Wednesday 8am Silicon Valley news report:

U.S. Presses Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Book Settlement -NYTimes

The Justice Department has sent the requests, called civil investigative demands, to various parties, including Google, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild and individual publishers, said Michael J. Boni, a partner at Boni & Zack, who represented the Authors Guild in negotiations with Google.

Online Multitasking Increases Bandwidth Demand -NYTimes

A huge engine of traffic growth will be smartphones and other mobile devices. According to Cisco, mobile data traffic will double every year through 2013, jumping 66 times from 2008.

Microsoft patches 31 Windows, IE, Office security holes -ZDNet

Microsoft’s batch of patches this month is a big one: 10 bulletins covering a total of 31 documented vulnerabilities affecting the Windows OS, the Internet Explorer browser and the Microsoft Office productivity suite (Word, Works and Excel).

Brain Bots are Developing Personalities – and a Whole Lot More -h+

“It’s obvious that the brain is a huge population of individual neurons,” says UC Irvine neuroscientist Jeff Krichmar. “Neuronal Group Selection meant we could apply population models to neuroscience, we could examine things at a systems’ level.” This systems approach became the architectural blueprint for moving neurobotics forward.

Google CEO says looking to buy smaller firms -Reuters

"We primarily look for technology. It's a typical build versus buy. How long does it take us to build it with our engineers, versus there are already engineers in this other company that have built this thing."

IT staff snooping on colleagues on rise: survey -Reuters

More than one-third of information technology professionals abuse administrative passwords to access confidential data such as colleagues' salary details or board-meeting minutes, according to a survey.

Google News Might Add Wikipedia as a Source -NYTimes

Perhaps Wikipedia will someday supplement other news coverage in this kind of way, acting as a public clearinghouse for readers interested in an aggregation of all the facts reported, along with more extensive historical context.

China hands HP a corporate quandary -SFGate

How, for example, would they suggest HP weigh the bottom line - 40 million PCs were sold in China last year - with the "moral reasoning" and "practical ethics" that Stanford students are supposed to figure in the equation?

Friday is final curtain for analog TV signals -AP

"We were nowhere near ready for a nationwide transition in February. Had we flipped the switch back then, we would have faced a debacle that would have made New Coke look like a stroke of marketing genius."

APNewsBreak: Group says poker winnings are frozen

Documents obtained by the AP show that a magistrate judge in the district issued a seizure warrant last week for an account at a Wells Fargo bank in San Francisco, and that a federal prosecutor told Alliance Bank to freeze accounts.

Facebook land rush to start in three days -SFGate

"Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web," DiPersia said. "People can enter a Facebook user name as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names."

E3 2009: Who won? Who lost? Who wins a golden Ars? -ars technica

This was a big show filled with games, parties, lines, headaches, and, of course, celebrities. What rates as a Golden Ars? Here are our picks.

IBM aims to bolster partnerships amid weak economy -Reuters

Sources told Reuters late last month that IBM was in talks with network equipment maker Juniper Networks Inc for an OEM or original equipment manufacturer deal, in which IBM would resell Juniper equipment as part of its own family of products.

The next Silicon Valley -EETimes

Like Silicon Valley, regional tech centers from Brazil to Bangalore are finding that technology development thrives in an environment of creative intellectual energy that offers a networked economy, proximity to research institutions and universities, unique intellectual property development, a diverse base of high-tech talent, access to investment capital and infrastructure.