FCC approves open access rules, denies Google


[Financial Times] US regulators on Tuesday handed mobile handset and internet companies a partial victory over the country’s wireless communications carriers as they voted to free some of the country’s wireless spectrum to let consumers use more devices and mobile applications of their choice.

DOJ and RIAA may team up


[Ars Technica] The US Department of Justice has until mid-September to decide whether it wants to help the RIAA defend the constitutionality of its claim that it is owed damages of $750 for each copyrighted song infringed.

Apple releases torrent of patches


[News.com] Dozens of vulnerabilities and bugs were covered by a total of six downloads for Mac OS X. Some of the vulnerabilities seem quite serious, leading to arbitrary code execution, downed applications or both. Apple also issued the first software update for the iPhone as part of Tuesday's releases. The iPhone update will be delivered through iTunes the next time you sync your iPhone with your Mac or PC.

Twitter closes financing


[Twitter.com] Twitter has announced the closing of financing with Union Square Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and some angel investors including Marc Andreessen, Dick Costolo, Ron Conway, and Naval Ravikant.

Ready for behavioral AdWords?


[GigaOM] Susan Wojcicki, Google’s VP of product management, told reporters Google is experimenting with behavioral AdWords. For instance, if you search for "Italian Hotels," and follow that with a keyword search for "weather," the results will show Italian weather-related advertisements. No user information is stored by Google; the ads are displayed on the fly.

As MSFT reels from competition, Gates still plans to leave


[NYT] Gates insists that his new world of philanthropy will be just as compelling as software has been. “I’ll have also malaria vaccine or tuberculosis vaccine or curriculum in American high schools, which are also things that, at least the way my mind works, I sit there and say, ‘Oh, God! This is so important; this is so solvable,’ ” he said, “You’ve just got to get the guy who understands this, and this new technology will bring these things together.”

Wales' Wikia wants to challenge GOOG in search


[Reuters] Wikia, has acquired Grub, a pioneering Web crawler that will enable Wikia's forthcoming search service to scour the Web to index relevant sites. "If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers. I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome."

Woz backs video venture


An Internet video brainchild of three twentysomething former University of California grad students has won big backers, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Red McCombs, co-founder of Clear Channel Communications.