The Los Angeles Times writes that “

[w]hile the consumer electronics world is watching Las Vegas this week, many manufacturers are also keeping an eye on foreign markets where they can build and sell their latest gadgets.  The head of the trade group behind the International Consumer Electronics Show used the stage to drive home a political message Monday: Foreign trade is key to the growth of the industry and the overall health of the U.S. economy.  Gary Shapiro, president and chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Assn., said that without trade deals to lower the costs of making and selling products in new foreign markets, technology companies won’t be able to continue producing the stream of innovative and increasingly affordable gizmos flowing into American homes.  Electronics companies have gone on the offensive as pending trade pacts with South Korea, Colombia and Panama languish in Congress because of concerns about U.S. job losses. Some presidential candidates, including Republican Mike Huckabee and Democrat John Edwards, have criticized free trade policies.”

According to the Register, “[c]ircumventing DRM to make copies for personal use will remain illegal for consumers, under copyright reform proposals floated by the UK government today.  […]  DRM circumvention will be permitted for academic and research purposes, but not for the general public for entertainment.”

InfoWorld reports that “Linux creator Linus Torvalds, in an interview being made public by the Linux Foundation Tuesday, stressed that version 2 of the GPL (GNU General Public License) still makes the most sense for the Linux kernel over the newer GPL version 3.  GPL 3, which was released last year by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), reflects the FSF’s goals while GPL 2 closely matches what Torvalds thinks a license should do, Torvalds said.  ‘I want to pick the license that makes the most sense for what I want to do. And at this point in time, Version 2 matches what I think we want to do much, much better than Version 3,’ said Torvalds, who is now a fellow at the foundation. He was interviewed in late-October by Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.”

The Guardian has a fun article today on Yahoo’s Finds of the Year 2007 competition, an annual search for the most innovative and strange UK contributions to the web.

On eWeek.com, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols points out that Microsoft’s “exclusive deal with NBC to deliver live and on-demand Olympics coverage on MSN with its Silverlight, cross-browser, cross-platform video plug-in” opens up a “new world of online video” and even though Microsoft “could have made Silverlight Windows-specific, […] they didn’t. Microsoft and Novell are working together to bring Silverlight to Linux Web browsers with Moonlight. Microsoft is already supporting Silverlight on Mac OS X.”