Week in review: Go go Google

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So is it worth upgrading? CNET Reviews finds that Leopard's interface enhancements make productivity more pleasurable with a Mac, as more than 300 functional and fun features top off this update.

Apple sold 2 million copies of Leopard between Friday and Sunday night, which includes sales of boxed copies, online sales, and new Macs with Leopard preinstalled. When Apple launched Tiger, it took the company 39 days to hit the 2 million mark on a much smaller installed base.

By comparison, Microsoft sold 20 million copies of Windows Vista in the first month it went on sale. And as of last week, Microsoft had sold 88 million copies of Vista.

The sales numbers brought out the usual debates about which operating system is better, based on features and on the market that each commands.

"The truth is until Apple creates competition by not tying their OS with their hardware, businesses are not going to buy it," wrote one reader to the CNET News.com TalkBack forum. "That's the only reason Apple has a low market share."

On the Hill
Good news for your pocketbook: Congress isn't planning to allow taxes on your Internet connection for another seven years. With little debate, the U.S. House of Representatives approved an extension of an existing ban on Internet access taxes until 2014. The same proposal received unanimous approval in the Senate late last week. The move comes just in the nick of time, as current law generally prohibiting state and local governments from levying the taxes was scheduled to expire Thursday.

Granted, not everyone is safe from taxes under the bill. States that already had Internet access taxes in place before the ban took effect several years ago would still be allowed to keep them through a grandfather clause in the bill. (Nine states--Hawaii, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin--fall into that category.) Officials can also tax Internet services, albeit more indirectly, if they had already enacted broad-based laws on their books that tax the gross income or receipts of a business.

In other Hill business, identity theft victims would be allowed to request monetary compensation for the time they spent getting their lives back in order under a bill approved by a U.S. Senate panel. The Identity Theft Enforcement and Restitution Act of 2007 would allow those who fell prey to identity fraud to seek "criminal restitution"--that is, payouts from the offender in a particular case--for time "reasonably" spent correcting "actual" or "intended" harm.

The Senate bill transcends identity-theft-related issues, crossing over into cybercrime. It also includes rewrites to federal computer crime laws that are designed to make it easier for police to punish hackers, keyloggers, and spyware purveyors whose acts may not do quantifiable damage.

In another privacy issue, two public-interest groups are asking the U.S. government to target what they claim are "invasive" online marketing schemes--especially those involving social-networking Web sites or targeting children and teenagers.

In a lengthy new complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission, the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) say they're concerned that Internet users are more "vulnerable" than ever to increasingly sophisticated advertising techniques that depend on tracking and compartmentalizing people's behavior and preferences.

Singling out Microsoft's new-at-the-time advertising ventures, they had called on the FTC to review and potentially limit online business models dependent on technologies that "aggressively track us wherever we go, creating data profiles to be used in ever-more sophisticated and personalized 'one-to-one' targeting schemes." The latest filing also reiterates a call for Congress to pass new federal legislation.

Also of note
Oracle withdrew its $6.7 billion buyout offer for BEA Systems, after the middleware maker refused to entertain its $17-a-share bid before a deadline expired...IBM detailed new products and services aimed at securing corporate networks and announced it will spend $1.5 billion on security product development and marketing in 2008...Microsoft, state prosecutors, and the U.S. Department of Justice said a federal judge needs more time to weigh whether Redmond should be subjected to a lengthier period of antitrust policing.