Monday in the Middle

Post CES and pre-MacWorld. Is there anything more to say? Well I'm going to say it anyway. Indian tea first arrives in the UK on this day in 1836. The first subway opens in London in 1863. Oil is discovered in Texas in 1901. The 45 was introduced in 1949 (ask your parents). First passenger jet flight in 1951. Clara Peller first asks "where's the beef" in 1984.

1. Microsoft says that patches for the three critical Windows flaws I told you about last week will hit Windows Update next week.
2. Mozilla and Firefox have security problems of their own. One hole makes phishing schemes easier, another allows a buffer overflow exploit in the newsreader, and a third involves predictable temp file names in Thunderbird and Firefox.
3. There will be no live coverage of Steve Jobs's keynote address tomorrow at MacWorld. Apple will delay the webcast until 6p Pacific and it's rumored that no reporters will be allowed to transmit comments during the speech. This might kill our planned chat, but I'll file here immediately after.
4. The iHome media center is one rumor that's clearly a hoax, but lawsuit against Think Secret seems to confirm the rumor of a sub-$500 Mac and solid state iPod. The suit claims that the information posted on Think Secret in November and December of this year, and earlier, could only have been obtained by someone who had signed a confidentiality agreement with Apple. I'm looking for the iWork package featuring a new word processor and Keynote 2.
5. In the blogger world this counts as a massive merger. Six Apart, aka, the people who wrote Movable Type, aka Ben and Mena, have purchased Live Journal.
6. According to the Wall St. Journal, Comcast is planning to offer voice over Internet service to 15 million of its cable customers this year, and to all 40 million customers within 18 months.
7. Forget the moo-cow, I want a µcard. The Mu-Card alliance of Taiwanese solid state storage companies is promoting a new format that will hold two terabytes of data. The spec should be final next month with production beginning shortly after.

Listen in tomorrow at 6:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KGO 810 AM in San Francisco.