North America

The White House is seeking comment on a draft plan for establishing a trusted identity system online, with the goal of making Internet transactions more secure and convenient.  read more »

It was surely only the purest coincidence that Verizon, Motorola and Google introduced the Droid X smartphone the day before Apple's iPhone 4 shipped. And certainly, the companies' ability to get actual shipping units into reviewers' hands before most of them could see Apple's latest had not a whiff of calculation. Perish the thought.  read more »

The folks on Capitol Hill are the latest to take an interest in Apple. According to a report in the Washington Post, Representatives Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), who co-chair the House's privacy caucus, have issued questions to Apple CEO Steve Jobs over Apple's policy on collecting private information.  read more »

Reps. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) are asking tough questions of Apple CEO Steve Jobs about recent changes to the company's privacy policy. The two congressmen sent a letter to Jobs on Thursday asking the company to explain its privacy changes and how they comply with user privacy safeguards built into Section 222 of the Federal Telecommunications Act.  read more »

Microsoft reports that it has sold more than 150 million copies of the Windows 7 desktop operating system in the roughly nine months it's been available--making it the fastest selling OS in history. Windows 7 has more than redeemed Microsoft for the fiasco that was Windows Vista, and it is still just getting started.  read more »

YouTube's popularity continues to make for impressive statistics, but it also serves as a reminder of how little the site has changed through the years.  read more »

Google's officially opened the gates and invited all of America into Google Voice, its customizable phone management service.  read more »

Although it wasn't mentioned during Apple CEO Steve Jobs' keynote address Monday at WWDC, Apple launched an updated version of its Safari Web browser for Mac OS X 10.5.8 and 10.6.2 or higher, as well as Windows XP SP2 or higher, Vista, and Windows 7. With the new release, Apple patched security holes, boosted performance, and introduced a handful of features that collectively have the potential to put Safari on par with Chrome and Firefox in terms of core features and performance.  read more »

Twitter's persistent and disruptive service outages entered a second week, as the company scrambles to bring its site availability back to acceptable levels.  read more »

After applications recently started disappearing from the Android Market, Google continued to have reliability issues with the online store as developers over the weekend experienced issues with erroneous download counts.  read more »