With Windows 7, I have decided to break one of my longstanding personal policies of never installing a new operating system before it has been in public use long enough to prove its stability.  Of course, I didn’t break my policy because of Microsoft’s marketing or computer industry reports, which are often bias.  I broke from my policy following my own testing to verify the stability of Windows 7.  Now, that I’m an early adopter, I thought I would share my experiences to benefit anyone who may be considering a move to Windows 7.

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Last month when Cerulean Studios launched Trillian Astra, they also submitted Trillian for iPhone to the Apple App Store for approval.  Fast forward thirty days and they are still waiting for a response from Apple.

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A worm affecting older versions of WordPress has been getting lots attention in recent days.  The worm takes advantage of a security flaw that allows it to register a new user, grant itself administrator privileges and wreak havoc with your permalink structure.

The good news is that, if you are running one of the two most recent releases of Wordpress (2.8.4 is the most current), your site is not susceptible to this problem.  As such, there is no specific patch for this vulnerability other than to upgrade to the most current release.

The WordPress Blog has additional details on this worm, as well as an FAQ if you believe your site has been affected.

eBay announced that a group of venture capital funds and investors will buy Skype in a deal that values the company at $2.75 billion (US).  The investor group will buy approximately 65% of Skype with eBay retaining 35% ownership.  Skype was acquired by eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion plus payouts totaling an estimated $3.1 billion in a transaction The New York Times calls “one of the worst technology transactions of the decade.”

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TechCrunch reported that a group of venture capital and private equity firms are joining forces in an effort to acquire Skype, a software application and service that enables video and voice calls, instant messaging and file sharing.

In 2005, eBay purchased Skype, but made a huge mistake in the terms of the deal by failing to acquire ownership of the software that defines Skype.  Instead, eBay licensed the software from Joltid Limited, a company owned by Skype’s founders.  This mistake continues to haunt eBay, who now finds itself in a legal battle over the software licensing, which I covered earlier this month.

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AT&T announced today that Visual Voicemail is now available to BlackBerry Bold customers.  The new Visual Voicemail feature will allow users to selectively handle their voicemail messages in a manner similar to an e-mail inbox.

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Trillian Astra, the multi-protocol instant messaging client, was officially released by Cerulean Studios.  Astra is available as a free download and is also upgradable to a pro version which includes more features.  The full announcement is available at the Trillian Blog.

Astra’s release came at a perfect time.  We reported just a few weeks ago that Astra was voted “Best Instant Messenger” in a poll conducted by Lifehacker.  Also, Digsby, an Astra competitor, was slammed in the media just days ago for utilizing their users’ computer resources in distributed computing projects with this fact buried deep in their license agreement.  Digsby has taken steps to remedy this situation, but trust is sometimes hard to regain.

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The New York Times reported back in May that the Federal Trade Commission was investigating the violation of antitrust laws related to Apple and Google sharing two board members on their boards of directors.  Apple may have crossed another line by creating a software monopoly for the iPhone.  This issue has yet to catch the attention of the Federal Trade Commission.

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Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5.2.  According to the release notes, this update to the internet browser addresses approximately seventy issues including four that are security related.  The complete list of changes can be found here.

Firefox 3.5 has already been updated twice since its June 30^th release date.  It was a stable product when released and continues to pick up momentum.  The Mozilla Blog announced the one billionth download of Firefox since it was originally released in November 2004.

With efforts already underway for versions 3.7 and 4.0, it is no wonder that Firefox continues to gain popularity among internet browsers.

WordPress 2.8.3 was released yesterday to provide a fix for a security related issue that existed in version 2.8.1.  The announcement in the WordPress Blog was short and to the point, indicating that privilege escalation issues were addressed in this release.  Because this release is security related, WordPress highly recommends that users upgrade.

The latest release can be found here.