The Federal Communications Commission has released its long-awaited report on the state of rural broadband deployment, calling for greater coordination among government agencies, better data and a flexible approach when selecting the best technology to reach remote areas.

"For years, large parts of rural America have languished on the sidelines of the digital revolution," Acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps wrote in the report, available as a PDF here.

The report stresses the importance of cooperation among the various agencies with a hand in the nation's broadband policies. At the federal level, these principally include the FCC and the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture, though the report also emphasizes coordination with state, local and tribal governments, as well as community groups and individuals.

Congress charged the FCC with creating the rural broadband report through the 2008 Farm Bill. In the time since, Copps noted that the agency's mandate on broadband policy has changed, most significantly owing to the economic stimulus bill signed into law in February. That bill appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband projects, including $2.5 billion to the Rural Utilities Service, a division of the Department of Agriculture, for rural areas.

RUS, incidentally, will be headed (pending a Senate confirmation) by Jonathan Adelstein, a friend of Copps who currently serves as a commissioner at the FCC.

The rural broadband report, which the FCC delivered to Congress May 22, will serve as a building block for the larger roadmap the agency is charged with developing for a national broadband strategy. That project, another requirement of the stimulus bill, is due to Congress by Feb. 17, 2010.

In addition calling for better mapping of the service available in different rural areas, the report suggested the FCC create a section of its Web site to serve as a clearinghouse for links to various government programs promoting broadband programs.

The report also suggested rural America is a victim of market failure when it comes to broadband deployment, hinting that government might need to subsidize the cost of deploying high-speed networks in remote areas.

"Relying on market forces alone will not bring robust and affordable broadband services to all parts of rural America," the report said. "Therefore, all levels of government should explore ways to help overcome the high costs of rural broadband deployment."

President Obama today announced a plan to create a "national security staff" consisting of new White House advisors in key areas of homeland security, including cybersecurity and information sharing.

The staff will operate under the direction of the national security advisor, advising the White House staff on policy decisions concerning international and national security matters.

Today's announcement brings the White House a step closer to releasing the results of the long-awaited federal cybersecurity review Obama commissioned in February.

The creation of a cybersecurity czar would make good on one of Obama's campaign promises, though he said he plans to retain the position of assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism as his principal advisor on security issues.

Placing the cybersecurity position at a lower level of the White House structure, rather than giving the role direct access to the president, could disappoint some cybersecurity experts who have warned that the government hasn't taken the threats to the nation's digital infrastructure seriously enough.

Obama also said he plans to keep the Homeland Security Council as the primary body coordinating interagency security work.

Today's announcement comes as the result of a comprehensive government security review, touching on a breadth of areas ranging from weapons of mass destruction to pandemic preparedness.

The details of the cybersecurity review, led by Melissa Hathaway, a former intelligence official in the Bush administration, are expected to be released later this week.

So Google's not buying a newspaper.

In an interview with the Financial Times, CEO Eric Schmidt said he had looked at the possibility, but ultimately decided that Google is a technology company that doesn't want to be in the business of producing content.

"There is a line and we're trying to stay on our side of it," Schmidt said.

No, Google's business is not producing content, but organizing and monetizing other people's content. Trouble with newspapers -- the monetization has been falling behind, and it's dragging the content with it.

"From our perspective, we depend on the production of very, very high quality content," Schmidt said. "If the people who are producing that are getting laid off, it's really a tragedy for both."

But Schmidt and others from Google have been meeting with newspaper executives to discuss partnerships, of some sort.

"With a number of newspapers, and the Washington Post being an example, we are very interested in trying to develop online news versions that somehow address the immediate needs of people and for which advertising works better," Schmidt said. "Without commenting specifically about products, it seems to me that the newspaper I read online should remember what I read. It should allow me to deeper into the stories. It's that kind of discussion that we're having."

Still advertising based, eh? But what about charging those free-riding readers, say through micropayments or subscriptions? Probably not going to work, except for highly specialized news -- in-depth newspaper pieces or magazine features, Schmidt said.

And trying to rewrite fair use law or newspapers trying to grab a bigger piece of the revenue pie from aggregators like Google News? Nope. The well-established fair-use doctrine has spread into so many corners of the economy that trying to reargue its basis now is beyond hopeless. And asking Google for more money isn't going to work, because Google doesn't really monetize its news section.

"We've decided that the value we provide to the partners is the traffic," Schmidt said.

So the search continues for that killer ad product for newspapers. If Schmidt and his team at Google can find it, we'll all be better off for it. But looking at their continuing frustrations with making money from YouTube, and the abortive experiments in serving ads on old-line media like radio, one might be forgiven for a holding onto a bit of skepticism.

The Obama administration has taken another step down the path to the an open, Web-accessible government, today unveiling an initiative to collect suggestions on open government from anyone who's interested in chiming in with an idea.

The White House opened a new section of its site, WhiteHouse.gov/Open, where people can contribute ideas on open government.

The White House is planning to move forward with the open-government initiative in three phases. The first, which opened today and runs through May 28, is a brainstorming session hosted.

Then, from June 3 through June 14, the administration will hold a discussion phase, where the ideas on open government proposed in the brainstorming session will be winnowed down to coherent topics and examined more closely.

Finally, the drafting phase is slated to run from June 15 through June 19. During that time, the public will be able to use a wiki to collaboratively draft open government recommendations.

"This will help us achieve a new foundation for our government -- a foundation built on the values of transparency, accountability, and responsibility," White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett said in a statement. "This is a chance to brainstorm ideas, discuss the most promising ones, and collaborate with one another on next steps."

After the drafting stage wraps up, the White House's CTO will work with the Office of Management and Budget and the General Service Administration to develop formal proposals for open government. Following that review, OMB will issue an Open Government Directive to the agencies.

The administration also launched the Data.gov Web site today, aimed at making large government data sets available to the public in machine-readable format.

These latest initiatives, along with many other sites the White House has launched in the last four months, are billed as an outgrowth of Obama's Jan. 21 memo on open government. In it, he called for remaking government along the broad principles of transparency, participation and collaboration, ideas that pretty well get at the heart of wiki culture.

How far the new site will stretch into the crafting of policy remains to be seen. But it's hard to argue with opening the lines of communication -- assuming there's an army of people on the other end to make sense of the comments.

Here's Jarrett talking up the initiative:

This saga just gets more and more interesting.

Craigslist, in the face of increasingly shrill (and politically charged) calls to close the valve for prostitution on its site, has filed suit against one of its more vocal critics: South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster.

McMaster has been rattling his saber against Craigslist, threatening criminal prosecution if the site didn't scrub all the objectionable postings -- those with pornographic images or obvious ads for prostitution -- from the South Carolina sections of the site by 5 pm May 15. In the meantime, Craigslist announced plans to shutter its erotic services section, but a few ads remained by the close of McMaster's ultimatum, and he announced plans to move ahead with his criminal prosecution.

Now Craigslist is suing in federal court for declaratory relief and asking for a restraining order to keep the attorney general at bay.

In a blog post, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster claims that McMaster's case is both "unwarranted by the facts" and unconstitutional.

"Interestingly, if you read Mr. McMaster's ultimatum carefully, you'll note that the only way to definitively comply with it is to take down the Craigslist sites for South Carolina in their entirety. The open architecture of Craigslist, quintessential to the value it provides for users, simply does not allow for the absolute prevention of solicitation or pornography, with respect to any of its categories and functions."

In a statement, McMaster put a cheery face on Craigslist's move.

"The defensive legal action Craigslist has taken against the solicitors and my office is good news. It shows that Craigslist is taking the matter seriously for the first time."

Of course, Buckmaster has pointed out several times that McMaster was one of 40 state attorneys general who signed on to a set of policy changes Craigslist announced in November to scrub the site of illicit sex ads.

But McMaster and others have since complained that Craigslist failed to live up to the spirit of that agreement, and that prostitution has continued to flourish on the site.

Not helping things was the high-profile murder in Boston earlier this year, where medical student Philip Markoff allegedly shot and killed a masseuse he met through the site, and was quickly dubbed the "Craigslist killer" in the media.

That incident seemed the catalyst for the reinvigorated state AG probe that eventually led to Craigslist replacing erotic services listings with an adult services section, which it said would be monitored manually for unsavory or illegal content.

Craigslist announced that change two days before McMaster's ultimatum expired, saying at the time that erotic services listings would drop off the site in seven days.

Two days later, of course, some of the ads still lingered on the South Carolina sections (and all others) of Craigslist.

So today, seven days since Craigslist announced that all erotic services ads would disappear from the site, McMaster says:

"Overnight they have removed the erotic services section from their website, as we asked them to do. And they are now taking responsibility for the content of their future advertisements. If they keep their word, this is a victory for law enforcement and for the people of South Carolina."

No argument that Craigslist might have dragged its feet a little on the sex ads issue.

But for McMaster to take credit for pressuring Craigslist into a policy that it said it has already said it was moving toward seems like political posturing of the most cynical kind.

A review of the timeline:

May 5: SC AG McMaster issues his 10-day ultimatum.

May 13: Craigslist announces that erotic services ads are closed for new ads, and that existing listings will drop off the site in seven days. Other AGs praise the agreement.

May 15: Erotic services ads still show up on SC Craigslist sections. McMaster announces his intention to pursue a criminal investigation and potential prosecution.

May 18: Buckmaster asks for an apology for McMaster's threats.

May. 20: On schedule, last erotic services ads drop off of the South Carolina Craigslist sections. Buckmaster announces a lawsuit seeking declaratory relief and a restraining order. McMaster unconvincingly claims credit for purging the site of erotic services ads.

A New Orleans judge has ordered Michael Dell to head to the Big Easy to testify about his company's role in a soured deal to sell the city crime cameras, the Times-Picayune reports.

The PC giant has come under fire for efforts to sell the city crime cameras in violation of a multistate agreement, and a judge has threatened to hold the firm in contempt of court for stalling when asked to disclose documents about its dealings with the city.

Complicating things: One of Dell's partners in the deal, NetMethods, is the subject of an FBI investigation for providing Mayor Ray Nagin with expensive trips, begging the suggestion of a payola affair in a city where such arrangements have a long and proud tradition.

Plaintiffs Southern Electronics and Active Solutions, have cried foul, charging Dell and its partners with unfair business practices by seeking to freeze them out of the crime-camera deal and conspiring to steal its technology. Those firms had been providing the crime-riddled city with cameras until late 2006, when Dell took over the business, selling the equipment through NetMethods and Veracent, firms both owned by Mark St. Pierre, a businessman with close ties to city hall and a chummy relationship with former New Orleans CTO Greg Meffert.

Vintage New Orleans, from the Times-Picayune:

"The lawsuit has helped uncover hundreds of thousands of dollars in gratuities NetMethods gave Nagin and his former technology chief, Greg Meffert. Nagin and his family took trips to Hawaii, Jamaica and Chicago on NetMethods' dime. Meffert had free access to a corporate credit card while he was the city's tech chief, using it for everything from strip club visits to cruises to home furnishings, and then collected more than $600,000 in fees from St. Pierre's firm once he left City Hall."

Dell's lawyers had asked the judge to allow the company's founder and CEO to give a one-hour deposition by phone, but she said no, that he must appear in person and submit to a questioning session of up to three hours.

Dell is scheduled to testify within 60 days.

Google has loosened its trademark policy for AdWords, the auction-based program where advertisers bid on keywords to place text ads alongside search results. Under the new policy, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) will allow advertisers to include trademarked names in their text ads, even if the trademark belongs to someone else.

In a blog post detailing the change, Google likens the old policy limiting trademarks to a supermarket only being able to advertise with generic terms like "discount cola" or "snacks for sale."

So this means that an online clothing retailer could include trademarked brand names like "Hugo Boss" or "Perry Ellis" in its text ad.

There are limitations, which Google spells out in its trademark policy. Retailers, for instance, must sell the product corresponding to the trademark, or the component parts relating to it.

The policy change brings Google in line with online competitors Yahoo and Microsoft, who have already adopted what is a standard practice in the offline world.

Google seems confident that it is well within the bounds of the law on this one, but advertisers have raised questions about other, murkier areas of its handling of trademarks.

The New York Times has a piece describing some of Google's other legal troubles in the trademark arena, which have come from brands unhappy that the search giant places paid ads for competitors directly above their own Web sites in organic search results.

On Monday, a firm called FPX filed a class-action suit in Texas seeking to represent all trademark owners in the state charging Google with trademark infringement, the Times reported. That suit follows others brought by individual brands upset with Google for allowing competitors to place ads alongside their brands.

But Google sells its keywords at auction, which has proven a phenomenally successful business model. Bidding on a competitor's brand is hardly a new phenomenon. Early in last year's presidential campaign, for instance, John McCain sniped search results for "Rudy Giuliani" -- then a serious rival -- with paid ads of his own.

Google's decision to roll out the new trademark policy just four days after FPX filed its lawsuit would seem to suggest that it's not taking the legal threat too seriously.

Google is accepting ads containing non-owned trademarks today, but said it will not publish them until June 15.

What Twitter described as a "small settings update" was anything but. Darn near cataclysmic, it seemed.

The popular microblogging site has now said it is implementing changes to bring back the "serendipity" of discovering what the people you follow are saying to the people you don't, which it so egregiously snatched away Tuesday night.

Here's how Twitter's Biz Stone explained the initial change in the company blog:

"Based on usage patterns and feedback, we've learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow -- it's a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today's update removes this undesirable and confusing option."

So that meant that messages someone you know sends to someone you don't wouldn't show up in your feed anymore.

The outrage was swift and severe. A day later, the meme "#fixreplies remains at the top of Twitter's trending topics list. Farther down is "#Twitterfail. Both are packed with tweets from users obeying the call to "Retweet this if you disagree w/ twitter's decision to hide replies to people you don't follow." So is the topic, "Twitter's," which sits at No. 2 on the list.

Well, earlier today, Stone put up a post, "Whoa, Feedback!" promising the pitchfork-wielding mob that the Twitter team was aware that they were upset, but that the change was necessary for "serious technical reasons."

"It wouldn't have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever," Stone said.

Four hours later, Stone put up another post, "We Learned A Lot," telling users that their feedback made it painfully clear that a great many people loved the feature. But the engineering problems remained, so Stone offered this as an olive branch:

"First, we're making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.

"Second, we've started designing a new feature which will give folks far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow. This will be a per-user setting and it will take a bit longer to put together but not too long and we're already working on it. Thanks for all the great feedback and thanks for helping us discover what's important!"

This episode has drawn some unsurprising comparisons to Facebook, the site that users love to death right up until something about it changes. Privacy, design, terms of service ... you name it. If it changed, they let 'em have it. And, in some cases, Facebook bowed to the pressure after the initial period of stonewalling failed to silence the critics.

So what do we think in Twitter's case? Crisis averted, or first of many?

This "tug of war" has a familiar ring.

The L.A. Times has a lengthy story laying out the increasing concern cable companies are feeling over the rise of Hulu, a free video site packed with premium content introduced to the public by NBC Universal and News Corp. a little more than a year ago.

Essentially, the idea of putting cable programming on a free Web site, supported only by advertising revenue, has cable companies wondering if that might not be the beginning of the end of their business model. In essence, giving away what for years you has been sold at a handsome profit is asking customers to cancel their subscriptions to cable or satellite television. Why buy the cow ...?

This existential conundrum bears more than a passing resemblance to the debate over the past missteps and dark future of the newspaper industry. A new, more user-friendly distribution model begins to chip away at what had been a well-established and highly profitable business model.

Content creators are compelled to put their work online, where free is the law of the land, because that's where consumers expect to find it. Then all of a sudden expensive-to-run businesses find that online advertising is a pale echo of the traditional format.

So there is a broad-brush parallel. But TV is a little more complicated than the newspaper sector. In the case of cable, there are the distinct (but related) stakeholders in the form of providers (Time Warner Cable, etc.) and programmers (HBO, etc.).

And Hulu's got them both worried. The Times story cites many examples of cable networks (including some owned by Hulu's founders) pulling programming from the site for fear of cannibalizing their TV audience. While the story doesn't purport evidence that consumers are cancelling their cable subscriptions in any significant number, it does note that that providers have been pressuring networks to limit availability of their programming on Hulu.

But just in case, cable companies are leaning toward some type of authentication model for premium content on the Web, making the free, online version available only to TV subscribers.

"It wouldn't make a lot of sense to give away a pay channel and try to make it up with advertising," Time Warner Chairman and CEO Jeffery Bewkes said at an event in Washington last month.

"We don't have to charge people extra," he added. "We're not trying to make the Internet not free. We're just trying to say if you use it for free, you ought to get what you've got in your home."

Is it any surprise that Google finds itself under increasing antitrust scrutiny?

Now the subject of two federal antitrust inquiries, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has been meeting with lawmakers and regulators in an attempt to convince them that it is not, as some would claim, moving toward a global takeover by locking down a monopoly on the world's information.

Google offers a Webinar of the presentation here, and you can find an annotated version of the PowerPoint, marked up like a school paper (Google gets an F) by a self-styled consumer watchdog group called, well, Consumer Watchdog.

In essence, Google's talking points run along the lines of openness, helping individuals and businesses earn additional income on the Web, and the old chestnut that "competition is just one click away" -- a longstanding quip the company has used to explain why it has a very compelling business not to run roughshod over its users' privacy.

Bogus, cries Consumer Watchdog. The marked up version, featuring "comments from an expert," finds that Google's Capitol Hill "charm offensive" rings hollow and shows transparent. Among other things, it charges the company with capital hypocrisy for forcing openness on the market when it suits its interests (spectrum, Android, etc.) while remaining opaque as the walls of a coffin when it comes to things like its page ranking formula and the way it handles consumer information. Consumer Watchdog's expert has peppered the slides with quotes describing Google's secretive, anticompetitive practices from news reports and industry folk, including Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, whose run at bringing transparency to search results ended earlier this year when he shuttered his venture Wikia Search. Watchdog's expert even takes the liberty to correct a spelling mistake.

Good points all around, I'm sure.

But there's a subtext to all this pubic posturing. Consumer Watchdog has been harping on Google for some time now -- for privacy, anti-competitive shenanigans, lobbying -- you name it.

Consumer Watchdog received a grant of $100,000 from the Oakland, Calif-based Rose Foundation that seems to have been intended for the not-so-subtle public disparagement of Google. A smear campaign, in essence, attended by PR ploys like a press release announcing that one of its ranks would be confronting Google's CEO with a tough question about privacy at a speaking engagement in Washington last November. (Schmidt, alone on stage in front of a packed auditorium in the Reagan Building, politely suggested that the occasion was not the appropriate forum for arranging a meeting.)

The two groups had a minor skirmish -- public, of course! -- after Google broached the idea of pulling Consumer Watchdog's funding with the Rose Foundation. (That came after CW put out a press release citing a "rumored lobbying effort" on Google's part to allow it to sell people's health records, a claim that Google immediately dismissed as patently false.) Well, CW erupted, demanded an apology. Google evidently apologized for the action, but as a matter of general record has little patience or respect for what Consumer Watchdog is trying to do.

So the image war continues and the antitrust inquiries drag on.

What would Jeff Jarvis do?

For an Internet reporter, the press table at a Senate hearing on the gloomy future of journalism is an odd thing. You're surrounded by print reporters who are all too aware that their medium is on its way out. They joke about being dinosaurs and grumble about the union dispute that nearly shuttered the Boston Globe. One is the Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News, whose CEO and publisher is brought in to testify about how the thriving traffic to the paper's Web site isn't nearly enough to sustain the newsroom that produces the content.

It's an altogether dreary affair, full of gallows humor and unsatisfying assurances from Arianna Huffington and Google's Marissa Mayer that quality journalism will flourish on the Internet.

David Simon, creator of the HBO series "The Wire," told a Senate panel at a hearing yesterday that "aggregating Web sites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth." But with the "first-generation reporting" that they piggyback on eroding, "the parasite is killing the host."

Well, new media enthusiasts will swing a heavy axe at those comments. It's easy to find examples of original, quality reporting produced by members of the digital press corps. But far more plentiful are the half-cocked screeds hastily assembled by the shrieking hyenas of the blogosphere.

Consider Joe Weisenthal's take on yesterday's affair at Silicon Alley Insider. Writing about a hearing that he apparently didn't see and linking to an AP story, Weisenthal headlines his blog post, "The Ridiculous Newspaper Bailout Begins."

There was talk about a bailout at yesterday's hearing. It came in the context of categorical opposition to any such proposal from all parties present.

Yet, Weisenthal writes, "Yesterday, Sen. John Kerry held a hearing on the 'Future or Journalism' -- but we'll just call it what is was: A hearing about a possible newspaper bailout.

"See, politicians aren't like us. When we get concerned about newspapers becoming 'endangered species,' we talk about it or discuss it. When politicians do, they pass laws to deal with it. A hearing isn't just an idle event."

Voicing an opinion about what, if anything, should be done about newspapers is one thing. But writing such rubbish and passing it off as authoritative?

There is much crowing on the Internet about the demise of what has been dubbed legacy media. A great many of the commentators exhibit the Schadenfreude that is the distinct privilege of the winning team, and what comes through is an abiding contempt for the haughty righteousness of the old media. But much of it also contains lucid analysis that at times manages to resist the urge to taunt the leaders of a dying industry. SAI has a delightfully consistent pattern of flitting between both forms.

At the same time, when you come across a completely inaccurate blog post linking to an AP story that at least got the facts down, you wonder if Simon didn't have it right about the parasite and the host.

When President Obama announced his intention earlier this week to "level the playing field" for U.S. labor by ending tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, we knew that tech would be one of the sectors with the most to lose.

But it's not just jobs. Major Web companies like eBay and Google have been steadily expanding their foreign operations, which now account for more than half of their annual revenue. Establishing a business presence overseas, even if in some cases if it's little more than a billing address, can provide a substantial tax benefit.

The federal statutory tax rate stands at 35 percent, but companies have been able to significantly lower their effective tax rate through deferrals and credits for taxes paid overseas. Obama describes those benefits as loopholes that give companies incentives to push jobs overseas and evade taxes they rightfully owe.

So how would Obama's plan affect the bottom line? Barclays analyst Doug Anmuth ran some preliminary numbers.

Anmuth estimated the tax rate on international pretax income for Google, eBay and Amazon in the low to mid single digits in 2008. Based on Obama's plan to bring those rates in line with the 35 percent currently assessed on U.S. operations, he projects that Google's EPS would decline by 11 percent in 2011, when the proposed tax changes would take effect. That same year, eBay's EPS would tumble 19 percent, and Amazon would fall off 9.2 percent from current estimates.

Does that sound like a policy they could get behind?

So now it's Apple, eh? This is rich.

Valleywag has floated the rumor that Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) is in "serious negotiations" to buy Twitter for as much as $700 million, with the hope of announcing the deal June 8 at its Worldwide Developers Conference.

This latest comes after the failed Facebook acquisition, the most likely inaccurate (or at the very least overstated) TechCrunch story that Google was getting close to sealing the deal, and persistent rumors that Microsoft, News Corp. and other deep-pocketed companies are considering adding the microblogging phenom to their portfolios.

These are best to be ignored. But we can't do that now, can we? There is no hotter company in the tech world than Twitter, and none with a more fiercely loyal following than Apple. The idea of these two companies marrying -- when a mere mention of either in a headline is enough to guarantee a healthy interest in the story, no matter how specious or trumped-up the reporting -- is bound to create a feeding frenzy for the tech press.

On its face, the idea of an Apple-Twitter tie-up seems a crude match. Departing Valleywag editor Owen Thomas points this out in his post, declaring, "If Apple buys Twitter, it won't be about making money. It will be about making a statement."

That statement, presumably, would be about Apple's overture toward the open culture of the Web, about bringing glasnost to Cupertino, or something.

Imagine Apple's communications department, hardly renowned for its forthcoming spirit, embracing Twitter to engage with the company's fans and media -- and the great, great many who belong to both camps. To drop cryptic clues about upcoming product releases? Maybe. To reassure us that when the levees break, the banks fail and the oceans boil, it's okay, because there's an app for that? Perhaps.

But really, whether it makes sense or not, the idea is enough to capture our imagination. With entire sites built on unearthing and spreading rumors about what Apple is up to, and media outlets very much in the mainstream continuing with their bizarre fascination with Twitter, the story of their union is, as Kara Swisher puts it, a "Techmeme dream-ticket."

Madness.

Making good on a campaign promise, President Obama today called for a sweeping reform of the international tax code that would crack down on overseas tax havens and raise the tax rates for U.S. companies with overseas operations.

For companies in the tech sector with substantial workforces in countries like India, the plan would amount to a dramatic increase in their tax burden. The White House said it expects to generate $210 billion in additional revenue over the next 10 years through the tax reforms and other measures to be included in the president's final budget later this month.

Announcing his plan today, Obama said it aimed to close loopholes in a "broken tax system" that has given businesses license to avoid paying taxes on overseas operations that by all rights they should have to remit.

"It's a tax code that makes it all too easy for a number -- a small number of individuals and companies to abuse overseas tax havens to avoid paying any taxes at all," Obama said. "And it's a tax code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York."

Obama described the offshoring provisions as a means of "leveling the playing field" to undo tax incentives for investing overseas. Specifically, the administration seeks to end a tax deferral for profits from overseas operations and tighten the tax code to prevent companies from inflating the credits they can claim on U.S. income tax returns related to taxes they paid to foreign countries.

Obama said he would use a portion of the additional revenue to make the tax credit for research and development in the United States permanent, another plank of the technology agenda he campaigned on.

Companies with substantial overseas workforces like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are likely to oppose the legislation that would be required to amend the tax code as Obama outlined.

The second part of the plan calls for getting tough on offshore tax havens, such as a single address in the Cayman Islands the White House said is listed as a home to 18,857 corporations, most of which have no physical operations in the islands. The administration cited a GAO report issued in January that found that 83 of the 100 largest U.S. companies have subsidiaries in offshore tax havens.

To implement the plan, Obama plans to hire nearly 800 additional employees to work exclusively on overseas tax enforcement.

Every year, Time ignites a spirited conversation with its list of the world's 100 most influential people. Lists like these are meant to be provocative, not authoritative. They are representative, dividing their selections into groups like "leaders and revolutionaries," "builders and titans" and "scientists and thinkers."

In that sense, the editors are trying to hold up a mirror to the prevailing trends of the day, affording themselves the flexibility to include athletes alongside politicians, actors next to scientists.

So if it's an exercise in zeitgeist, it's only fitting that the Twitter co-founders, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, made this year's list. After all, last year Time recognized Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Digg's Jay Adelson and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington made it last year. In 2007, YouTube's Chad Hurley and Steve Chen made the list. See a pattern?

In the past year, what Internet trend has garnered more hype than Twitter? The meteoric growth of the microblogging service and the almost unreal media fascination that has accompanied it have left some of us convinced that this is a communications revolution of historic proportion, and others of us scratching our heads trying to understand why and how it became so popular.

Is Twitter a fad, or is the 140-characters-or-fewer format really the future of human interaction?

Equally interesting as the choices for the Time 100 list are the people who write the tributes. This year, Craig Newmark raises a glass to toast Zipcars co-founder Robin Chase, amd Rick Astley praises 4chan.org founder moot (yep, he made the list!).

So who more appropriate to sing the praises of Twitter than Ashton Kutcher? After beating CNN in the race to 1 million followers on the site, the actor/budding Internet entrepreneur has emerged as one of the most exuberant and visible evangelists for the site.

Lest you think it over the top to talk of Kutcher's fervor for Twitter in religious terms, consider the first graph of his tribute to Stone and Williams:

"Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs -- because the creation of Twitter by Stone, 35, Williams, 37, and Jack Dorsey, 32, is as significant and paradigm-shifting as the invention of Morse code, the telephone, radio, television or the personal computer."

Indeed.

Cybersecurity experts warned a House panel Friday that medical and energy systems are increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks as they are introduced to networked environments.

Rodney Joffe, senior vice president with Neustar, described the ongoing battles with the worm Conficker he has been engaged in through the Conficker Working Group, a public-private consortium of security researchers working to stamp out the fast-mutating worm.

"As a sobering side note on this, last month in collaboration with one of the members of Conficker Working Group from Georgia Tech, we identified at least 300 critical medical devices from a single manufacturer ... that were infected with Conficker," Joffe said.

"The hospitals had no idea. The manufacturer had no idea. When we called them they were honestly shocked."

The infected devices, which are used to read high-density images like MRIs and CT scans in intensive-care units, became infected because they were connected to a local area network.

"They should never have been connected to the Internet," Joffe said.

Worse still, when members of the working group tried to fix the problem, Joffe said they were told they had to wait 90 days to modify the machines due to an arcane FDA rule.

"In some cases clearly there can be a disconnect between government rules, which are meant to protect consumers, and today's cyber threats," he said.

Similarly, noted security researcher Dan Kaminsky warned of potential threats to the energy grid as the industry moves toward remote power meters that communicate with each other through what is essentially a peer-to-peer mesh network.

But the energy industry has been largely removed from the rising tide of threats to networked systems, Kaminsky noted.

"This technology is being done by people who frankly have not had to deal with the last 10 years of attacks," he said.

"On analysis we've seen these meters actually able to be compromised remotely," he added. "The only thing preventing pretty widespread attack is a lack of connectivity."

But connectivity is coming, and with it a host of security scares like the recent Wall Street Journal report describing the exploits of Russian and Chinese hackers who managed to map the critical parts of the nation's energy infrastructure.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced matching legislation last week that would direct the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to take a stronger role in shoring up the defenses of the electrical grid against cyber attacks.