As for the U.S. attempts to thwart piracy overseas, those efforts have met with mixed results. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) saw some success prodding Russian officials to derail Allofmp3.com and other accused pirate sites in that country. The USTA also lobbied Sweden's government for a long time to file copyright charges against BitTorrent search engine the Pirate Bay, accused of helping millions around the globe find unauthorized copies of films and music. Last year, the operators of the Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright infringement and sentenced to a year in jail. That case is on appeal.Despite these high-profile cases, piracy thrives in places such as China, and some Eastern European countries Megaupload is one service that continues to help distribute millions of US films across the globe without the permission of the Hollywood film studios Illegal streaming sites are cropping up all over and many times investigators working for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) don't even know where the operators are located.

"We have seen speculation that Microsoft might release an update for this issue out of band. I can tell you that we are working hard to produce an update which is now in testing," Jerry Bryant, senior security communications manager lead at Microsoft, wrote in a post on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog."This is a critical and time-intensive step of the process as the update must be tested against all affected versions of Internet Explorer on all supported versions of Windows Additionally, each supported language version needs to be tested as well as testing against thousands of third party applications," he wrote "We never rule out the possibility of an out-of-band update When the update is ready for broad distribution, we will make that decision based on customer needs".

Web browsers have been able to store data locally for years in a primitive fashion through small text files called cookies. Browser makers have been casting about for a more powerful mechanism, though, resulting in a hodge-podge of possibilities.One newer method, appropriately enough called LocalStorage, is supported in Firefox and IE 8 But even as it becomes formally standardized through the W3C as Web Storage, browser makers have recognized its limits for modern browser designs.

Microsoft and Mozilla are in agreement that this strategy is the right one. Programmers can choose to build a more sophisticated interface on top out of the raw materials of Indexed DB. They've done just that with browsers' JavaScript program technology, building libraries such as jQuery, Dojo, and YUI that are widely used to build sophisticated Web."What we've learned from the recent history of the Web is that putting out simple APIs [application programming interfaces] that push decisions and complexity to the edges is a strategy that works The way that the Web works today is that programmers aren't using a lot of browser APIs directly Instead they are using jQuery or Dojo or one of the other libraries that are out there for doing cross-browser and cross-version compatibility," Blizzard said "We think that instead of delivering an API that's complicated and underspecified that will cause browser vendors and developers to have to struggle with incompatible APIs, that we can deliver something that is simple, well-specified and understood that developers and people building Web browsers can build on".

Browser makers, grappling with outmoded technology and a vision to rebuild the Web as a foundation for applications, have begun converging on a seemingly basic by very important element of cloud computing.That ability is called local storage, and the new mechanism is called Indexed DB.

"It was as loud as I have ever heard it in the dome," Brees added. "It feels so good to know we have given our fans an NFC championship. We have another championship to go after in two weeks."It was anything but easy for the Saints, in only their second conference championship game; they lost at Chicago three years ago.They had to withstand yet one more comeback by Favre, who returned to the NFL with the Vikings (13-5) after another brief retirement He was alternately spectacular and pedestrian Sunday, finally betrayed by his gambling style and, perhaps, an aging body.

They have cited research that shows intellectual property accounts for 20 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and nearly 40 percent of U.S. economic growth. The music sector has seen a major decline in jobs over the decade since Napster made file sharing popular. The industry has contracted to four major record companies and with EMI Music, the smallest major label, in deep financial trouble, there's a possibility we'll see more shrinkage. Sony Pictures, the film studio owned by the giant Japanese consumer electronics company, recently announced its second round of layoffs within the past year."There's nothing wrong with other people using our technologies, we welcome it," Obama said "We just want to make sure that it's licensed and that American businesses are getting paid appropriately That's why the (US Trade Representative) is using the full arsenal of tools available to crack down on practices that blatantly harm our businesses, and that includes negotiating proper protections and enforcing our existing agreements, and moving forward on new agreements, including the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)" (Note: You can hear the president discuss ACTA and intellectual property in the video above starting at 18:14 and ending at 19:07).

Microsoft's praise is important. For one thing, the company maintains a dominant, though diminishing, share of browser usage, so even Web programmers who've scorned the company's earlier lack of interest in advancing Web technologies should pay attention to what it says. They should pay even more attention when Microsoft and its longtime arch-rival Mozilla agree on something. Microsoft's cooperation makes it more likely Indexed DB will be a real tool for Web programmers, not just an academic concept with little real-world relevance.It may sound perverse, but the ability to store data locally on a computer turns out to be a very important part of the Web application era that's really just getting under way The whole idea behind cloud computing is to put applications on the network, liberating them from being tied to a particular computer, but it turns out that the computer still matters, because the network is neither fast nor ubiquitous.