Ok maybe not wildly random, but it is pretty cool.

The vendor has donated $70,000 to help the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) digitize 150 years worth of historic astronomical information ---- about 100 terabytes.

PARI is an EMC customer. The organization helps organizations "collect humanity’s information heritage," according to a press release, and make information accessible online for research and education purposes.

Part of that "information heritage" work involves star research.

The donation was made through EMC's Information Heritage Initiative, and included an EMC CLARiiON networked storage system and EMC Navisphere software. T

The information infrastructure will support the Stellar Classification Online Public Exploration program, which enables PARI and volunteers from the general public to classify astronomical research data.

PARI was founded in 1998 in North Carolina to further science technology, engineering and math education and research for students, astronomers and the general public.

Nice gesture EMC.

And savvy media folks know it, too. Jeff Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy has made an art form out of it. It's kind of like search engine optimization, only instead of trying to make a Web site more visible to Google, these folks are preening for the press.

But there's a line. Too often people are heard barking from the fringes, serving up punchy one liners confident that it will likely land them some ink, even if it's a weird diversion from the topic under discussion. Contrarian-minded reporters will often reject this yapping out of hand, refusing to kowtow to a noisy minority.

Game the ranking system, and Google will ban you.

In this case, Google was the target. It was shameless, and frankly a little nonsensical, but by gum, this one was too good not to share.

So I concede, and offer this, what you might call a clothespin blog.

This morning, the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet held a hearing examining just how much broadband service providers know about what their subscribers are doing on the Internet. The nominal topic was deep-packet inspection, but the predominant focus was NebuAd, the startup ad company that pays ISPs to collect their subscribers' Internet activities in order to serve targeted ads.

So while much of the hearing saw the representatives and several of the witnesses beating up on NebuAd's program -- and NebuAd's CEO Bob Dykes defending his company -- the best line of the day had nothing to do with NebuAd or its controversial program. It went to Scott Cleland, president of the consultancy Precursor, and Chairman of NetCompetition.org, a coalition of Internet service providers that advocates on policy matters such as Net neutrality (against, in case you were wondering).

While ISPs fund NetCompetition, Cleland offered the disclaimer that the thoughts he expressed at the hearing were his own. Foremost among those thoughts was a criticism of the fundamental premise of the hearing: Don't single out ISPs, particularly when the worst privacy offender in the world (Google) is snooping into people's medical, financial and every other kind of information out there with impunity. Thanks to Gmail and Google Chat it knows what you're saying. Thanks to Google checkout it knows what you buy. With the coming Gphone, it will know ... exactly ... where ... you ... are.

"This is truly Orwellian Big Brother stuff -- Google's not the government, but all the information that Google collects is on Google's servers," Cleland said.

"Google's market power over private information is corrupting Google," he continued. "Information is power. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Just as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover went mad with power, whither shall go Google, Cleland assured the representatives. "That's why I call it J. Edgar Google."

Indeed.

News reports this morning claim SK Telecom has publicly said it's not panting after Sprint after all.

The reason? The minute the news hit SK's stock dropped and its investors expressed some angst.

Not horrible news in my opinion as I'm looking forward to seeing Sprint evolve over the next few months and rumours of acquisition and buy in can be sooooo distracting.

I mean what do you think the productivity level drop at Yahoo has been this past month? People can't work well in environments of so much uncertainty and confusion.

Sprint's got enough challenges ahead and focus is key to keep moving ahead.

The current courting could be a full acquisition or just a technology buy-in proposition depending on what paper you read today.

For its part Sprint said today it "doesn't comment on rumors or speculation."

No one does if they've got any kind of business background.

After all Sun gave a similar response yesterday about rumors it was being sold and or possibly spinning off a storage business and potentially tanking a Sun-built technology.

The thing is, Sprint's stock took a healthy jump initially late yesterday at the rumor. Today it's actually down a teensy bit.

I'm not going to begin pontificating on stock movements but I think such a swift reply by the market could be an indicator Sprint is getting much more attention these days given its new leadership, new marketing and recent news about customer service improvements.

It's a company taking action and making change.

CEO Dan Hesse, who took the helm in January, is known for turning companies around. He did it for an AT&T business, another company called Embarq and another company called Terabeam.

In several published interviews since taking the helm all Hesse has talked about is improving customer service as Sprint's churn rate reported in first quarter results was a bit chilling: total wireless subscribers declined by 1.09 million and revenues were down 8 percent over year to year.

Yes, one of the first things Hesse did was to reduce labor -- 4,000 jobs.

But he's also undertaken "a complete review of all of our operations and strategic planning" in an effort to streamline and get faster, quicker and better. He's also made customer service the top item on every meeting agenda as well as implemented some big changes in customer retention including:

• • reaching out to new customers during the 2nd, 5th and 12th months as a "check in" to ensure the customer is satisfied and has no unresolved issues
• • monitoring new customers’ wireless usage in first six months of service and letting customers know right away about significant excess voice, text or data overage charges so they can either change plans or cellular behavior
• • implementing an automatic alert that sends customers a confirmation email or text when there has been a price plan, a bill cycle change or an adjustment

And then of course the new Simply Everything plan -- a compelling package of data and voice at a pretty compelling price.

Not for nothing, but that's just a few things that have come into play in a short six months.

So maybe it isn't surprising SK Telecom has come back around looking at Sprint.

I think the smartest thing they could do though is wait another six months given the possibilities Hesse brings to the table.

Yes a better company draws a higher price, but a better company has a better chance to thrive and survive in what has to be one of the most cut-throat industries the US has seen in awhile.

Instead, the keyboard forces people to learn to type by tactile feel and learning to position their hands properly. No more two finger typing by looking down and pecking out words one index finger at a time.

Just like the Shamwow being hyped on basic cable channels, Das Keyboard touts its German-designed, complete with gold-plated mechanical key switches (on the keyboard, not the Shamwow) to create a "distinct click" with each keystroke. It also has two USB 2.0 ports, a black surface with blue LEDs, and a two meter (about six and a half feet) USB cable.

One of the biggest pieces of Xbox Live-related news from Microsoft's presentation was the announcement of its deal with Netflix. We all saw this coming months ago, of course, but it's nice to see that Microsoft is laying the groundwork for Live to become a more extensive e-commerce play beyond downloads of indie games.

From the 'time to update your browsers again' files:

Barely two weeks after Mozilla patched Firefox to version 2.0.0.15, the 2.0.0.16 version is out patching a pair of critical flaws. Users of the newer Firefox 3.x version however will have to wait until later today to get their fixes in the 3.0.1 update. Both Firefox 2.x and 3.x are at risk from the same two flaws.

MFSA 2008-35 is the 'infamous' Safari carpet bombing flaw that has been known for months and first reported by researcher Billy Rios.

In Firefox 2 scripts running from file: URIs can read data from a user's entire disk, a risk if the attacker could first place a malicious file in a guessable location on the local disk. Rios demonstrated that the so-called 'Safari Carpet-bombing vulnerability' could be used for this, as well as other techniques that do not rely on that now-fixed Safari vulnerability.

Apple fixed the flaw from the Safari side at the end of June. Firefox 3 which will get patched for the same flaw later today with version 3.0.1 apparently has limited risk from this vulnerability with Mozilla noting that, "in Firefox 3 scripts running in local files have limited access to other files."

The second critical vulnerability patched has also been known for weeks - though it has not been disclosed publicly. It's the one that comes from 3com's Tipping Point Zero Day Initiative and deals with a remote code execution flaw that is triggered by overflowing the CSS reference counter.

The vulnerability was caused by an insufficiently sized variable being used as a reference counter for CSS objects. By creating a very large number of references to a common CSS object, this counter could be overflowed which could cause a crash when the browser attempts to free the CSS object while still in use.

URI type flaws like the 'carpet bombing' vulnerability are scary stuff and seem to crop up alot in browsers lately. But CSS related vulnerabilites - that's something I personally have seen very little off in recent years. Though it is triggered by a JavaScript related issue, and certainly JavaScript issue are the most common type of browser vulnerability in Mozilla browsers.

Personally I think that the decision to patch 2.x one day and 3.x the next is a very risky security decision - regardless of the fact that Mozilla thinks there is less risk to Firefox 3. The reality is that users don't patch as quickly as they should (though they do update Firefox faster than other browsers) and having a known vulnerability out there waiting to patch isn't my idea of mitigating risk properly. 

Just a week after a French court socked eBay with a $63.2 million bill for abetting the sale of counterfeit Louis Vuitton goods, the e-commerce giant emerged victorious from a very similar case in Manhattan brought by luxury jeweler Tiffany & Co.

Turns out, U.S. law is on its side on this one. Judge Richard Sullivan of the Federal District Court in Manhattan concluded that eBay had responded promptly to Tiffany's requests to shut down individual sellers, but that it was not responsible for policing its entire marketplace.

"In determining whether eBay is liable, the standard is not whether eBay could reasonably anticipate possible infringement, but rather whether eBay continued to supply its services to sellers when it knew or had reason to know of infringement by those sellers," Sullivan wrote.

"The result of the application of this legal standard is that Tiffany must ultimately bear the burden of protecting its trademark."

That is in marked contrast to the ruling in the French court, which held that eBay needs to proactively police the millions of listing on its site to keep on the sunny side of the law. A German court offered a similar opinion in a case involving Rolex in April.

eBay, then, could be faced with the unhappy prospect of implementing different authenticity controls in different markets if the European rulings hold up. In a finger-wagging statement responding to last week's ruling, eBay promised an appeal.

So the laws of the United States and France appear at odds. It happens. But after promising to issue a ruling "quite quickly" and then deliberating for eight months, did Sullivan really have choose Bastille Day to issue his decision?

Heck the blogsphere not only reports rumors, it creates them and fuels them to the point where sometimes you can't even believe what you're reading.

But when you hear three different rumors about the same company, in the timeframe of 18 hours, it can make your head snap up just a little bit.

The company here is Sun.

The rumors are the following:

Sun is for sale - the whole enchilada...

Sun is spinning off and selling off StorageTek -- yea, this has been mulled and whispered about but given that there seems to be little force pushing StorageTek to where it should be by now you gotta wonder...

Sun is tanking its Honeycomb technology -- this was the project announced in 2005 that resulted in a fixed content system, the Sun StorageTek 5800, in 2007

So like an enterprising, and responsible, journalist I put a call into Sun to see what's up.

I'll be back later today to update you if I hear any response. If you know anything, let me know.

Sun got back to me, and after inquiring about the sources, provided this statement:

Sun is committed to its growth strategy, its leadership team, and building value for its shareholders. Storage is an important part of that strategy as evidenced by our Open Storage initiative, our leadership in flash, and our announcement of the world's first 1 TB tape drive. Statements to the contrary are pure rumor mongering and FUD.

Hmmm. I kind of wish they had just said "no, no and no."

An article in the July/August issue of Technology Review puts the spotlight on Mountain View, Calif.-based startup Audience, which makes the voice processors for this technology. According to Audience, mobile phone manufacturers in Japan and Korea can purchase these processors for $5 to $7 to insert into the phones.

Technology Review reports that companies such as On Semiconductor, Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) and NXP Semiconductors are developing similar technology.

The voice processor chip cancels out most other noise traveling through the microphone except for the speaker's voice.

The fact that the phone chip makes the speaker's voice clearer and doesn't totally drown out other noise for the listener alleviates a major concern I have with noise-cancellation technology -- the canceling out of sounds you hear while speaking on the phone and crossing the street.