While Google is leading a charge to create a global privacy standard for how companies protect consumer data, the search giant is recommending that remedies focus on whether a person was actually harmed by having the information exposed.

Microsoft has lost its appeal against a record 497m euro (£343m; $690m) fine imposed by the European Commission in a long-running competition dispute.

Hurray! Finally some sense in the EUropean institutions.

At a breakout session for the Future of Music Policy Summit in DC this week, online music distributors complained that licensing music for digital retail is still far too complicated, and blamed this complication for the paucity of online distribution outside of the US market.

"Slashdot has an entry about a lawsuit filed this week by parents of a Texas minor whose photograph was used by Virgin Australia in an advertising campaign. The photograph was taken by an adult. He posted it to Flickr under a CC-Attribution license.

In order to spread the popularity of its single platform proprietary technologies among developers Microsoft has to retain and extend the appeal of technologies such as .NET and the proprietary languages it uses - and this means catching the imagination of developers, and locking them in to Microsoft technologies. This is the attraction of open source to Microsoft.

I don’t mind a little cynicism — it’s a natural and only mildly toxic byproduct of paying attention. So last week, when Microsoft’s Office Open XML file format was rejected as an international standard, I wasn’t bothered that Microsoft said it was “extremely delighted” by the result.