security official said on Monday.

Internet providers should also prevent access to any site giving instructions on how to make a bomb, EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said in an interview.

“I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector … on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism,” Frattini told Reuters.

The EU executive is to make this proposal to member states early in November as part of a raft of anti-terrorism proposals.

These include the screening of private data of passengers flying into the 27-nation bloc and the creation of an early warning system to alert police forces to thefts of explosives.

After years of holding out, IBM Corp. Monday has joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.’s Office software.

IBM has been using code from the project in its development of productivity applications it included in Lotus 8, the latest version of its collaboration suite, but until now had not been an official member of the community, said Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for the Lotus division at IBM. The company now will contribute its own code to the project and be more visible about its work to integrate OpenOffice.org into Lotus, he said.

Heintzman acknowledged that the International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO’s) recent vote to reject Microsoft’s Open XML file format as a technology standard was one reason IBM decided to join the effort. OpenOffice.org uses Open Document Format (ODF), a rival file format to Open XML that is already an ISO technology standard. IBM is one of the companies pushing for the use of ODF in companies and government organizations that are creating mandates to only use technology based on open standards in their IT architectures.