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The U.S. International Trade Commission in an initial finding said Apple’s iPhones, iPods and iPads don’t violate Samsung’s patents, handing the mega tech firm another victory in a contentious patent war between the world’s biggest handset makers. The decision was preliminary and must be voted on by the whole commission. But it set Samsung back another step as the ITC both defended and fired its own shots at Apple. ITC Judge James Gildea disagreed with Samsung’s allegations that Apple violated four of its patents being used in the iPhone, iPod and iPad. The ITC handles global patent disputes and has the ability to block imports of infringing products.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski circulated an order on September 14 declining to renew the prohibition on exclusive contracts for another five years, according to a highly placed source.

Friday marked three weeks before the FCC's Oct. 5 deadline to weigh in on the rules. The commissioners must all still vote on the item. In launching its review of the rules last March, the FCC pondered dropping the outright ban but retaining access mandates for satellite-delivered regional sports nets and other unique programming for which the FCC decides there is no substitute. The FCC chairman decided not to go that route, according to a source. Instead, as the FCC said last March when teeing up its various options, it decided to "sunset the exclusive contract prohibition in its entirety and instead relying solely on existing protections." Specifically the case-by-case consideration of complaints about exclusive contracts under current prohibitions on "deceptive practices."

Microsoft’s latest version of its Internet Explorer browser, scheduled to be available to consumers in late October, comes with an option called “do not track.” It lets users indicate whether they’d like to see ads tailored to them by companies that track their online browsing histories — or whether they’d rather not have their online activities tracked, recorded, analyzed and stored for marketing purposes. But Microsoft is going further — by making privacy a more public issue. The new Internet Explorer 10 comes with the don’t-track-me option automatically enabled, a fact that the software makes clear. During installation, a notice will appear giving users the choice to keep that preselected don’t-track-me preference as is, or switch it off on a customization menu. It’s a radical move for a technology company, especially one like Microsoft, with an ad business of its own. “No one says today, when a consumer first loads a product, ‘Hey, by the way, there are some privacy choices you may want to consider,’ ” says Alex Fowler, the global privacy and policy leader at Mozilla. He believes that this may be the first time that privacy features so prominently “in the first-run experience of a consumer software product.”

As a signpost on the road to the so-called Post-PC Era we’ve been hearing about for so many years, this one is pretty hard to argue with: As of this year, personal computers no longer consume the majority of the world’s memory chip supply. And while it may not come as a terrible surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to personal technology trends during the last few years, there’s nothing like a cold, hard number to make the point crystal clear. As shifts in market share statistics go, it at first seems insignificant until you consider the wider sweep of memory chips in the history of the modern technology industry. PCs have consumed the majority of memory chips since sometime in the 1980s.