Mail 5 days a week

Postmaster General Potter has said that the post office needs to drop one day a week of mail, such as a Tuesday. The USPS experienced a 4.5% drop in volume last year, a rise in prices, and may experience the first year that revenues drop. Maybe somebody should look at controlling costs or improving customer service.

Comcast Redux, but this time with Cox

A few months ago, the FCC ruled that Comcast violated principles of net neutrality by restricting downloads on peer to peer networks to a lower priority than other network traffic. Now comes word that Cox is trying to do the same thing, giving what it considers time sensative data higher prioirty on networks when there is congestion.

New Patent for Apple

The USPTO has awarded a patent to Apple for "multitouch" technology. This allows a cell phone touchscreen to register multiple touches. It looks like Apple will try to use the patent to stop the new Palm Pre from being released, or at least extort significant licensing fees from Palm.

Click!

Peter King, a congressman from New York, has introduced the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act which would require a cameraphone to make an audible sound within a reasonable radius of the phone when a picture is taken.

Mac Malware

As PC users watch, thousands of Macs are getting hit by a vicious malware attack by iServices.A Trojan horse. The malware is being distributed over a BitTorrent copy of a bootleg copy of the iWorks 9.0.

Gotta Spare Satellite? Anyone?

FCC rules require mobile satellite providers to have a spare satellite available before rolling out a ground repeater network. ICO Global just received a license from the FCC without the spare satellite so long as the company committs to having a spare spacecraft in place within one year of starting operations, relaxing the FCC's previous position that the spare had to be in place at the time of licensing.

GateHouse, NY Times Settlement

GateHouse Media and the NY Times reached an agreement over the weekend regarding the Boston Globe's alleged copyright infringement of posting headlines and lead sentences from the NY Times website. Trial was scheduled to begin today.

Retaliation

In a unanimous opinion, the US Supreme Court just decided Crawford v. Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, holding that federal laws prohibiting job discrimination cover an employee who cooperate with internal investigations of retaliation by their employees.

Reset Option

In an effort to raise company moral, Google has announced that it will allow more than 8 million stock options held by more than 17,000 company employees to be exercised at lower prices, but the company extended the vesting period for those options by one year. Starbucks has already joined the repricing bandwagon, although not as generously as Google. 72 percent of the Fortune 500 companies could follow suit in that their employee options are underwater.