Week in review: Dell in the hot seat

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The feds and tech
The White House found itself in the hot seat as well, after a federal judge ruled that the warrantless Internet and telephone surveillance program authorized by the Bush administration violates the U.S. Constitution and must cease immediately.

The landmark decision makes U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency's once-secret program. In a sweeping victory for the American Civil Liberties Union and its clients, which included organizations representing criminal defense lawyers, journalists, Islamic-Americans and academics, Taylor appeared to knock down several major legal arguments that the Bush administration has used to defend the program since it was revealed by The New York Times last December.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government renewed its contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, effectively extending its grip on the administrative body that coordinates Net addressing until up to 2011. The new contract covers technical functions related to the Internet domain name system (DNS) and is scheduled to go into effect Oct. 1, one day after the existing contract expires.

Technically, the agreement lasts for one year, and the government has the option of renewing it each year for up to four additional years. In addition to asserting its plans to retain control over the Internet's "root," the master file that lists what top-level domains are authorized, the Bush administration said it plans to maintain its supervision over ICANN.

A first wave of U.S. passports implanted with radio tags will soon begin making their way into the hands of American travelers, despite lingering privacy and security concerns. Not long after researchers at a pair of security conferences in Las Vegas demonstrated potential risks associated with the new documents, the U.S. Department of State insisted that the documents are tamperproof and said it had begun producing them.

The agency said it plans to issue the documents through the nation's other passport facilities within the next few months as part of its original plan to make all future passports electronic by October. It was unclear how many e-passports would be mailed out this year, though a State Department representative said Monday that the agency expects to distribute a total of 13 million passports by year's end.

Linux lovefest
The LinuxWorld Conference and Expo kicked off in San Francisco, with AMD announcing its new "Rev F" generation of Opteron server processors, the next volley in a competition with Intel's newly competitive Xeon models. The chips are officially called the Next-Generation Opterons and will appear in new servers from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and others.

The new Opteron chips, all with dual processing cores, include AMD-V virtualization technology, which makes it easier to boost server efficiency by running multiple operating systems simultaneously. Another significant change with Rev F Opteron is a faster version of the double data rate memory technology called DDR2.

For Motorola, the No. 2 maker of mobile phones, Linux is the way of the future. So far, Motorola's Linux phone efforts have been confined largely to Asia, and there only with high-end "feature phones." Now Motorola has brought Linux to a more mainstream model, the Rokr E2, which Greg Besio, vice president of mobile device software, showed off during a speech at the Linux show.

But in 2007, consumers in North America and Europe will begin to see widespread Linux phones as Motorola pushes the open-source operating system into mainstream models costing between $100 and $300,

Meanwhile, engineers and designers in need of a mobile workstation now have the option for a preloaded version of Novell's Suse Linux on a ThinkPad laptop computer. Lenovo and Novell announced that the ThinkPad T60p will ship with Novell's new Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.

The Linux laptops will be geared toward engineers and other high-end users, but they will be available for purchase by anyone on Lenovo's Web site. In addition, Lenovo will provide Linux support for the laptop, including drivers and its ThinkVantage technologies found on ThinkPads loaded with Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Also of note
Microsoft's security update from Aug. 8 to Internet Explorer is causing browser trouble for some systems...The long-awaited next-generation Wi-Fi standard has been delayed again and won't likely be ratified until sometime in 2008...Following Google's insistence that media outlets shouldn't be using the term "googling," Apple Computer has become similarly protective over the word "pod."