Tuesday's Takedown

Time to take a look at the world of tech. Socrates was sentenced to death in 399. Galileo Galilei was born on this day in 1564. Charles Lewis Tiffany in 1812. Susan B. Anthony in 1820.

1. Michael Malone, in a commentary last week for ABC News, declared that it's the beginning of the end for Microsoft. And he makes a lot of sense. It's stuff I've been saying and thinking for some time now.
2. While you're at it, check out Hakon Lie's tirade against Microsoft. The CTO for the Opera browser says even Microsoft's own interoperability statement discriminates against Opera.
3. The RSA Conference opens today in San Francisco. To once again underscore Microsoft's commitment to security, Bill Gates will keynote. The biggest computer security conference of the year brings 11,000 security experts and 275 companies to Moscone Center. Last year, Gates (incorrectly) predicted the death of spam. This year he's expected to announce new anti-virus and anti-spyware products from Microsoft.
4. Yesterday the last insider lockups at Google expired, meaning as many as 176.8 million shares worth around $3.5 billion could come into play creating hundreds of new millionaires at the company. The stock, which opened at $85, has been as high as $211 closed at $192.99 Monday, up nearly 3%.
5. It's a landmark for music on the Internet. Jazz composer Maria Schneider took home a Grammy on Sunday for her album "Concert in the Garden," without selling a single copy in a record store. Her music was produced with financial help from fans and sold exclusively online. She spent $87,000 making the album and has already made her money back.
6. Last month everyone was talking about SBC buying AT&T, now Verizon has agreed to buy MCI for $6.7 billion, reducing the number of big phone companies to four: Verizon, SBC, BellSouth Corp. and Sprint Nextel.
7. Internet phone provider Vonage said it's asked the FCC to investigate allegations that a "major" broadband operator is deliberately blocking Internet phone calls - they won't say who it is, though. I figure it's either a phone company that doesn't want the competition, or a cable company that's offering its own VoIP services. That doesn't narrow it down much, does it?
8. Apple has announced a 2-for-1 stock split. Its shares have almost quadrupled over the past year due to the success of the iPod. Shares climbed further yesterday after a very positive report from a UBS analyst on prospects for the Mac mini and iPod shuffle. The analyst, Benjamin Reitzes, also predicted new, higher capacity, iPods later this year.
9. That's what plucky little Mac rumor site, Think Secret, has been predicting. Undeterred by an ongoing lawsuit from Apple, the site says the fifth generation iPods will have 80GB drives and silver enclosures to match the Mac mini and Powerbooks. There will also be upgraded 5GB iPod Minis, probably just in time for summer vacation.
10. The movie companies announced a new form of copy protection for DVDs. The existing technology, CSS, was cracked in 1999. The new Macrovision RipGuard will prevent copying by most existing DVD ripping tools - so far it hasn't been employed on any DVDs.
11. But there is some good news for downloaders who have been quaking in their Aerons ever since the MPAA was awarded LokiTorrent's server logs by a judge last week. A LokiTorrent partner says that the logs are useless - and no torrent site does more than register the download of a .torrent file, not the movie itself. Something that is, as yet, still legal.
12. Mainstream media is taking on the bloggers. Conservative blogs were instrumental in taking down Dan Rather over the memogate scandal earlier this year and CNN News Executive, Eason Jordan, is the latest casualty. Jordan resigned in the face of a firestorm created by bloggers who jumped on off-the-record and still unpublished remarks by Jordan at the World Economic Forum. Both the Wall Street Journal and the Columbia Journalism Review have decried this trend, calling the bloggers "salivating morons" and a "lynch mob."