The lawsuit Apple filed this week may target smartphone maker HTC, but Cupertino is likely shooting for much bigger prey. Specifically, Google is the real focus of Apple’s wrath, said Chris Hazelton, research director for mobile and wireless with the 451 Group. Based on the details of the lawsuit, “an argument could be made that it’s targeting HTC,” he noted. However, the numerous issues listed on Apple’s simultaneously filed complaint with the ITC are “all based on what the operating system does and how it interacts.”

As a result of recent updates to the BBC’s Flash-based iPlayer, open source media players can no longer play its content. The updates implement SWF Verification, a copyright protection mechanism that excludes free alternatives to Flash player, such as that offered by the XBMC community, among others. The result is that such open source plugins can no longer stream iPlayer content. BBC Trust, which oversees the BBC, reportedly has no plans to investigate the decision despite widespread complaints.

On top of all the other demographic categories that segment the United States, the FCC on Tuesday introduced some new ones that its chairman says serve as reasons for adopting a new national broadband strategy, which the agency will present to the public March 17. “Near converts,” “digital hopefuls,” “digitally uncomfortable” and “digitally distant” all describe the various high-speed Web access non-adoption levels found in an FCC phone survey of 5,000 Americans conducted in October-November 2009.

On top of all the other demographic categories that segment the United States, the FCC on Tuesday introduced some new ones that its chairman says serve as reasons for adopting a new national broadband strategy, which the agency will present to the public March 17. “Near converts,” “digital hopefuls,” “digitally uncomfortable” and “digitally distant” all describe the various high-speed Web access non-adoption levels found in an FCC phone survey of 5,000 Americans conducted in October-November 2009.

Virtual private networks, or VPNs, have been around for about a decade. They provide a secure data exchange between two locations using an encrypted connection. VPN technology has changed little over the years. A newer version of VPN software, known as SSL-VPN, taps into the common IP circuitry of Web browsers to make secure connections with less reliance on third-party software. VPNs have long been an internet tool used to keep enterprise networks free from unwanted visitors.

We’re now in week two of Google’s high-profile battle with China, and the stakes have risen high enough to catch the attention of no less than the U.S. Secretary of State herself, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She cheered on Google’s stance in a speech Thursday, saying, “Censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere, and in America, American companies need to make a principled stand. This needs to be part of our national brand.” Easy enough to say, but doing that can be painful to the bottom line, right?

Microsoft has said it will release a patch on Thursday to fix the Internet Explorer 6 flaw that hackers used recently to attack Google and other large companies. The attacks have triggered a slugfest between Google and the Chinese government. While the flaw can also be exploited in Internet Explorer 7 and 8, most of the attacks so far have been against IE6 on Windows XP because this combination of browser and operating system seems to be the most vulnerable. The situation raises the question of why large corporations continue to use IE6, which is now eight years old.

Jaspersoft on Tuesday released its latest offering aimed at helping businesses make sense of the piles of data they accumulate on a regular basis. The new Jaspersoft Enterprise Edition provides organizations with a package of business analytics and reporting functionalities. It announced the availability of an upgrade of its flagship BI product to Jaspersoft 3.7. “The Enterprise Edition is a special packaging schema that includes some of the new features of Jaspersoft 3.7 and additional features not found anywhere else,” Jaspersoft’s Brian Gentile told LinuxInsider.

The 2009 holiday spirit seems to have faded for Google and Apple, who didn’t waste much time getting back to the business of giving each other the stinkeye. First up was Google, which gave its Nexus One smartphone its first official public appearance. It’s a phone manufactured by HTC, and it runs on Android 2.1, which is .1 better than the version on the Verizon Droid. It has a 1 GHz processor, and for a smartphone today, that’s pretty powerful. I think my 24-pound desktop from 2002 had the same stats, and I thought it was just so cool.

AT&T and T-Mobile both announced on Tuesday that they have upgraded their 3G networks with technology enabling faster speeds. Specifically, the carriers have both deployed
HSPA 7.2 technology at their cell sites across the United States. That technology will improve consistency in accessing data sessions, AT&T said, as well as increase network efficiency. Faster speeds will come as AT&T increases the number of high-speed backhaul connections to its cell sites, primarily with fiber-optic connections, over the course of this year and next.

Data mining is becoming a crowded field filled with software providers using similar strategies. Their basic goal is always the same. The analytics platforms are designed to slice and dice data to make sales trends and buying opportunities more evident. The firms that can deliver this product more accurately and more rapidly grow their reputations and entice new customers from lesser-producing competitors. Even when relative newcomers such as ParAccel introduce innovations, what they provide to their customers is essentially a better, faster way to dissect digital data.

Hackers have once again demonstrated that the GSM standard, the most widely used mobile phone standard in the world, can be hacked. The GSM Association has acknowledged the technology’s flaw, but it said the weakness is not a serious threat and that hackers have not been able to create a practical attack capability that can be used on live, commercial GSM networks. However, the danger of this latest hack is that it was done with relatively inexpensive equipment, including a PlayStation 3 and open source software.

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